For the Love of a Dog (4 page)

These are reasonable questions for any dog lover to ask. Our emotional connection to our dogs is the fundamental glue that binds us to them, and it’s natural to want to know more about their emotional connections to us. We can’t have long intellectual discussions with our dogs as we do with our human friends; perhaps that’s part of the attraction. Our intelligence and ability to use language can make our human relationships pretty complicated, as any marriage and family therapist can tell you. Our relationships with dogs are simpler in many ways than our relationships with people, but simplicity doesn’t necessarily make something less important. E = mc
²
is simple, but it’s an equation of great value. Perhaps our emotional connection to dogs is similar: pure, primal, and as basic as oxygen and water.

I don’t remember whether I ran forward or stood frozen in fear during that endless second when Luke was in danger, but it was only a moment or two before a woman behind me calmly said, “Down your dog.” I will forever be grateful to her, because this was perfect advice. A working guard dog is unlikely to be aggressive to a dog who lies down and stays still when approached, rather than running at the sheep like a hungry wolf
. “Lie
down!”
I bellowed, and two hundred yards away, Luke hit the dirt like a Marine on maneuvers
.

If Luke had been a much younger dog, he might have kept running. Asking a dog to stop on his outrun goes against his nature, and although an experienced trial-ready dog should be able to do it, it’s an advanced skill that takes some serious teamwork to achieve
.

Luke’s age and training might have saved his life, because he dropped to the ground at my first request. Just in time: the guard dog got to him within seconds. “Stay there,” I said in a low, steady voice, finally coming to my senses enough to be able to function. Luke stayed motionless, glued to the hillside, while the Pyrenees sniffed him from head to toe. (Well, really it was from rear end to muzzle, but you know what I mean
.)

Although I was still terrified about what might happen to Luke, my brain was working again, and I was able to remember that my own guard dog insisted on inspecting any visiting dog from tail to collar. Tulip has been aggressive toward a visiting dog only once—when it ran away from her instead of standing still for scrutiny. I’m reminded of airport security guards, who are benevolent if we accept their inspections, but who react instantly to anyone who resists. Tulip behaves in a similar way, and once she’s cleared canine travelers of harboring some doggy equivalent of sharp objects, she ignores them or invites them to play. That’s exactly what happened that morning at the fun day. After a round of intense sniffing, the dog trotted off to check in with his flock. Soon his owner came and put him away, and Luke was able to complete his outrun and ease the sheep down the hill to me
.

We had a great time working the flock after the interlude with the guard dog, and drove home tired from our day outside in the fresh air. Later I told a client about what had happened, and she suggested that Luke had probably been traumatized by it. “Look at poor old Brandy here [the dog lying at her feet, in my office for a serious case of dog-dog aggression]. He’s never gotten over being attacked by that Black Lab at the dog park. You can see it right now in his eyes.”

It was hard to see Brandy’s eyes, covered as they were by champagne-colored bangs, but what I could see looked pretty much like the eyes of a dog happily chewing on the bone I’d provided. I’m not saying Brandy couldn’t have been traumatized at the dog park. (We’ll talk later about how traumatic events can affect the behavior of a dog years after their occurrence, just as they can in humans.) But if I had to make my own guess about what
internal state Brandy’s eyes were expressing in my office, it would have been contentment, not trauma
.

It’s not surprising that people don’t always agree with others about what emotion their dog is feeling. Emotions are complicated things, and it’s worth taking a fresh look at them before we try to expand our understanding of our dogs’ emotional lives.

Emotions may be primitive and primal, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to understand. Now that we’re finally getting around to studying them, emotions are turning out to be amazingly interesting and complicated biological processes. Most scientists agree that mammals such as dogs are capable of basic emotions like fear, anger, and happiness, but they don’t agree on how they actually experience them. Surely, on the one hand it’s a simple issue—if Luke saw an aggressive dog running toward him, why wouldn’t he be fearful in much the same way that I was?

Ah, but on the other hand being scared is an emotional experience driven by the brain, and the only simple thing about the brain is the fact that we still haven’t begun to comprehend it. No wonder: there are about a hundred billion neurons in the human brain, all linked together by ten trillion connections. Because of this level of complexity, our understanding of the biology of emotions is primitive at best. This makes it especially challenging to compare emotions in people and dogs, but the last few decades of research have taught us so much about the biology of emotions that it’s more than reasonable to try. A good place to start is an examination of what we know about our own emotions.

Surely we all know what we’re talking about when we’re discussing emotions, but what would you say if someone asked you to define them? Beyond the labels we give them—fear, anger, joy—what exactly are emotions, and how are they created inside you? If you struggle with a precise definition, don’t feel bad: you’re not alone.
³
According to Antonio Damasio, an internationally acclaimed expert on emotion and the brain, our feelings are the least understood of all mental phenomena. They are also the most ubiquitous and probably the most ancient, so it’s surprising that we’ve only recently attempted to sort them out. It took scientists like Damasio to dismiss the arguments of early behaviorists that we shouldn’t attempt to understand emotions because, as subjective internal processes, they were “beyond the bounds of science.” It turns out that’s not even close to true; Damasio and others have proven that the biology of emotion is as accessible as the biology of hearing, vision, or memory.

This doesn’t mean that research on emotions is easy. Emotions are slippery things, in some ways as hard to separate from our bodies and minds as it is to separate egg yolks from egg whites once you’ve mixed them together. As the neurologist John Ratey says: “Emotion is messy, complicated, primitive, and undefined because it’s all over the place.” You can’t sit back and examine your own emotions as if in a petri dish, because they come along with you. We do know that emotions— like joy, fear, and anger affect the mind and body in predictable ways. An emotion like fear includes physiological changes in your body (your heart starts pounding when you see your dog running toward the road), visible changes in expression (you freeze in place, your pupils dilate, your eyes widen), conscious thoughts (“Oh no! There’s a car coming!”), and feelings (your conscious experience of fear and panic). Thus, every emotion includes (1) changes in the body; (2) changes in expression; and (3) the feelings and thoughts that go along with them.

