For the Love of a Dog (46 page)

Another hot debate in science right now is about the elusive phenomenon we call consciousness. Since we are unable to deny that the bodies and brains of other animals behave in ways strikingly similar to ours, the controversy about the mental life of animals has evolved into one
about whether animals are able to “experience” their emotions. Some people assert that while animals may “have” emotions, they aren’t actually conscious of them. If ever there was a claim difficult for a dog lover to swallow, this has got to be it.

I think I can speak for most dog lovers when I say that it’s impossible to imagine that our dogs “have” emotions without being conscious of them. Many scientists feel the same way. Look at what the biologist Marc Bekoff says about the mental life of his dogs: “If he [Bekoff’s dog] tries to solicit play and I don’t play with him, he is surprised—and he looks it. It’s just wrong to say dogs don’t have thoughts and beliefs about their world just because these might be different from our beliefs.” The late Donald Griffin wrote an entire book arguing that
of course
, complicated animals like chimpanzees and dogs are conscious. He says, eloquently, that we need to acknowledge that and get on with learning more about it.

However, others argue that imagining consciousness in animals is foolish and problematic. In 1992, R. Boakes said: “Attributing conscious thought to animals should be strenuously avoided in any serious attempt to understand their behavior, since it is untestable, empty, obstructionist and based on a false dichotomy.”
Whew
. Pretty strong stuff. It is true that trying to understand something as slippery as consciousness is a great challenge, but that’s not stopped us in other endeavors of science. Physicists aren’t daunted by the difficulty of studying wave theory or black holes, much less the origins of the solar system, so why should we be intimidated by the mysteries inside our brains?

It is true that consciousness is such a tricky topic that we haven’t begun to understand it. Scientists haven’t even agreed upon a definition of consciousness, even in our own species. Consciousness is central to our lives—indeed, it defines life as we know it—but by its very nature it’s as difficult to understand as a puff of smoke.

The neurobiologist John Ratey sums up the debate about consciousness as well as anyone: “Considering that we don’t know what it is or how it works, the fervor with which it is debated can be embarrassingly presumptuous.” I love this man. And I love the practical, feet-on-the-ground definition offered by another neurobiologist, Deric Bownds, who argues with welcome clarity: “Consciousness is a device for focusing awareness through the linking of emotions and feeling to
sensing and acting.” He goes on to say that it is perfectly reasonable to grant other animals varying levels of consciousness, depending upon the complexity of their brains.

Some fuel for the argument that animals aren’t conscious comes from the knowledge that more of our own behavior is driven by our unconscious than we ever might imagine. For example, if you’re flashed a frightening picture so quickly that you have no conscious awareness of it, your amygdala still activates and signals your body to go on alert.

Remember the study in which people who read the words “old” and “wrinkled” walked out of the room more slowly than they entered it? A similar study by the psychologist John Bargh serves to emphasize the power of unconscious processes. In this experiment, people were asked to unscramble phrases that included words like “rude” and “intrude,” or “considerate” and “polite.” The subjects had no idea that the real experiment came later, when they were asked to go to the experimenter’s office and ask about their next task. No matter whether the subjects had been working with “rude” words or “polite” ones, they were forced to cool their heels while someone else dominated the experimenter’s attention. Bargh was interested in how long the subjects would wait before they interrupted. He figured the difference between the groups might be a matter of milliseconds, if there was any difference at all. Imagine his surprise when the subjects who had read words like “polite” turned out to be exactly that—82 percent of them
never
interrupted, even after ten minutes, while the group who had read “rude” words interrupted after an average of five minutes.

Studies like these remind us that much of who we are, and much of how we behave, is driven by unconscious processes. However, it doesn’t follow, if
unconscious
processes are more important than we previously believed in
human
behavior, that
consciousness
is irrelevant in
animal
behavior. We know that consciousness does not appear to be dependent upon language; patients in whose brains the left and right hemispheres can’t communicate can have consciousness in either hemisphere, even when the capacity for language is restricted to the left hemisphere of the brain. A researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Giulio Tononi, suspects that consciousness is the result of many parts of the brain communicating with one another simultaneously. He’s found that when we’re awake, and conscious, the various parts of our
brains maintain a continuous dialogue with one another. However, when we’re asleep, and are not conscious, these same areas keep to themselves.

