Dog Sense (26 page)

For example, why do some dogs find it relatively easy to cope with being left on their own, while many others find it difficult? At the present time, research has not been able to shed much light on this matter. One possibility, however, is that dogs have been so heavily selected to form strong attachments to humans that they
all
have the potential to develop separation problems—but the lucky ones have owners who, whether accidentally or knowingly, teach them that being left alone is not a catastrophe.

Most dogs seem to become more distressed when they are separated from their owners than when they are separated from other dogs. So the question arises, Do dogs love people more than they love other dogs? This doesn't sound like a particularly scientific sort of question, but it could be a test of just how domesticated dogs have become. Few scientists have ever considered this a question worthy of an answer, but there is one study that conclusively shows that dogs are indeed prone to bonding more strongly with people than with other dogs.
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The subjects of the study were eight mongrels, seven to nine years of age, who had been living as littermate pairs in kennels since they were eight weeks old; all had been fully socialized to people, and they were being looked after by one carer who was, as far as they were concerned, their “owner.” When the experiment began, the kennel-mates had not been apart even for a minute during the previous two years, and hardly ever during their whole lifetimes. However, when one of each pair was taken out of earshot for four hours, the remaining dog's behavior did not alter appreciably. Puppies separated from their littermates will usually yelp until they are reunited, but these adult dogs barely even barked. Moreover, the level of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood did not change as a result of the separation, provided the dogs had been left in their familiar pen. Overall, therefore, there was no indication that any of these dogs was upset—this despite the fact that, since they had virtually no history of being left alone, they would not have been sure that they'd be back with their pen-mate in a few hours' time.

In contrast, when the dogs were taken to an unfamiliar kennel, they did become upset. They were visibly agitated, and their levels of stress hormone went up by over 50 percent. Remarkably, this proved true whether they were on their own or with their kennel-mate. When the
two were together, they did not interact with one another any more frequently than usual; whatever the bond between them, it was not sufficiently comforting or confidence-building to help them cope with being somewhere new, outside their familiar territory. However, if their carer sat quietly with each dog in the novel kennel, it would stay near him and pester him for contact (which he responded to by brief episodes of stroking). This was apparently enough to alleviate the dogs' stress completely, because if the carer was there, their cortisol levels stayed close to normal.
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These dogs, although they'd kept the company of another dog for their whole lives, behaved as if they were much more attached to their caretaker than to their brother or sister. While they had not led quite the same kind of life as a pet does, everyday experience suggests that the same is probably true of pet dogs. Dogs do have territories, in the sense that they feel most calm when they are in familiar places, but like the wolf, they can comfortably go to new places if they are with their “pack”—the difference being that in this case the key “pack” member is almost always a human (namely, the owner) and not a member of their own species. For many dogs, the owner will be a constant feature of their lives from the middle of the socialization period onward. However, others will be forced, through changes in circumstances, to alter their primary attachments on several occasions during their lifetime. Thus, in addition to the capacity to accept both humans as well as dogs as social partners, domestication has given dogs the social flexibility sufficient to form new “familial” ties at almost any time in their lives.

Since the need for a human attachment figure seems to be unusually powerful in the domestic dog, dogs that are abandoned by their owners and end up in rehoming centers must feel this very acutely. Research has shown that just a few minutes of friendly attention from one person on two consecutive days is enough to make some of these unowned dogs desperate to stay with that person; when left on their own, these dogs will howl, scratch at the door that the person has left through, or jump up at the window to try to see where he has gone. For many dogs, this perception of humans as potential attachment figures may last their whole lives; luckily for many of them, one individual or one family will satisfy this need from eight weeks of age for the rest of their lives. This
craving certainly explains why so many dogs develop separation disorders at some point in their lives.

Even though most of the evidence for these strong and rapidly forming attachments comes from the behavior of dogs that are distressed by separation, the strength of such attachments suggests that they should also be expressed in pet dogs' normal behavior. Unfortunately, however, very few biologists have studied the everyday interactions between pet dogs and the families they live in. There are probably a variety of reasons for this: Such studies are time-consuming; they use techniques more commonly employed by anthropologists, who are rarely interested in animals; the data they generate is complex and not straightforward to analyze; and there is the risk that the mere presence of an observer would change the way that family members behave toward their pet. For example, some people may feel inhibited while others might use the opportunity to “show off.” Nevertheless, such studies are a very useful counterpart to the much more structured investigations of, for example, dogs' cognitive abilities.

One of the earliest, and still one of the best, of these ethnographic studies shows just how people-focused most pet dogs are. Ten middle-class dog-owning families living in the suburbs of Philadelphia were observed for a total of twenty to thirty hours, usually in the late afternoon and early evening when the children were at home. The researcher noted that the dogs paid much more attention to the human members of the household than vice versa. They watched, approached, or followed one or more household members. When they rested, they often faced people in the same or the next room. When they happened to be looking elsewhere, such as out of a window, they were evidently still aware of where the people were, often turning toward them and approaching. Conversely, however, the family members rarely interrupted what they were doing to seek out the dog when the dog was in another room.
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The apparently single-minded vigilance on the part of the dog was not uniformly directed, however. Dogs are very good at sensing who in the family likes them best. In the three families where the husband was not attached to or interested in the dog, the dog seldom watched or followed him. In this way, the dogs showed that they were aware of who had been most responsive to them in the past. The implication is that
dogs, once they have an attachment figure, are not indiscriminate in terms of who else they become attached to, presumably relying on their experiences of people to guide them in how they should best react.

