We might be social with any other social animal; but we do not, notably, bond with meerkats, ants, or beavers. To explain our particular choice of dogs, we must look one step more immediate. A proximate explanation is a local one: what immediate effect the behavior has that reinforces it, or rewards the "behaver." For an animal, reinforcement could be the meal that follows a hunt or the copulation that follows an ardorous, energetic pursuit.
It is here that dogs distinguish themselves from the other social animals. There are three essential behavioral means by which we maintain, and feel rewarded by, bonding with dogs. The first is contact: the touch of an animal goes far beyond the mere stimulation of nerves in the skin. The second is a greeting ritual: this celebration of encountering one another serves as recognition and acknowledgment. The third is timing: the pace of our interactions with each other is part of what can make them succeed or fail. Together, they combine to bond us irrevocably.
TOUCHING ANIMALS
Neither of us is truly comfortable but neither of us moves. He is on my lap, sprawled across my thighs, his legs already a little long and dangling down the side of the chair. He's settled his chin on my right arm, right in the crook of my elbow, his head tilted sharply upward just to keep in contact with me. To type, I must strain to pull my trapped arm up and just over the desktop onto the keyboard, with only my fingers able to move freely, and my body leaning precariously. We're both working to hold on to each other, to keep that gossamer of contact that says we are going to intertwine our fates—or they are already intertwined.
We named him Finnegan. We found him at a local shelter, in a cage among dozens of cages, in a room among a dozen rooms, all filled with dogs who we could just as easily have taken home. I remember the moment I knew it would be Finnegan. He leaned. Outside of his cage, on the tabletop where germ-carrying humans were allowed to interact with the sick dogs, he wagged, his ears flopped around his tiny face, he coughed long bursts of coughs, and he leaned against my chest, at table height, his face tucked into my armpit. Well, that was that.
Often it is contact that draws us to animals. Our sense of touch is mechanical, matter on matter: different than our other sensory abilities, and arguably more subjectively determined. The stimulation of a free nerve ending in the skin could be, depending on the context and the force of stimulation, a tickle, a caress, unen-durable, painful, or unnoticed. If we are distracted, what would otherwise feel like a painful burn might be a niggling irritation. A caress might be a grope if it comes from an unwanted hand.
In our current context, though, "touch" or "contact" is simply the erasing of a gap separating bodies. Petting zoos have arisen to satisfy the urge to engage that animal on the other side of the fence not only by looking at it, but by
touching
it. Better still if the animal is touching back—with, say, a warm tongue or worn teeth grabbing at the food in your outstretched hands. Children and even adults who approach me on the street as I walk with my dog want not to look at the dog, to watch her wag, to meditate on the dog—no, they want to pet the dog: to touch her. In fact, after a cursory rub, many people appear satisfied with that interaction. Even a brief touch is sufficient to bolster the feeling that a connection has been made.
Occasionally one might find one's toes, hanging off the end of the bed bare, being licked.
Dogs and humans share this innate drive for contact. The contact between mother and child is natural: by dint of the requirement for food, the infant is drawn to the mother's breast. Thenceforth, being held by the mother may be naturally comforting. A child who has no caregiver, male or female, will develop abnormally, in ways that it would be inhuman to experimentally test. Inhumane or not, in the 1950s a psychologist named Harry Harlow enacted a series of now notorious experiments designed to test the importance of maternal contact. He took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and raised them in isolation. Some had the choice of two surrogate "mothers" in their enclosures: a wire-framed, monkey-sized doll covered in cloth, plumped with filling, and warmed with a lightbulb; or a bare wire monkey with a bottle full of milk. Harlow's first discovery was that the infant monkeys spent nearly all their time huddled against the cloth mother, dashing over to the wire mother periodically to feed. When exposed to fearful objects (demonic noisemaking robotic contraptions Harlow put in their cages), the monkeys tore for the cloth mothers. They were desperate for contact with a warm body—with just that warm body from which they had been removed.*
The long-term discovery from Harlow's work was that these isolated monkeys developed relatively normally physically, but abnormally socially. They did not interact with other monkeys well: terrified, they huddled in the corner when another young monkey was put into their cage. Social interaction and personal contact is more than desirable: it is necessary for normal development. Months later, Harlow tried to rehabilitate those monkeys whose early isolation so malformed them.
He found that the best remedy was regular contact with young normal monkeys, whom he came to call "therapy monkeys," in play. This restored some of the isolates to more normal social actors.
Watch an infant child, with limited vision and even more limited mobility, try to snuggle into his mother, his head rooting around for contact, and one is seeing just what newborn puppies look like. Blind and deaf at birth, they are born with the instinct to huddle with siblings and their mother, or even with any solid object nearby. The ethologist Michael Fox describes the head of a puppy as a "thermotactile sensory probe," moving in a semicircle until it touches something. This begins a life of social behavior reinforced by and embracing contact. Wolves are estimated to make a move to touch one another at least six times an hour. They lick—each other's fur, genitals, mouths, and wounds. Snouts touch snouts or body or tail; they nuzzle muzzles or fur. They are oriented to touch even in agonistic activity, which, unlike many other species, usually involves contact: pushing, pinning with a bite, biting the body or leg, seizing another's muzzle or head with one's mouth.
Directed toward us, the dog's youthful instinct becomes a drive to burrow a head under our sleeping bodies or to rest a head upon us; to push and bump us as we walk; to gently nibble or lick us dry. It seems no accident that dogs playing at full steam regularly run into any observing owners nearby, using them as living bumpers defining their playing field. In turn, dogs suffer being touched by us. This is to their infinite credit. We find them touchable: furry and soft, right under dangling fingertips and often wearing their neoteny to greatly cute result. The dog's experience of that touch, though, is likely not what we think. A child may rub the belly of a dog fiercely; we reach to pat a dog's head—unknowing whether they want to be either fiercely rubbed or head-patted. In point of fact, their tactile umwelt is almost certainly different than ours.