Certainly consciousness is a difficult issue, but, thanks to our current progress in neurobiology, it shouldn’t be too much longer before we get a better sense of what it is and how much of it we share with other animals. Given what we know so far, it seems reasonable to take the same approach as we did with respect to thinking in abstractions. There’s simply no biological argument for the belief that consciousness could occur only in humans. It makes sense that complex mammalian brains, like our dogs’, share in the ability to coordinate all the parts of their brains into something similar to what we experience when we’re conscious.

Brenda came to the office because her Cairn Terriers were starting to fight. Neither had been seriously injured yet, but the fights were getting worse, and it looked as if one of the dogs was going to get badly hurt in the near future. Fortunately, the fights were predictable; it’s always easier to solve a behavioral problem if you can find what triggers it. Romeo, the young male, was cheerful and fun-loving—as long as he got all the petting, all the attention, and all the treats. He got along swimmingly with the other dog, Juliet, unless Juliet got something he wanted. If Brenda dared to pet Juliet without petting Romeo, he’d leap toward Juliet and begin growling and snapping
.

Some people would describe this as an issue related to dominance, that overused concept about social status in dogs. But Brenda’s explanation was a different one. When asked what she thought was going on between the two dogs, she said, “It’s simple. Romeo’s jealous.”

Jealousy. Now there’s an interesting emotion. Many scientists consider it one of the “higher-level” or more complex emotions, and some believe that it’s exclusive to humans. Others don’t hesitate to use the term “jealousy” in relation to dogs. In his book
If Dogs Could Talk
, the biologist Vilmos Csányi says anyone with kids or dogs knows exactly what
jealousy looks like. The primatologist Frans de Waal is clearly comfortable talking about jealous chimpanzees in his book
Chimpanzee Politics
. But the range of beliefs about jealousy in nonhuman animals is vast. You can find differences of opinion anywhere you go, in or outside of science. I’ve had clients who started sentences with: “I know dogs can’t be jealous …,” but most dog owners I’ve talked to don’t hesitate to describe their dogs as being capable of jealousy
¹³

We’ve a long way to go before we can know how much canine jealousy resembles the human version, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be fundamentally similar. Jealousy doesn’t strike me as a particularly complicated emotion. I see tension and aggression between dogs on a weekly basis that seem little different from behavior that we wouldn’t hesitate to call jealousy in young, preverbal children. It all seems to come down to “You’ve got it, I don’t, and I’m not happy about that.” Remember our discussion on the relationship between anger and frustration; I can’t see why dogs couldn’t feel frustrated, and thus either angry or sad, because they’re not getting something they want. It’s unimaginable to me that they don’t have some sense of missing out on something good. Surely your dog knows when you’re petting another dog that he’s not being petted himself.

“Himself”? “Herself”? Ah, now we’re getting down to the heart of another controversy about emotions in animals. Can dogs think in those terms? Do they have a concept of “self” versus “other”? Almost all biologists agree that animals share with us basic emotions like fear, anger, and some form of happiness, but they don’t agree on whether animals feel “higher-level” emotions such as jealousy, guilt, or sympathy, which depend on a concept of “self” and “other.” The biologist Marc Hauser, in an excellent book entitled
Wild Minds
, speculates that animals probably don’t experience what are often called the “social emotions” (such as jealousy), because they lack something that all humans have: an awareness of
self
. If you don’t have a sense of
self
, compared with a sense
of other
, then how could you feel jealousy or, for that matter, sympathy? It might be tempting to dismiss such comments, given how hard it is for most of us dog lovers to imagine our dogs
not
being self-aware (to say nothing of being sympathetic), but although I don’t agree with Hauser’s conclusion, I do agree that the question is a tricky one. Let’s take a look at the issue for a moment.

