Dog Sense (31 page)

Why are so many dogs prone to this problem? My take on this is that it's not a “disorder” at all, but perfectly natural behavior. After all, we don't say that human children have a “separation disorder” when they cry for their mothers. We have selected dogs to be highly dependent on us, so that they can easily be made obedient and useful: Why is it so surprising that they don't like being left alone?

There is still a great deal of debate about how many different kinds of separation disorders exist, but two in particular have been verified.
In one category are the overattached dogs who cannot bear even to be shut in a different room from their owner.
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If they're destructive, these dogs tend to target their destruction to the area around the door that the owner has just left through.

In the second category are dogs who seem quite confident most of the time but have a phobia—often of loud noises—that sends them into a panic if their owner is not present to provide reassurance. These dogs typically don't show signs of separation distress every time they're left alone, because the trigger, whatever it is, doesn't always coincide with the owner's absence. Such dogs sometimes leave clues of their panic, such as a ripped-up sofa cushion that they've tried to bury their head beneath.

As noted earlier, separation disorders can be difficult to cure once they've become established—in direct contrast to the ease with which they can be prevented. Such disorders constitute as many as one-third of clinical behaviorists' caseloads, yet it is often only as a last resort that owners seek expert help—after the dog has been performing the behavior for years, at which point some change in their circumstances forces them to take action. By then, the behavior may have become habitual, divorced from its original cause (rather like the stereotypic pacing behavior of big cats, or the weaving behavior of bears, confined in small, boring enclosures), and it will often continue even after the original cause has long since been removed.

Although separation distress is far more frequently observed, the behavioral disorder that grabs all the headlines is, of course, aggression. What they have in common is that their emotional basis is often misrepresented. Dogs that chew up the house when their owners are out are labeled “naughty”; dogs that bite are labeled “dominant” or “aggressive” and motivated by anger. Neither label is valid, and neither diagnosis is helpful in finding a humane solution.

Although canine aggression occurs much less often than separation distress, it is not uncommon. Pet dogs very rarely kill other dogs or people (although when they do, a media frenzy often follows). Pet dogs do, however, bite their owners and members of their owners' families quite frequently: According to one recent estimate, 4.5 million people are bitten
each year in the United States. Although most of these incidents are relatively minor, nearly a million require medical attention, and children are more at risk than adults. Because a dog that bites, especially one that bites children, is socially unacceptable, such cases form the greatest proportion of behavior consultants' caseloads. Dogs that have bitten are often euthanized. A great number of dogs would benefit if we could better understand why they bite and, even more important, what can be done to stop aggression toward people before it gets to the stage of biting.

Twenty years ago, the solution seemed obvious. Dogs were believed to bite when they felt that their status in the household was being threatened, and so most cases in which owners or members of their families (as opposed to unfamiliar people) were bitten were described as due to “dominance aggression.” The majority of dog behavior specialists now regret ever having used this term. Why have most of the experts recently changed their minds?

One review suggests three answers to this question.
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First, owners' accounts of the behavior of their dogs around the time of the attacks are not consistent with the idea that they were trying to assert their “status.” Rather, the dogs had exhibited body postures more accurately associated with fear and anxiety, with only a tinge of anger; for example, they were often noted to have been trembling immediately before they bit. Immediately after the bite, many had engaged in appeasement and “affiliative behavior,” such as crouching, tucking their tail between their legs, and licking their lips. Second, most dogs who bite start biting before they are one year old, much younger than they logically should be if they were ready to “take over the pack.” Third, and perhaps most telling, those dogs who lived with other dogs were not especially confident with them and thus were certainly not behaving as the “dominant dog” ought to.

Although every case is different, a logical explanation for a typical dog bite often goes something like this. While they are puppies, dogs try out a number of strategies for dealing with situations that they find threatening—in other words, for dealing with fear. Take the example of a dog that, to its owner's embarrassment, launches into an unprovoked attack whenever it sees dogs of a particular kind—say, small white dogs. This dog is unlikely to be a psychopath; rather, it was probably attacked
by a small white dog in the past and as a result is initially fearful of all dogs of similar appearance. Over the course of several such encounters, it will have found that the best way of quelling its fear is to threaten to attack—and the more successful this strategy is, the more likely the dog is to repeat it. This will become especially likely if the dog has not been trained properly, since its owner will be unable to intervene with a command, and by the time the dog has been dragged away its aggressive strategy will already have been reinforced.

Similarly, puppies inevitably nip their owners as part of play. If they discover that nipping gets them what they want, and if their owners happen to ignore all their attempts to communicate by signaling rather than through physical contact, then biting may become their default strategy for dealing with frightening or even just unfamiliar situations.

