Dog Sense (19 page)

Why do they show this rapid loss of interest? We don't know, but it's tempting to speculate that it's connected to the dog's origins as hunters. Something taken into the mouth and maybe tossed in the air is worth persisting with only if it produces food, or at least starts to break apart and so might eventually yield food
¹³
—which may be why many dogs love to rip their toys apart. But something that remains unchanged even after repeated chewing is probably not worth bothering with.

Habituation can be useful, for both dogs and their owners, because it reduces a dog's anxiety in reaction to unexpected events. Of course, the technique works only if the trigger for the fear (say, the sound of fireworks) has no actual consequences for the dog (is not actually painful). As a training technique, the stressor has to be presented at a level that is
just high enough to be detected by the dog but not high enough to frighten it. Commercially available recordings of gunfire and firework noises are a very practical way of reducing the anxiety associated with such noises. Once this level has been established, the intensity of the sound can be increased very, very gradually, with quite long gaps in between, such that the dog becomes more and more habituated to it, eventually reaching the point where even the “normal” everyday intensity is no longer important enough to make the dog feel frightened.

Bear in mind that great care has to be taken to avoid raising the intensity of the stimulus to the point where the dog becomes even slightly frightened. If this line is crossed, the process goes back several stages before you can try again.

The opposite process,
sensitization
, occurs when the dog panics because it cannot escape from whatever is scaring it—this is a common cause of so-called firework phobia. Many dogs are frightened of loud noises; some will gradually get used to them, if their initial exposure is not too intense, either by good fortune or because their owner has had the foresight to deliberately habituate them. Others, those that may be intrinsically nervous or whose first exposure is especially intense, on finding that nothing they do makes the noise go away, react more and more intensely on each successive exposure. Once this has happened, even very low levels of the stimulus will trigger the feeling of fear, making habituation almost impossible. The technique known as flooding (exposure to extreme intensities of unavoidable fear-inducing stimuli) can be successful in the treatment of irrational phobias in humans, but when used on dogs and other animals less rational than ourselves it is much more likely to make the fear even more deep-seated.

Both habituation and sensitization are forms of learning—both change the way the dog responds emotionally to situations. Each combination of external events, as recognized by the dog, triggers one emotion—in this case, fear. The specific combination may be important; for example, a dog may lose its sensitivity to loud noises when it's at home but still become frightened when it's out in the car. The dog may still not like the sound of fireworks but has learned that nothing bad follows
when it's at home
. The car introduces a new context, one in which the dog has never previously heard fireworks, and so the fear resurfaces.

The role of context is essential also to understanding much more complicated forms of learning, including associative learning.
Associative learning
occurs when two hitherto unlinked events get connected together in the dog's mind. A dog may learn that “I get fed soon after my owner gets my bowl from the cupboard,” that “soon after the doorbell rings the door opens and people come through it,” that “there are rabbits in that wood,” that “when my owner says ‘sit' it's fun to sit down,” that “if I fetch my leash my owner may take me for a walk,” and so on. These are all simple associations, either between two sets of information (bowl = food, bell = people, wood = rabbits to chase) or between doing one thing and achieving something (sit = praise from my owner, fetch leash = walk).

In psychologists' jargon, these two types of associations occur in what are respectively referred to as
classical
and
operant conditioning
. Classical conditioning is also sometimes referred to as Pavlovian con-ditioning, after Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments conducted in the 1900s. Having noted that dogs anticipated the arrival of food by drooling, Pavlov was able to show in these experiments that if the arrival of food was always preceded by a bell, the dogs would start to salivate whenever they heard the bell—whether or not the aroma of food was also present in the air. Thus he helped to establish the fact that animals such as dogs were able to quickly learn the significance of artificial cues that evolution could not have prepared them for. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that something that reliably predicts a mealtime, such as the bowl coming out of the cupboard, doesn't just make the dog drool (and the quantity of drool is precisely what Pavlov measured) but actually conjures up some kind of mental picture of food in the dog's mind. (Knowing dogs, it's probably an olfactory representation rather than an imaginary snapshot of some brown stuff in a bowl.) Thus something that the dog instinctively likes (in this case, the smell of food) gets linked to something arbitrary, something that would otherwise not mean much—the owner getting something out of a cupboard.

Classical conditioning is automatic; it doesn't involve the dog's reflection on what has just happened. For this reason it works well only when the arbitrary stimulus comes
immediately
—within one or two seconds—before the stimulus that the dog is already programmed to
respond to. If the bowl appears and then the owner is distracted, the dog will probably drool until the food eventually arrives. If for some reason the owner changes her routine and starts getting the bowl out long before she fills it, the dog will, after a period of frustration (and drooling), start to unlearn the association—a process referred to as
extinction
. On the other hand, given that food is very important to dogs, they may be conditioned to another predictor that is present at the same time—perhaps the owner getting the pack of food from the cupboard.

Classical conditioning also works in the opposite direction, if the association is with something the dog
doesn't
like. If a dog treads on a thorn and hurts its foot, it will immediately associate the pain with the place where it got hurt and avoid it for a while. Such
aversions
are generally quite long-lasting, partly because the dog isn't disadvantaged much if it stays away from that place for a while—in biological parlance, it has an alternative strategy available. Dogs also don't like electric shocks and will rapidly learn to predict when they're going to occur, if they possibly can. This is the concept behind a product for dogs called the “pet fence,” which involves a collar that delivers a mild shock to the dog's neck. The shock is triggered when the dog gets close to a buried wire emitting a radio signal, visually marked out by a line of flags or something similar. The collar also makes a beeping sound just before it's about to deliver the shock; the dog rapidly learns that the beep means the shock is about to happen and also associates the shock with the location in which it previously happened. The dog should then be able to learn to turn away whenever it hears the beep, thus avoiding the shock itself—in short, it is given an alternative strategy.

