Soldier Dogs (24 page)

Canine ears have a reputation of being able to hear sounds up
to four times farther than ours can. The mobility of their ears plays a role in helping locate and focus on sounds. As anyone who has ever watched a dog listen to something of great interest will tell you, a dog’s ears almost seem to have minds of their own. It’s no wonder: Dogs have about eighteen muscles helping them swivel and tilt their ears in response to sound. It’s pretty endearing to watch. Jake is adept at this ear maneuver whenever he begs for food or sits in the backyard listening for the cat.

Dogs have poor color vision compared to ours, decent night vision, and generally see a wider picture than we do because of the placement of their eyes. But how a dog sees the world is highly dependent on what a dog looks like. Dogs with longer noses, like most military working dogs, tend to have more photoreceptors crowded together in a horizontal streak across the eye. This “visual streak,” as it’s called, makes for better panoramic vision, with a field of vision that extends up to about 240 degrees (as opposed to our full frontal 180). Dogs with this kind of vision can even have some awareness of what’s going on behind them. But don’t ask them to focus on anything closer than ten to fifteen inches in front of their noses. Their eyes aren’t set up for that kind of vision. Dogs with shorter noses likely do better with closer vision. Their vision cells are packed in more of a circular shape, making for a narrower field of vision and more visual acuity up front.

This may explain why retrievers retrieve and lapdogs, with their big forward-looking eyes and their small snouts, like to sit on your lap and look at you.

Scientists are continuing to investigate the eyes, ears, and noses of dogs. And beyond the realm of these senses, they’re
reaching out to get to know more about dog psychology, including how dogs think, feel, solve problems, and why they behave the way they do. Canine cognition is a relatively new field that’s burgeoning with enthusiastic scientists eager to plumb dogs’ minds for things we’ve wondered about but never explored before.

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T
he heart of the Duke Canine Cognition Center is the dog lab. Unlike many laboratories that use dogs as guinea pigs for research, there is no pain in this lab. There aren’t even cages. In fact, the lab looks like a small dance studio. The white floor is striped with an assortment of tape colors; red, green, yellow, and blue. The dogs who come here enter with their owners, stay within feet of their owners, leave with their owners, and inevitably get treats and lots of attention during the studies. It’s Center Director Brian Hare’s idea of “an awesome place to learn about dogs.”

It’s late morning, and Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology and cognitive neuroscience, warns me that he just had cake from Costco and a coffee. “I’m totally ADD, I warn you. I’m really excited about a lot of things,” he tells me, blue eyes glittering. For the next hour, Hare talks fast and nonstop about the dog lab as he careens about his office. There’s something about his energy, his look, and demeanor that keeps reminding me of Brendan Fraser’s George of the Jungle—only Hare’s rendition holds advanced degrees, has earned great respect in the world of
academia, and has the tremendous responsibility that goes along with founding and running a major research facility at one of the nation’s top universities.

This lab is one of a few dog cognition labs that have opened at universities in the United States in the last several years, including one run by Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College. Until the late 1990s, little attention was paid to the topic of canine cognition. Primates were the primary animals being studied for cognition. But “now it’s like out-of-control exciting, trying to unlock the secrets of a dog’s mind. Now everybody is so super-excited by this research on dogs, from psychologists to anthropologists to the average American dog lover,” Hare says as he swipes his hands through his shock of thick, wavy hair.

Hare and his staff had just written a grant to the Department of Defense when I visited. He admits he’s never worked with military dogs before, but he has many ideas about how his center can help advance the understanding of dogs in a way he thinks would benefit the military dog program. He’d like to develop a cognitive test for dogs who have been involved in stressful situations, like deployments. He also wants to be able to put together a system so handlers can check their dogs for stress in the field by methods other than simply looking at behavior. This involves testing cortisol levels in conjunction with core body temperatures, as taken by a thermal imaging temperature gun.

In addition, he’d eventually like to be able to use the results of an ongoing study on something called “laterality bias” to help improve accuracy of detector dogs. “Dogs tend to go to the right. A lot tend to stay to the right of what they’re searching,” Hare explains. “It’s something you should know about your dog before you send
him to find explosives, if he favors one side over the other. Don’t you think that’s important information?”

