Dog Sense (27 page)

Even owners who treat their dogs quite rationally can fall into the trap of presuming that they know more than they actually do about how their dog is feeling. In a study conducted in Switzerland,
⁵
the investigators showed still photos and short video clips of dogs interacting with one another as well as with people to sixty-four Swiss dog owners and sixty-four randomly chosen individuals with little or no experience of dogs. Both groups were able to correctly associate the dogs' facial expressions with obvious emotions and behavioral states such as fear and inquisitiveness. But this was not the case with other emotions, such as anger and jealousy; moreover, the dog owners tended to be more anthropomorphic in their descriptions than the non-owners. The closeness of their relationship was evidently affecting their judgment.

Dog owners may think they can interpret canine communication, but in actuality they are often misled by their anthropomorphism. In the second part of the same study, the dog owners were shown a video clip of an owner getting her dog ready for a walk—putting on her coat, putting the dog on the leash—and then immediately removing the leash, taking off her coat, and ignoring the dog for a few minutes. The dog followed her to the door, then went back to where she kept her coat, and finally sat down, watching her while she directed her attention elsewhere. Almost all of the participants who were shown the whole sequence identified the dog's emotion, while it was being ignored, as “disappointment.” But among those who were shown only the last part of the scene, after the owner had left the picture, very few identified the dog's emotional state in this way. Clearly, the former participants were projecting onto the dog's body-language their own sense of how they would feel under those particular circumstances. The dog's actual behavior was almost irrelevant. The implication, of course, is that even the most well-meaning and rational of owners may know significantly less than they think they do about their dogs' inner lives. Those owners who regard their dog as a “little person” may even unconsciously
prefer
explanations for their dog's behavior that rely more on projections of what they guess the dog is feeling than on what its body-language is telling them.

A better understanding among pet owners of the emotional life of dogs would improve their relationships with their pets. It would enable
them to deal with their dog's behavior in a reasoned and informed way—ultimately enhancing, rather than diminishing, the emotional depth of the relationship. Some dog owners may treat their dogs as “little people,” attributing to them mental and emotional capabilities that they don't actually have, simply because it has never been pointed out to them that there is a more rational basis for understanding why their dogs behave the way they do. This more rational perspective, in turn, can allow them to make sensible decisions about how to resolve any problems that arise.

In order to understand the emotional lives of dogs, we first have to come to grips with what emotions actually
are
. Unfortunately, psychologists are still not in total agreement about what emotions consist of or, indeed, precisely how they should be discussed. One key issue is the role that emotions play in guiding behavior. Some philosophers have suggested that, even in man, the brain controls behavior directly, and that what we experience as emotion is merely our consciousness commenting on what's going on. In this view, full consciousness is required for emotions to exist at all. Since dogs do not appear to have the same degree of consciousness that we have, this seems to suggest that they can't experience emotions either, or at least not in a way that would be intelligible to us.

However, we no longer have to think about emotional states in such an abstract way. New techniques now available to neuroscientists have enabled a fuller understanding of how emotions are generated—specifically, through an interplay among hormones, the brain, and the rest of the nervous system. For example, MRI scanning can show what is going on in the brains of fully conscious humans (and one day soon, hopefully, dogs too), helping to pinpoint where in the brain emotions are generated.

It's now generally agreed that what we experience as emotions are an important part of the machinery that allows us to lead our everyday lives, and not just a side effect of consciousness. They are thought to act as essential filters, enabling us to make appropriate decisions at the right moment, without waiting for our brains to come up with all the possible courses of action and attempt to choose logically between them. In this
conception, emotions exist for the purpose of providing a rough-and-ready indicator of where we are in relation to where we ought to be. If I see a figure approaching me late at night out of a dark alley, fear will instantly propel me in the opposite direction. If someone breaks into my house while I'm at home, anger will take over and make me aggressive toward the intruder. The first of these responses is probably as appropriate today as it was for my hunter-gatherer ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. The second is probably more effective now than it was then, and I will have to keep my anger in check if I want to remain within the reasonable limits of force that the law allows in deterring intruders. Nevertheless, anger does channel my brain toward the immediate threat (the intruder) rather than wasting its time on less urgent tasks that can wait (such as working out how I'm going to get the newly broken lock on the door repaired or trying to remember where I wrote down the phone number of my insurance agent).

If emotions are indeed survival mechanisms, then they most likely evolved to fulfill specific functions. And those functions—avoiding danger, counteracting threats, forming pair-bonds that enhance the survival of offspring—are not unique to man. They apply just as much to wolves as they did to our own human ancestors. Indeed, since both wolves and humans are mammals, and our brains and hormone systems are based on the same biological pattern, it is highly likely that both our emotional systems evolved from those possessed by our common mammalian ancestor. It therefore stands to reason that our emotional lives, and those of dogs, are similar. However, because millions of years of evolution separate us, it's also highly likely that they are far from identical.

