Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (3 page)

This morning I was awakened by Pump coming over to the bed and sniffing emphatically at me, millimeters away, her whiskers grazing my lips, to see if I was awake or alive or me. She punctuates her rousing with an exclamatory sneeze directly in my face. I open my eyes and she is gazing at me, smiling, panting a hello.

Go look at a dog. Go on, look—maybe at one lying near you right now, curled around his folded legs on a dog bed, or sprawled on his side on the tile floor, paws flitting through the pasture of a dream. Take a good look—and now forget everything you know about this or any dog.

This is admittedly a ridiculous exhortation: I don't really expect that you could easily forget even the name or favored food or unique profile of your dog, let alone everything about him. I think of the exercise as analogous to asking a newcomer to meditation to enter into satori, the highest state, on the first go: aim for it, and see how far you get. Science, aiming for objectivity, requires that one becomes aware of prior prejudices and personal perspective. What we'll find, in looking at dogs through a scientific lens, is that some of what we think we know about dogs is entirely borne out; other things that appear patently true are, on closer examination, more doubtful than we thought. And by looking at our dogs from another perspective—from the perspective of the dog—we can see new things that don't naturally occur to those of us encumbered with human brains. So the best way to begin understanding dogs is by forgetting what we think we know.

The first things to forget are anthropomorphisms. We see, talk about, and imagine dogs' behavior from a human-biased perspective, imposing our own emotions and thoughts on these furred creatures.
Of course,
we'll say, dogs love and desire; of course they dream and think; they also know and understand us, feel bored, get jealous, and get depressed. What could be a more natural explanation of a dog staring dolefully at you as you leave the house for the day than that he is depressed that you're going?

The answer is: an explanation based in what dogs actually have the capacity to feel, know, and understand. We use these words, these anthropomorphisms, to help us make sense of dogs' behavior. Naturally, we are intrinsically prejudiced toward human experiences, which leads us to understand animals' experiences only to the extent that they match our own. We remember stories that confirm our descriptions of animals and conveniently forget those that do not. And we do not hesitate to assert "facts" about apes or dogs or elephants or any animal without proper evidence. For many of us, our interaction with non-pet animals begins and ends with our staring at them at zoos or watching shows on cable TV. The amount of useful information we can get from this kind of eavesdropping is limited: such a passive encounter reveals even less than we get from glancing in a neighbor's window as we walk by.* At least the neighbor is of our own species.

Anthropomorphisms are not inherently odious. They are born of attempts to understand the world, not to subvert it. Our human ancestors would have regularly anthropomorphized in an attempt to explain and predict the behavior of other animals, including those they might want to eat or that might want to eat them. Imagine encountering a strange, bright-eyed jaguar at dusk in the forest, and looking squarely in its eyes looking squarely into yours. At that moment, a little meditation on what you might be thinking "if you were the jaguar" would probably be due—and would lead to your hightailing it away from the cat. Humans endured: the attribution was, if not true, at least true enough.

Typically, though, we are no longer in the position of needing to imagine the jaguar's desires in time to escape his clutches. Instead we are bringing animals inside and asking them to become members of our families. For that purpose, anthropomorphisms fail to help us incorporate those animals into our homes, and have the smoothest, fullest relationships with them. This is not to say that we're always wrong with our attributions: it might be true that our dog is sad, jealous, inquisitive, depressed—or desiring a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But we are almost certainly not justified in claiming, say,
depression
from the evidence before us: the mournful eyes, the loud sigh. Our projections onto animals are often impoverished—or entirely off the mark. We might judge an animal to be happy when we see an upturn of the corners of his mouth; such a "smile," however, can be misleading. On dolphins, the smile is a fixed physiological feature, immutable like the creepily painted face of a clown. Among chimpanzees, a grin is a sign of fear or submission, the furthest thing from happiness. Similarly, a human might raise her eyebrows in surprise, but the eyebrow-raising capuchin monkey is not surprised. He is evincing neither skepticism nor alarm; instead he is signaling to nearby monkeys that he has friendly designs. By contrast, among baboons a raised brow can be a deliberate threat (lesson: be careful which monkey you raise your eyebrows toward). The onus is on us to find a way to confirm or refute these claims we make of animals.

It may seem a benign slip from sad eyes to depression, but anthropomorphisms often slide from benign to harmful. Some risk the welfare of the animals under consideration. If we're to put a dog on antidepressants based on our interpretation of his eyes, we had better be pretty sure of our interpretation. When we assume we know what is best for an animal, extrapolating from what is best for us or any person, we may inadvertently be acting at cross-purposes with our aims. For instance, in the last few years there has been considerable to-do made about improved welfare for animals raised for food, such as broiler chickens who have access to the outside, or have room to roam in their pens. Though the end result is the same for the chicken—it winds up as someone's dinner—there is a budding interest in the welfare of the animals before they are killed.

But do they want to range freely? Conventional wisdom holds that no one, human or not,
likes
to be pressed up against others. Anecdotes seem to confirm this: given the choice of a subway car jammed with hot, stressed commuters, and one with only a handful of people, we choose the latter in a second (heeding the possibility, of course, that there's some other explanation—a particularly smelly person, or a glitch in air-conditioning—that explains this favorable distribution). But the natural behavior of chickens may indicate otherwise: chickens flock. They don't sally forth on their own.