I’m not sure what the Department of Defense thinks of Hare’s ideas, but even if he doesn’t get the grant the first time, the DOD should be prepared for more grant proposals in the future. “We want to help save money and dogs and save lives, and we’ll keep trying,” Hare says.

He and his graduate students are running several studies concurrently. This helps explain the colorful stripes and circles and geometric figures all over the floor of the lab. In certain studies, dogs and people need to be at certain fixed places. Marking up the floor eliminates a variable. The green tape is for the predictions study, the yellow tape is for the inhibitory control study, the worn-out blue tape is for a completed attention study, and the red tape is for the trust study.

The red tape is where we find Alice and Duane Putnam, who have driven for two hours to get here from Warren County, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. (Staffers here tell me that they get calls from dog lovers all over the world who want to bring their dogs to the lab to be part of the research. The lab tries to limit participants to no more than a three-hour drive, so the dog won’t be discombobulated by travel.) The Putnams are here with their dog, Tri, who looks like he’s part Rottweiler, part German shepherd, and a bit of something else. They believe he is the reincarnation of two of their previous dogs, thus the name. (Two plus himself equals three. Tri sounds better than Three.)

The Putnams are fascinated with their dog. They say he’s too smart for his own good. When no one is looking, he opens peanut
butter jars and Vaseline jars by screwing off their lids. Then he eats the contents.

Today Tri the Vaseline thief is taking part in the study about trust. He has been here before because his “dog parents,” as they call them at the cognition center, like the idea that they’re contributing to the better understanding of dogs. Besides, it gets them off their ten acres in the rural corner of the state.

Researcher Jingzhi Tan, aka “Hippo,” has devised a study that investigates how trust is established and whether dogs differentiate between owners, a very friendly new acquaintance, and a complete stranger. His goal is actually to find out how humans become friendly and trusting, and he says a good way to study this is through dogs. Many of the studies at the center could end up with significant findings about people as well as dogs.

When I start observing (via a video monitor, so I don’t interfere with the goings-on), Tri is being lovingly petted by a new acquaintance—someone who works at the center. She is on the floor with him, making friends like this for about twenty minutes. The Putnams are thrilled Tri is letting a stranger handle him without balking. He’s usually not quite as social with people he doesn’t know.

Following the petting session, this new friend and a complete stranger will enter the room and take turns sitting next to bowls with food—one bowl will be near the person, one will be near an empty chair. If the dog thinks a person is risky, the idea is that he’d try to avoid that person, and would pick the food that’s farther away. Mary, an intern who helps coordinate dog visits here, is the stranger today. But Tri doesn’t seem to mind going near her. He is
fine with his new friend, too. In other variations of this study, the new friend and stranger take turns pointing to food bowls and researchers see if the dog trusts one more than the other.

The study, and others like it, could eventually have implications for military dogs and how they come to trust their handlers, but that would be years down the road. What counts now in this room is that Tri, dog number 54 for this study, is done and that he has trusted more people than the Putnams would have thought. They proudly stroke his head and tell him, “You did good!”

Alice Putnam exhorts him: “Kissy Mama!” He doesn’t. “He’s not much of a kisser,” she explains. She says she knows her dog well.

But how well does her dog know her? Chances are, much better than she would suspect.

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A
lexandra Horowitz likens dogs to anthropologists: They study us. They observe us. They smell changes in our very chemistry. They learn to predict us. “They know us in ways our human partners sometimes do not,” she says.

I’ve heard a similar refrain dozens of times from handlers, particularly those who have deployed and spent almost every hour for months with their dogs: Their dogs know them better than their spouses or parents do.

Nearly every handler I interviewed, for instance, said that his dog can tell when he’s having a bad day. Most civilian dog lovers would say the same thing. But how can it be that a dog—who doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t know about problems with your bills or your boss or your in-laws—can somehow sense when things are amiss in your life?

It’s a phenomenon many military working dog handlers and instructors refer to as “dumping down the leash.” How you’re feeling and acting is observed by a dog, who will react to this information in different ways. A tense handler is likely to make a dog more
tense. Likewise, if a handler is confident and not fearful, even after a loud explosion nearby, the idea is that a dog who is not already gun-shy will figure there’s nothing to worry about, with an instinctual logic along the lines of “My handler’s OK with it, and he’s the leader here, so it must be OK.”