Any conversation about self-awareness is complicated by the fact that knowing whether another individual is self-aware is no easy task. You know
you
are, but how do you know anyone else is? For that matter, how could you prove that you are yourself? No matter what you did, someone could argue you were just “acting reflexively,” or simply following the rules of learning that apply equally to primates and parakeets. Scientists have lined up on one side or the other of this debate for decades, although the voices of those who believe that at least some animals are self-aware are strengthening.

The controversy heated up a few decades ago, when a scientist named Gordon Gallup anesthetized a variety of primates and put a red dot of paint on their foreheads. When they woke up and looked in the mirror, some of the chimpanzees and orangutans touched their forefingers to the dot on their foreheads. Gallup argued that the chimps’ behavior suggested that they understood the image in the mirror was of themselves, and that their response showed they had a rudimentary concept of the self. A more recent study introduced dolphins to underwater mirrors, and then recorded what the dolphins did when the researchers put ink marks on areas of their bodies not visible to the “wearer” without the use of a mirror. Sure enough, the dolphins who found ink on their mirror images in surprising places spent more time investigating themselves in the mirror than did dolphins who had been touched by markers that had no ink.

Gallup and others cited these results to argue that some animals are self-aware, but others used the same data to debunk that suggestion. Chimps and orangutans responded to the red dots in the mirror, but other highly evolved apes, gorillas, did not. More important, what does mirror recognition really have to do with a concept of self? Mirror skills are learned: people in hunter-gatherer societies look behind a mirror to find the body of the image that they see, and have to learn that the image is actually a reflection of their own face. Six-month-old
children behave as though the image in the mirror is that of another; not until fifteen to eighteen months of age do they touch their own noses if they see a spot on the nose in the mirror. For these reasons, many credible scientists argue that until we have better evidence of self-awareness, we must stay with “simpler” explanations of an animal’s behavior, believing that animals are not self-aware until proven otherwise.

However, many observations do suggest self-awareness in a variety of species: subordinate male chimpanzees involved in “illicit” sexual trysts use their hands to cover their erections from passing dominant individuals; polar bears have been known to cover their black noses in order to stay camouflaged on white snow. Such behaviors suggest a sense of “self” and “other,” although I’ll admit they are far from definitive evidence of self-awareness.
¹⁴

It’s true that we have to be careful about believing that animals are self-aware just because we can’t imagine life without self-awareness. However, neither can we imagine what it’s like to do what dogs do easily—like use our noses to find a smidgen of cocaine in a warehouse of coffee beans—so our lack of imagination is not reason enough to believe other animals are self-aware. The jury is still out about how animals like our dogs experience “self” versus “other;” but, given the value of any degree of self-awareness in any highly social species, it seems most reasonable to argue that our dogs are self-aware in the absence of evidence that proves they’re not.

If you live in a complex social system, as many animals do, what would be “simple” about negotiating every interaction with another individual without some concept of self? How could a wolf, for example, manage the social intricacies of the pack without at least a rudimentary concept of “self” and “other”? How could our dogs not be aware that the
other
dog got a treat and they didn’t? The problem with denying self-awareness to animals with complex social relationships is that it doesn’t result in a “simpler” explanation of their behavior. Remember, good science always considers the simplest explanation first, and it seems far simpler to imagine dogs as having a conscious sense of self than not.

Joe wasn’t a big man, but he was an ex-Marine, and I had no doubt he was capable of handling just about anything. His wife, Virginia, was as big as Joe was small, and this Mutt and Jeff couple had been visiting my office for years, lighting it up with Virginia’s raucous laughter and Joe’s sweet smile. They’d first come with a dog so aggressive we wondered if he’d ever be safe in public. Bear was a strikingly beautiful collie, all flashing teeth and nasty growls when I first met him—eyes rounded like pennies, black and hard and threatening pupils expanded to the borders. After years of dedicated work, Bear had softened into a lover boy; he charmed pet-store employees and veterinary technicians and came wagging and grinning into my office, happy to say hello, looking always looking for his ball. Over the years, our visits became as social as therapeutic. Joe and Virginia would stop by on their way to a weekend getaway; Bear would prance in and run to the toy box, drop the ball on my lap, and wait, wait, wait for me to throw it
.