If biting works better than anything else, dogs will gradually become more confident about using aggression. They will use it whenever they feel threatened, not just in the context where they originally learned it. It's been noted that people who have highly distorted, anthropomorphic relationships with their dogs are more likely to get bitten, probably because they are very inconsistent in interpreting their dog's body-language (and potentially explaining why it's little dogs—those most likely, because of their size, to be anthropomorphized—that bite their owners most). Furthermore, puppies who have a serious illness during their socialization period, and therefore don't have as many opportunities to work out how to deal with challenging situations, are more likely to bite later in life than dogs who had the full range of opportunities for learning before the fear reaction set in.

A word of caution: Training techniques that suppress aggression using punishment do little to resolve the underlying problem in such cases, although they are often superficially successful in the short term. Fear of a beating will temporarily inhibit the dog from performing its preferred, if unacceptable, way of resolving conflicts. However, it may become even more unpredictably aggressive when it subsequently encounters circumstances that do not match those under which it has learned that aggression is followed by punishment—for example, when the trainer that originally beat it is no longer nearby. Alternatively, it may find an outlet
for its misery in one of the so-called obsessive-compulsive disorders,
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such as tail-chasing.

Fear is also the underlying emotion behind some dogs' threatening behavior toward unfamiliar people, so-called territorial aggression. A dog that barks and bares its teeth, apparently confidently, when it sees someone passing by on the street will often be the same dog that adopts a much more ambiguous posture as that person stops by the gate. It may then begin to cower, albeit still barking loudly, when the same person actually enters the property—hence the truth in the old saying “His bark is worse than his bite.” That dog will have learned that barking is a good way of keeping people it's not sure about at a distance. Only if cornered may it resort to an actual attack.

Fear is also the motivation behind aggression in dogs that have been specifically trained, using punishment, to attack intruders. In their case the fear is triggered by the memory of the handler's beating, and they attack the intruder in order to alleviate that fear. In the case of the unruly pet dog, the fear stems not from any threat posed by the owner but from the imagined threat of an unfamiliar person. Nevertheless, from the dog's perspective there is an underlying similarity. It is pursuing a learned course of action that enables it to avoid a negative emotion: fear.

As far as we can tell, dogs experience the same range of basic emotions that we do, both positive and negative. Much of their behavior, both that which we cherish and that which we don't, is driven by those emotions—joy, love, fear, anxiety, anger. The idea that animals are like robots, acting without feeling, self-evidently cannot be true of the dog (and therefore is equally unlikely to be true of other mammals): We simply find dogs to be more expressive than other animals, so their emotions are there for all to see. These emotions are part of the biological systems that regulate and guide dogs' behavior and, as such, are essential to the capacity for learning that allows dogs to adapt to the world that they find themselves in today.

However, dogs and humans may experience even these basic emotions in subtly different ways. One of the paradoxes of human behavior is that we actively seek out and apparently enjoy some self-evidently
negative emotions such as fear, sadness, and anger: How else to explain the popularity of horror films, thrillers, and tearjerkers? But there is nothing to indicate that dogs ever do this, suggesting that consciousness has given humans a unique capacity to evaluate, and then attempt to distance themselves from, such emotions. Conversely, dogs may experience fear, anger, joy, and love more intensely and in more nuanced ways than we do, precisely because they are less able to reflect on and damp down those feelings by rationalizing them. The difference in intelligence between our two species may in turn be reflected in different subjective worlds. While acknowledging the basic similarities in our experiences of emotions, we therefore need to be careful when projecting our own awareness of emotion onto our dogs.

S
ome people treat their dogs as if they're as smart as humans; others, as if they were dim-witted children. They're neither! Dogs are as intelligent as dogs need to be—which means that their intelligence isn't going to be like ours. Canids evolved in environments different from those that shaped the human race, so it should hardly be surprising that they don't think in exactly the same way we do. That said, there are some similarities; for example, their associative learning capacities, as well as the emotions that drive them, follow the general mammalian pattern and are therefore the same as ours. Like us, dogs try to avoid situations that have scared them in the past and repeat experiences that they have found rewarding. It's their more complex cognitive abilities that are likely to be qualitatively different from ours, since these will have been selected to match the canid lifestyle.
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For example, the usefulness of guide dogs depends upon their ability to “think outside the box,” to use their canid brain to predict what is going to happen next in the ever-changing environment with which their owners are interacting
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—a skill possibly derived from the wild canids' ability to predict their prey's next move.