The “lupomorph” or “pack” model, while flawed in many respects, is therefore correct in one: Dogs' behavior toward humans does use a set of rules and behavior patterns that are ultimately derived from those of the wolf and more distant canid ancestors. However, these are not the rules of “Dominate or be dominated, crush or be crushed.” They are the rules of family, the rules of “Those who raise you are those who are most likely to continue to cherish you throughout your life.” Our pet dogs' behavior clearly shows us that they see us as attachment figures, based on a parent-offspring framework. Indeed, the dog owner who tells her friends “I'm Fido's mum” is really not far wrong.

Dogs are fundamentally different from all other animals in this respect. We take it for granted that we can exercise them off-lead and that, once trained, they will return to us for no more immediate reward than being reunited with us. The mechanisms involved are essentially developmental; domestication has imbued the dog with the capacity to achieve this unique social behavior, but it is only through the learning environment we give them that dogs come to understand how to behave toward people.

D
ogs are obviously attached to their owners—in the sense of their behavior, in the sense that they follow them around. But does your dog actually love you? Of course it does! It tells you, every time you come home, by the way it greets you. Your dog may be “just” a household pet, but I'd be very surprised if most owners couldn't bring themselves to say that they loved their dog and that their dog loved them in return. Anything less, and the relationship is probably in trouble.

Emotions are not easy to pin down, scientifically speaking. As a scientist, I can investigate how much you love your dog, and as a human, I can be reasonably sure that what you describe to me as “love” is much the same emotion that I have felt for my own dogs. We can both articulate this, first, because we are members of the same species and therefore are likely to have similar emotional repertoires and, second, because we can communicate our feelings to each other through language.

However, the love that flows in the other direction, dog to owner, is much harder to pin down. First of all, dogs can't tell us how they feel, so we have to deduce it from their behavior. Can we be sure that we always get this right? Second, because we belong to different species, we cannot simply assume that dogs experience the same array of emotions that we do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's
unethical
to make that assumption. Scientists have a responsibility to convey as much as they know about the
reality
of canine emotions, guiding owners to a proper perception of what their dogs can and cannot feel.

I am convinced that giving proper consideration to the emotional life of dogs is not just an academic exercise—it has real and practical implications for their welfare and their relationships with people. But not all scientists agree that dog emotion is even a proper subject for investigation. Some behavioral scientists think that every attempt should be made to explain the behavior of other species without referring to emotions at all,
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because emotions are ultimately subjective and therefore not completely accessible to scientific investigation. Others think it's okay to ascribe emotions to our nearest relatives—perhaps just the apes, or maybe the higher primates—but are more inclined to restrict themselves to more mechanistic explanations of behavior in less closely related species, including dogs. Of course, most pet owners would find this degree of skepticism absurd—they firmly believe in the emotional lives of their pets. These points of view are so divergent that many scientists have simply come to regard owners as deluded whereas many dog owners dismiss science as too out of touch with the realities of dog ownership.

But in fact the human mind is sufficiently sophisticated to comprehend both views simultaneously. Subjective and objective perspectives of emotion can exist side by side even within the same person. Scientists will casually talk about their own pets as if they have complex internal emotional lives but, if pressed, will admit that there is little direct evidence that the animals are actually experiencing precisely those emotions.
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Does this mean that they are living in a fantasy world at home, where they've fallen into the trap of behaving “as if” animals have emotions, but then return to objective reality at work and deny that such emotions exist at all? Although this seeming contradiction may appear paradoxical, I don't see it that way. Rather, I consider it a natural expression of the complexity of human thought and consciousness.

It's well established that the human mind loves to project emotions and intentions onto everything, especially things it can't control. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman creatures—to phenomena such as the weather and even inanimate objects like rivers and mountains—is an intrinsic part of human nature.
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So are zoomorphism and totemism, the complementary processes by which humans ascribe the characteristics of animals to other humans.
We talk about dogs as being “little people,” and we may refer to a person as “a dog” (though what we might mean by that will vary from culture to culture and possibly with the gender of the target!). Does that mean we don't know that dogs and people are different, not only in outward appearance but also in inner characteristics? We may blur the distinction from time to time, but mostly these attributions are metaphors, and we use them with full awareness of that fact.

As humans, we have the ability to stand back from a situation, detaching ourselves from its emotional component and making logical decisions on what to do next. Parents can simultaneously experience an emotional bond to their children while objectively analyzing their transgressions and the motivations behind them. Our capacity to detach ourselves from our automatic emotional reaction to something they've done, in order to work out the most effective response, does not mean that the emotional response is in any way demeaned or diminished. Equally, why should we not express ourselves in anthropomorphic terms as animal-lovers, while being simultaneously aware that such projections may be the product of our imaginations? I cannot see any dissonance—as psychologists call it—in such behavior.

Without an emotional bond, there would be no pets—and yet this bond can sometimes create problems for dogs and humans alike. The emotional bond between owner and pet is often, perhaps always, bound up in anthropomorphic projections.
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Many people really do unthinkingly treat their animals as if they were little people. Yet most pet owners are also capable of conceiving of their animals' behavior in a logical way, especially when decisions have to be made that affect the well-being of that animal. It is perfectly possible to hold a logical view about the “otherness” of animals without interfering one iota with the emotional aspects of the relationship. It is when these two approaches become blurred that the relationship is destined for problems and potential breakdown. For example, owners who treat their dog as if it were a person may project responsibilities onto it that the dog is not even aware of, let alone capable of responding appropriately to. And, consequently, owners may feel justified in punishing the dog for something they mistakenly think the dog “knows it has done.”