What we’re not sure about is what comes first. Are you conscious of fear because your heart is racing and your eyes widen, or does your heart pound after your mind tells you your dog may be killed by a car? It seems reasonable to most of us that our bodies must be reacting to our thoughts—we see a car bearing down on our dog, we know enough about physics to know this is not a fair fight, so our bodies react with the feeling of fear. But research has shown that much of what we experience actually flows in the other direction. Often, it’s the changes in your body that create the thoughts in your mind.

We’ve long known that you can stimulate different areas of the brain with a mild electrical current to evoke feelings of fear, sadness, or amusement. What’s most remarkable about those cases is that the research subject, wide awake and in no pain, always comes up with an intellectual explanation for his or her feelings
after
the emotion is
elicited. In my favorite case, a woman reliably burst into peals of laughter every time one area of her brain was stimulated. When the attending neurologists asked her what was so funny, she said: “You guys are just so funny…standing around!” Apparently needing to explain her amusement, her brain turned a circle of serious researchers into a knee-slapping vaudeville act.

You can even create emotions by moving parts of your body into different positions. You’ve no doubt read about experiments in which people were asked to raise or lower the corners of their mouths, and later asked how they were feeling. Just as our moms told us to put a smile on our face to cheer up, the people whose mouths moved into a smile felt better, while the frowners felt worse than when they came in. You can try it right now: hold a pencil in your back teeth for a few seconds and notice how you feel (besides silly). Most people report a mild boost in mood, because your mouth has to move as if it was smiling to hold the pencil. Now take the pencil out, drop your shoulders, droop your head, and slump down as if the air had come out of you. Feeling chipper? Probably not.

There’s a long list of surprising ways you can influence your emotions by changing what you’re doing with your body. One researcher noted that people in love tend to gaze into each other’s eyes for prolonged periods of time. Wondering whether the process could work in reverse, she asked strangers to do the same for two minutes. After that amount of mutually agreed-upon eye contact, the people in the study reported feelings of attachment and attraction to the other person. (Of course, this long period of eye contact was by mutual consent, and had nothing to do with a stranger walking up unannounced and staring straight into your eyes. That would probably elicit the opposite of attraction. If the stranger was a dog, it might even get you bitten, so please don’t go experimenting with a nonconsenting partner of any species.)

You never know where and when these postural changes might affect your mood. The famous jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald reported that one year she had become so tired she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. She went to several doctors until finally one asked her what she did during the day. As she thought through her day, she realized she was singing her hit song “I’m So Tired” over and over again, changing her posture each time to match the emotion she was expressing. The
doctor prescribed eliminating the song from her repertoire, and Ella recovered in days.

As we all know now, our emotions can also be affected by our internal physiology. This was not Nobel Prize-winning news to women with premenstrual syndrome, but an understanding of the impact of physiology on emotion is relatively new. Decades ago—before PMS was acknowledged—my best girl friend and I wondered why we could be blissfully happy one day, but, with no discernible changes in circumstance, be depressed and irritable the next. Eventually we noticed a pattern and figured out on our own that the mood changes correlated with our menstrual cycle. Right around that time, a physician in England began arguing that hormonal changes could radically affect mood and, in extreme cases, could lead to suicide or institutionalization.

Now that we have a much better understanding of neurochemistry, it’s universally accepted that the body’s chemistry affects our emotions. As I write, millions of people are taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) to improve their mood by changing the ratio of neurohormones in their brains. An acknowledged side effect of being on a heart-lung machine is the onset of depression in patients who have never experienced it before. No one knows why, but it probably has something to do with a change in internal physiology created by the heart-lung machine itself. Three decades after my conversations with a friend, women with PMS are now taken seriously by the same doctors who used to do little more than pat them on the head.

Of course, in addition to the powerful effect of the chemistry within our bodies, we all know that external events drive our emotions on a daily basis. A perfectly good mood can be soured by stop-and-go traffic. The impending death of a beloved dog is heartbreaking, because we intellectually understand what that death will mean to us. Once those thoughts arise (and in some cases, even before we’re conscious of them), our bodies respond with the cascade of changes that define our different emotions. It seems reasonable to believe that something similar occurs in our dogs as well. Pick up the leash, and your dog radiates with excitement; tell him that he can’t come with you this time, and watch his body slump and his face droop, just as yours does when you’ve been disappointed.

In spite of the “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” controversy about emotions, neurobiologists agree that the primary function of emotions is to keep the brain in touch with the rest of the body. Emotions are a kind of bridge between the “thinking” part of the brain and the rest of the body, acting to keep the organism moving toward its ideal state. Emotions allow each of us, from an award-winning neurobiologist to a hungry bloodhound, to respond to the world in ways that allow us to keep growing.

Before the invention of things like caramel corn and Krispy Kremes, what made us feel good was good for us. That’s still true of animals who live in an environment with limited resources, in which they don’t have the opportunities that we do to pig out on too much of a good thing. This general rule works just as well in reverse: in the wild, what feels bad probably isn’t good for you, so you should avoid it. One of the first things you learn when you study animal behavior is that animals move toward pleasure and comfort, and away from pain and discomfort. Emotions are the mechanisms that allow animals to do that; they are the Geiger counter of the body that informs the brain what to do next. Did your eyes spot a predator behind the bush? Then it’s good when your heart starts to race and more blood pumps to your muscles and your brain tells you to get ready to run. Feel warm and cozy and content? Then you’re probably in an environment that is safe and healthy for you.