Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (47 page)

As when she spent a quarter hour digging a hole in which to drop a treasured rawhide chew, but in digging actually created more of a pile than a hole: the result being that the rawhide was actually not stashed secretly away, but proudly and conspicuously displayed (itself probably the result of an imperfectly-honed caching instinct). In like manner, one might wonder if she experiences it as ironic (or as magic) when I make a show of unfurling my fingers in front of her and the treat I had in my palm is missing.

This could be another way of accounting for Rico's ability to pick the toy with the unfamiliar name out of a pile of toys: he selected the toy that he did not recognize.

With age, dogs sleep more but enter paradoxical—REM—sleep less than in youth. Scientists have theories but no final explanation for why dogs dream—and they dream vividly, if their eye fluttering, claw curling, tail twitching, and yelping in sleep is any indication. As in humans, one theory names dreams the accidental result of paradoxical sleep, which itself is a time of bodily restoration; alternatively, dreams might function as a time to practice, in the safety of one's imagination, future social interactions and physical feats or to review interactions and feats past.

When animals pass the test, skeptics highlight the logical fallacy of the conclusion: that self-aware humans use a mirror to examine ourselves does not imply that using a mirror requires self-awareness. When animals fail the test, the debate goes the other way: there is no good evolutionary reason why animals
should
examine something non-irritating on their heads, even if they recognized themselves. In either event, the mirror test continues to be the best test thus far developed for self-awareness, and one that uses simple equipment to boot.

I do not know if the origin of the myth of
dog years
—that dogs live the equivalent of seven years for every one of our years—has ever been cracked. I'd guess that it is a backward extrapolation from the length of the expected lifetime of humans (seventy+ years) to the expected lifetime of dogs (ten to fifteen). The analogy is more convenient than it is true. There is no real life-length equivalence except that we both are born and die. Dogs develop at lightning speed, walking and eating on their own in their first two months; human infants take over a year. By a year, most dogs are accomplished social actors, able to navigate dog and human worlds easily. The average child might be there by four or five. Then dog development slows, while human development skyrockets. If committed to the comparison, one could make a case for a sliding scale ratio: around 10 to 1 in their first two years, then diminishing to more like 2 to 1 in their last years. But the truly committed should consider the critical-period windows, the performance on cognitive tests, the diminishment of sensory capacities with age, and the lifespans of different breeds in their calculus.

This is similar to what has been called
ontogenetic
ritualization:
the co-shaping by individuals of a behavior over time, until even the very initial part of the behavior carries meaning for them. In humans, an eyebrow-raise from one friend to another can take the place of a spoken commentary; as we've seen, among dogs a quick head-raise might replace an entire play bow.

Which some wolves instinctively do: even as young cubs they burrow their noses into a patch of land, drop a bone, nose-burrow some more, then proudly leave their poor excuse of a hole with a bone obviously visible. As adults they refine the behavior and do retrieve cached food—although there is no data about whether the retrieval is time-sensitive.

The medieval policy seems ridiculous to presume that dogs merit lawful consideration. It may seem equally ridiculous that our modern policy presumes that dogs do not: we still kill dogs who mortally wound a human—but now we call the dogs "dangerous" and do not bother to put them on trial (though their owners might be tried).

The command varies from owner to owner—from
no!
to the recently popular
leave it!
Each is fundamentally a negation: a sharp-sounding grammatical flourish that can be applied concurrently to any behavior to make it off-limits.

For a horse, releasing pressure on the body is sufficiently pleasurable as to be able to be used as a reinforcement in training. Perhaps it would be the same with dogs who startle at the feeling of a hand pressed firmly on their head.

As Temple Grandin has similarly noted with cows and pigs, causing the meat industry to alter the paths the animals walk into the slaughterhouse. For the industry, her work is useful in promoting less stressed, and thus better-tasting meat. For the animals, they are presumably spared from some added anxiety as they travel—one hopes unknowingly—toward their deaths.

To pull a dog from ardent sniffing is the same for him as being yanked away from a scene just as soon as you turn your eyes to it.

Clicker training tries to address this dissonance of our different "moments" and our different senses of what the dog is "doing" at any moment. Trainers use a small device that allows them to make a sharp, distinct
click!
when the dog has done a desired behavior and can expect an imminent reward. The click helps make a human moment salient to a dog; left to his own devices, the dog parcels up his life differently.

This might seem a good time for a young dog to meet his new owner. There is surprisingly little good science about the timing of this introduction. The forces determining when people adopt dogs are more often than not influenced by everything
but
the best age for a puppy to meet a person. Many states have laws prohibiting sale of puppies prior to 8 weeks, to protect against selling physically immature animals. Breeders have their own interests in mind in selling their charges. But social recognition requires experience. From two weeks to four months dogs are particularly open to learning about others (of any species). No dog should be taken away from his mother before he is weaned (which can be from six to ten weeks), but dogs
should
be exposed to humans as well as to littermates.

We are generally enthralled by creatures that look like us in at least some way. Notably, not every and not all animals are effused over, taken in, or anthropomorphized: monkeys and dogs regularly are, but eels and manta rays rarely are. "That barnacle just loves hanging out with me and my boat" is a sentence never uttered. The difference between the monkey and the barnacle is part evolutionary, part familiarity. An infant monkey curling a hand around a mother's finger easily evokes the same poignant scene between human mothers and infants. By contrast, however much a young eel may be yearning for contact as it slides toward its mother, its lack of limbs gets in the way of our calling the scene "touching"—or even intentional.

Edward O. Wilson, the naturalist and sociobiologist who studied ant populations in amazing detail, proposed that we have an inborn, species-typical tendency to affiliate with other animals: what has been called the "biophilia hypothesis." The notion is attractive and also much debated. It is, notably, difficult to disprove such a hypothesis. Regardless, I consider it the scientist's way of saying what Woody Allen did.

In studies with puppies, researchers found that those distressed at separation from their mothers and littermates vocalized somewhat less if given a towel or soft toy (a stuffed blue lamb). If there is knowledge to be gained here it is that a soft familiar object can be a salve (hence, in children, the power of teddy bears); in fact, such an object may reduce some of the unease dogs may manifest at being left at home alone.

*

Neither are these methods benign, in some cases: there is the famous case of the zebra finches, captured and harmlessly leg-banded for identification as the researchers observed their mating tactics. Lo and behold, the only feature that they found was predictive of a male's success at breeding was the color of his leg band. Female zebra finches apparently swoon for a red band on a fella (males prefer black-banded females).