In the context of applying the principles of classical conditioning to dog training, it's crucial to appreciate that dogs live in the here-and-now to a much greater extent than humans do and, therefore, that they may associate any punishment (or reward) with something that we humans may not expect. For example, many owners punish their dogs, verbally or physically, when they come home to find that the dog has done something wrong. They assume that the dog will be able to think back to whatever that deed was and thereby associate the punishment with it. However, as noted earlier, dogs don't do mental time-travel at all well. What the dog actually does in such instances is to associate the
immediate situation—the owner's return—with the owner's angry words and any physical punishment that follows. In short, the dog associates events that happen immediately one after the other. The mess in the room is highly relevant to the owner but much less relevant as far as the dog is concerned; the dog is incapable of reflecting on what the owner is angry about. What is different from the “pet fence” situation is that here the dog has no alternative strategy; it has no means of avoiding punishment, because it does not understand what has precipitated the punishment in the first place, nor has it had any warning that the punishment is imminent. Because it does not understand the causation, the dog is unable to predict when its owner is going to come home angry and when not. It's like a rat in a cage, being shocked at random. Researchers have established that rats can become quite tolerant of mild electric shocks, even in situations where they can't avoid them, if they are given a reliable warning of when they're going to occur. However, a rat receiving exactly the same shocks, but this time without the warnings, becomes progressively more anxious and stressed. The same is true of dogs.

Although almost all learning in dogs takes place between events a second or two apart, there is one major exception—namely, when the “punishment” takes the form of an upset stomach. An inexperienced young dog may pick up the rotting corpse of some animal on a walk, mistakenly think that it is good to eat, and then feel nauseous and vomit it up an hour or so later. Although these events seem to be much too far apart in time for conventional classical conditioning to work, it would be very useful to that puppy if it could learn not to eat such things again, and indeed this is what happens. There is a special rule for food—connect taste/odor of last meal with painful stomach—but it is confined to food, and doesn't seem to apply to any other learned associations. This necessary relaxation of the usual rules can have unintended consequences: Animals (this applies to humans too) can “go off” a particular food if they are affected by a gastric virus within a few hours of eating it, even if the food did not actually cause the stomach problems. But this confusion is presumably a price worth paying for learning to avoid genuinely toxic foods.

As we have seen, dogs are continually learning about how their environment works. Domestication has made dogs more attentive to humans
than any other animal, wild or domestic, but it cannot have prepared dogs for every eventuality that each one experiences, especially since man-made environments change far too quickly for evolution to keep up. What domestication has given dogs is the capacity to make sense of the world by learning all kinds of associations, some of them between events and sensations that no dog of the previous generation could possibly have met. The first dog to encounter a vacuum cleaner was not specifically pre-adapted to handle the situation, but it did possess the ability to habituate to the unfamiliar sound and vibration.

Such straightforward learning helps dogs cope with man-made environments in a way that few other species are capable of. However, this is not enough to turn dogs into the kind of model citizens they need to be in order to be accommodated into those environments. For that, they also need to behave in the ways we expect them to, and this rarely happens spontaneously; rather, dogs need to be deliberately trained.

Dog
training
, as opposed to mere learning, primarily relies on the other major type of associative learning,
instrumental
or
operant conditioning
. This kind of conditioning links together an action that the dog performs and a specific reward. (The reward might also be the avoidance of a punishment.) The action is usually something that the dog would do in other circumstances, but not, until trained, specifically in order to obtain that reward. For example, a dog can be trained to sit down to obtain a morsel of food, even though sitting down isn't a normal part of canid hunting or feeding behavior. Behavior that does not come naturally is much harder to bring about; for example, it's much easier to train a dog than a horse to retrieve sticks, since the natural model—bringing food back home to feed the young—is an essential part of the canid repertoire but not that of an animal that grazes grass. Dogs are naturally motivated to perform a diverse range of tasks. For dogs, like all animals, food can be an important reward, but dogs are unusual in that most also regard contact with their owner as rewarding in itself. Some types of dog also find the opportunity to go exploring and/or hunting as rewarding in its own right, independent of any food that might eventually result; this tendency appears to be especially well developed in sled-dogs, for example. Others find play rewarding in itself, over and above the contact with their owner that is often also involved; thus it is used in some types of sniffer-dog training.

Not all training is deliberate; often a dog will “train itself,” learning by trial and error that when it does one particular thing, something good follows. This is often how the simplest forms of attention-seeking behavior arise. For example, young dogs will often “try out” fragments of adult behavior when playing with their littermates, or with their human family. One of these behaviors is mounting, a component of sexual behavior that is also routinely seen in play. When, by chance, the puppy attempts to mount the leg of one of the human members of the household, everyone else in the room will laugh in a slightly embarrassed way, and gently push the dog off. In the young dog's rather unsophisticated interpretation of human behavior, this is just play (i.e., rewarding), so it will repeat the performance, subsequently extending it to visitors, to the even greater embarrassment of the owner. The more entrenched the behavior becomes, the harder it is to eradicate. Boisterous young dogs may even interpret the owner's smack on the nose as just another part of the game, not the punishment that the owner intended.