First, sensation is not uniform across one's body. Our tactile resolution is different at different points on our skin. We can detect two fingers one centimeter apart at the nape of our necks, but if the fingers are moved down the back we feel that they are touching the same spot. The resolution of touch to animals is likely different still: what we think is a gentle pat may be barely detectable or may be painful.
Second, the somatic—body—map of the dog is not the same as our somatic map: the most sensitive or meaningful parts of the body are different on dogs. As seen in many of the aforementioned agonistic contact actions, grabbing a dog's head or muzzle—the first part a guileless dog-petter reaches for—may be viewed as aggressive. It is similar to what a mother will do to an unruly pup, or an older dominant wolf will do to a member of his pack. Here too are the whiskers (vibrissae), which like all hairs have pressure-sensitive receptors at their ends. The whiskered receptors are specially important to detecting motion around the face or nearby air currents. If you are close enough to see the dog's muzzle whiskers, you might notice them flare when the dog feels aggressive (it might be inadvisable to be so close in that case). Pulling a tail is a provocation, but usually one for play, not aggression—unless you don't let go. Touching the underbelly might prompt a dog to feel sexually frisky, as genital licking often precedes an attempt to mount. A dog rolling over on his back is doing much more than simply revealing his belly: this is the same posture dogs use to allow their mothers to clean their genitals. The forceful belly-rubber may find himself urinated upon.
Finally, just as we have highly sensitive areas—the tip of the tongue, our fingers—so too does the dog. There is a species level to this—no person likes being poked in the eye—and an individual level—I might be ticklish on the bottoms of my feet, while you aren't at all. You can easily do a tactile survey and map your own dog's body. Not only are the favored and prohibited places to touch different, but the very form of contact is crucial. In a dog's world repeated touching is different than constant pressure. Since touch is used to communicate a message, holding a hand in one place on a dog's body conveys that same message writ large. At the same time, full-body contact is preferred by some dogs, especially young dogs, and especially when they are the initiators of the contact. Dogs often find places to lie down that maximize contiguity of body with body. This might be a safe posture for dogs, especially as puppies, when they are entirely reliant on others for their care. To feel light pressure along the whole body is to have assurance of your well-being.
It is hard to imagine knowing a dog but not touching him—or being touched by him. To be nudged by a dog's nose is a pleasure unmatched.
AT HELLO
Early in my life with Pumpernickel, I got a full-time job and she got a classic case of separation anxiety. Mornings as I prepared to leave the house after our walk, she began to whimper, shadow me from room to room, and, finally, vomit. I consulted with trainers who gave me very reasonable guidelines to reduce her stress at separation. I followed all known commonsensical procedures, and before too long Pump returned to a healthy mental and physical state. But there was one dictum I didn't follow. Don't ritualize your departure and later return, they advised; don't celebrate your reunion. I refused. Her snuffly, nosed greeting, our heaping together on the floor in a joyous commemoration of togetherness, was too good to let go.
Lorenz called the greeting between animals after being apart a "redirected appeasement ceremony." That nervous excitement one might feel on suddenly seeing someone else in one's den or territory could lead to two different results: an attack of the potential stranger, or a redirection of the excitement into a greeting. His idea was that there is very little difference between the attack and the greeting, besides a few subtle alterations or additions. Between mallards, one of the birds he studied extensively, two individuals meeting each other engage in a rhythmical "ceremonial to-and-fro movement" that could become aggressive, but for the male mallard, the drake, lifting his head and turning it away. This leads to a mutual ceremony of pretending to preen each other, and the greeting is complete: another fight inhibited.
The greeting among humans is similarly ritualized. We look each other in the eyes, wave hands at each other, hug or kiss once or twice or thrice depending on one's native country. These all may be redirections of an uncertain feeling upon seeing someone else. What is more, we may smile or chuckle. Nothing is more reassuring of the good intent of another person than laughter, Lorenz proposed. This paroxysm of noise is surely most often the expression of joy, but it might also be an eruption typical of alarm reformulated as delight or surprise (not unlike the rough play context in which dog laughter appears).
Having channeled one's excitement into a greeting in this Lorenzian way, one might add other components to the hello. Wolves and dogs do. Their greetings, and the greetings of all social canids, are similar. In the wild, when parents return to the den, the pups mob them, madly lunging at their mouths in the hope of getting them to regurgitate a bit of the kill they have consumed. They lick at their lips, muzzle, and mouth, take a submissive posture, and wag furiously.
As we have seen, what many owners cheerfully describe as "kisses" is face licking, your dog's attempt to prompt you to regurgitate. Your dog will never be unhappy if his kisses in fact prompt you to spit up your lunch. This greeting isn't complete without an excited approach and constant, energetic contact. Ears that were pricked to hear your arrival fall flat against the dog's head, which dips slightly in a submissive gesture. The dog pulls his lips back and drops his eyelids: in humans, markers of a true smile. He wags madly or beats a frantic rhythm with the tip of his tail against the ground. Both wags contain all the excited running-around energy that the dog suppresses in order to stay close to you. He may whine or yelp with pleasure. Adult wolves howl daily: among packs, a chorus of howling may help coordinate their travels and strengthens their attachment. Similarly, if you greet the dog with cries and vocal hellos, your dog may cry back at you. In every move he is breathing and exuding his recognition of you.