In order to further investigate these similarities and differences, I'm going to take as valid the idea that emotions, far from being a luxury that only humans can appreciate, are a fundamental part of the biological systems that regulate behavior. I'm also going to assume that like any other biological system emotions have been selected for, and subsequently refined by, the process of evolution. The model I will adopt
⁶
divides emotions into three components. The most primitive level involves responses of the autonomic nervous system (the part that we are unaware of but which keeps the various parts of our bodies functioning for us), acting in concert with the hormones that are associated with arousal,
fear, stress, affection, and so on—Emotion I in the illustration below. As humans, we are not always aware of these autonomic responses (exceptions include the pounding heartbeat and sweaty palms triggered by fear), but thanks to the techniques of modern physiology they can all be measured and understood. Emotion II is the corresponding behavior—postures, displays, signals (and, in the case of dogs, odor signals that are imperceptible to us humans). Emotion III is what we are most interested in here—the feelings that we, as human beings, experience subjectively. They are what we refer to in everyday terms as emotions and moods: “I feel anxious” or “I'm happy today” or, indeed, “I love my dog.”

The three components of emotion. Emotion I is the sum of changes in hormone levels and in the nervous system. Emotion II is the outward expression of emotion, for example in body-language and vocalizations. These can be detected by other dogs (and people), whose reactions can be perceived and may subsequently modify how emotions are felt and reacted to. Emotion III is the subjective experience of the emotion itself, for example, “fear.” Arrows indicate interactions.

What is the point, then, in labeling both the underlying physiology and the associated behavior as “emotion”? In the context of improving our understanding of dogs, this model emphasizes that if we can measure a change in the underlying physiology (e.g., a sudden increase in the stress hormone adrenalin) and at the same time observe the corresponding behavior (the animal runs away), we can be reasonably sure that the dog is also experiencing the matching emotion (fear). Exactly what that experience is like for the dog we can never entirely know—just as we cannot even know precisely how another human being is feeling. Feelings are private, but that does not mean we cannot and do not take them into account. When dealing with other people, we just make a best guess and proceed accordingly—and if our first guess is wrong, there is a good chance that the other person will let us know. Dogs, however, may be less good at letting us know when we misjudge them, or perhaps we are not as clever as we should be at decoding their signals. In either case, what's clear is the importance of trying our hardest to understand their emotional lives.

My second reason for considering this three-level conceptualization of emotion to be helpful is that it proposes that emotions are
useful
to the animal: They act as special-purpose information-processing systems, alongside the general systems of learning and cognition (to which humans have added symbolic language). Emotions are an essential aid to survival, and if dogs possess the two “lower” levels (and without a doubt they do), then it is difficult to maintain that they don't also experience the third level, the emotional reactions.

My third reason is that this conceptualization emphasizes an evolutionary continuum. It posits that human emotions, while possibly unique in some respects, have evolved from those of mammals, which in turn have evolved from those of reptiles, and so on. Unless one subscribes to the view that human-type consciousness and self-awareness are absolutely essential to the experience of all emotion, it is very difficult to deny—even from such an apparently dry, purely scientific viewpoint—that dogs must experience at least
some
form of emotion.

Alongside the many advantages of this model, however, there is one major disadvantage: the implicit assumption that subjective emotion (Emotion III) always emerges as overt behavior (Emotion II). In humans,
most emotions are linked to facial expressions that vary little from culture to culture, thus serving as a near-universal language of feelings. However, we can all think of situations in which we try to hide our feelings or project emotions that are different from those we are actually feeling. Dogs, too, have expressive faces—and bodies—that give away much, but possibly not all, of what they are feeling.

It's worth briefly considering why dogs have evolved such expressive faces. Cats have not. Cats suffer in silence. Cats can communicate extreme fear, or extreme anger, but what about anxiety or joy?
⁷
This striking difference between cats and dogs stems from their evolutionary histories. Domestic cats are descended from solitary hunters, an “every man for himself” culture: Two male (or female) cats are essentially lifelong competitors in the business of passing on their genes to the next generation. A gene that made one cat likely to look pleased with itself when it had just returned from an especially successful hunting trip would die out, because it would contribute to its rival's success at finding food, not his own. The absence of a connection between communication (Emotion II in the model) and the physiological and subjective components of emotion (Emotion I and Emotion III) can thus sometimes be in the animal's own interest.

In fact, across the animal kingdom as a whole, the honest display of emotions is favored only in certain quite specific circumstances—namely, when cooperation is the desired result. Humans are among the most cooperative species alive, and indeed many of these special factors apply to us. As a species we evolved in the context of extended-family groups, and so, according to the theory of kin selection, we should tend to be honest with one another. Also, we are extremely good at recognizing other individuals of our own species and recalling our previous encounters with them. Accordingly, we have highly sophisticated cognitive mechanisms for detecting deception among those familiar to us. In other words, most of us are very good at detecting when someone we know is hiding his or her true feelings.

It's worth detouring briefly to look at the evolution of human body-language—to see why the connection between facial expression and (some) emotions should be so transparent in our own species—before going on to speculate on whether the same might apply to dogs.