Biologists devised a simple experiment to test the chickens' preferences of where to be: they picked up individual animals, relocated them randomly within their houses, and monitored what the chickens did next. What they found was that most chickens moved closer to other chickens, not farther away, even when there was open space available. Given the option of space to spread their wings … they choose the jammed subway car.

This is not to say that chickens thus
like
being smushed against other birds in a cage, or find it a perfectly agreeable life. It is inhumane to pen chickens so tightly they cannot move. But it is to say that assuming resemblance between chicken preferences and our preferences is not the way to insight about what the chicken actually does like. Not coincidentally, these broiler chickens are killed before they reach six weeks of age; domestic chicks are still being brooded by their mothers at that age. Deprived of the ability to run under her wings, the broiler chickens run closer to other chickens.

Do our anthropomorphic tendencies ever miss so fabulously with dogs? Without a doubt they do. Take raincoats. There are some interesting assumptions involved in the creation and purchase of tiny, stylish, four-armed rain slickers for dogs. Let's put aside the question of whether dogs prefer a bright yellow slicker, a tartan pattern, or a raining-cats-and-dogs motif (
clearly
they prefer the cats and dogs). Many dog owners who dress their dogs in coats have the best intentions: they have noticed, perhaps, that their dog resists going outside when it rains. It seems reasonable to extrapolate from that observation to the conclusion that he
dislikes
the rain.

He dislikes the rain.
What is meant by that? It is that he must dislike
getting the
rain on his body,
the way many of us do. But is that a sound leap? In this case, there is plenty of seeming evidence from the dog himself. Is he excited and wagging when you get the raincoat out? That seems to support the leap … or, instead, the conclusion that he realizes that the appearance of the coat predicts a long-awaited walk. Does he flee from the coat? Curl his tail under his body and duck his head? Undermines the leap—though does not discredit it outright. Does he look bedraggled when wet? Does he shake the water off excitedly? Neither confirmatory nor disconfirming. The dog is being a little opaque.

Here the natural behavior of related, wild canines proves the most informative about what the dog might think about a raincoat. Both dogs and wolves have, clearly, their own coats permanently affixed. One coat is enough: when it rains, wolves may seek shelter, but they do not cover themselves with natural materials. That does not argue for the need for or interest in raincoats. And besides being a jacket, the raincoat is also one distinctive thing: a close, even pressing, covering of the back, chest, and sometimes the head. There
are
occasions when wolves get pressed upon the back or head: it is when they are being dominated by another wolf, or scolded by an older wolf or relative. Dominants often pin subordinates down by the snout. This is called muzzle biting, and accounts, perhaps, for why muzzled dogs sometimes seem preternaturally subdued. And a dog who "stands over" another dog is being dominant. The subordinate dog in that arrangement would feel the pressure of the dominant animal on his body. The raincoat might well reproduce that feeling. So the principal experience of wearing a coat is not the experience of feeling protected from wetness; rather, the coat produces the discomfiting feeling that someone higher ranking than you is nearby.

This interpretation is borne out by most dogs' behavior when getting put into a raincoat: they may freeze in place as they are "dominated." You might see the same behavior when a dog resisting a bath suddenly stops struggling when he gets fully sodden or covered with a heavy, wet towel. The be-jacketed dog may cooperate in going out, but not because he has shown he likes the coat; it is because he has been subdued.* And he will wind up being less wet, but it is we who care about the planning for that, not the dog. The way around this kind of misstep is to replace our anthropomorphizing instinct with a behavior-reading instinct. In most cases, this is simple: we must ask the dog what he wants. You need only know how to translate his answer.

Here is our first tool to getting that answer: imagining the point of view of the dog. The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uexküll. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their
umwelt
(OOM-velt): their subjective or "self-world." Umwelt captures what life is like
as
the animal. Consider, for instance, the lowly deer tick. Those of you who have spent long minutes hesitatingly petting the body of a dog for the telltale pinhead that indicates a tick swollen with blood may have already considered the tick. And you probably consider the tick as a pest, period. Barely even an animal. Von Uexküll considered, instead, what it might be like from the tick's point of view.

A little background: ticks are parasites. Members of the family arachnid, a class that includes spiders and insects, they have four pairs of legs, a simple body type, and powerful jaws. Thousands of generations of evolution have pared their life to the straightforward: birth, mating, eating, and dying. Born legless and without sex organs, they soon grow these parts, mate, and climb to a high perch—say, a blade of grass. Here's where their tale gets striking. Of all the sights, sounds, and odors of the world, the adult tick is waiting for just one. It is not looking around: ticks are blind. No sound bothers the tick: sounds are irrelevant to its goal. It only awaits the approach of a single smell: a whiff of butyric acid, a fatty acid emitted by warm-blooded creatures (we sometimes smell it in sweat). It might wait here for a day, a month, or a dozen years. But as soon as it smells the odor it is fixed on, it drops from its perch. Then a second sensory ability kicks in. Its skin is photosensitive, and can detect warmth. The tick directs itself toward warmth. If it's lucky, the warm, sweaty smell is an animal, and the tick grasps on and drinks a meal of blood. After feeding once, it drops, lays eggs, and dies.