Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (34 page)

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Authors: Alexandra Horowitz

Tags: #General, #Dogs, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology, #Dogs - Psychology, #Pets, #Zoology, #Breeds

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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What the head doesn't tell of the dog's intent, the tail does. The head and tail are mirrors, conveying the same information in parallel media, the classic antithesis. But they can also be true pushmi-pullyus, differently sensitive at either end. A dog who balks at being sniffed in the face may be fine being examined at the rump, or vice versa. Either the tail or head is telling you what is inside.

I would be more surprised if I were entirely correct about "what it is like" inside of a dog than if I am entirely wrong. To address this question is to begin an exercise in empathy, informed imagination, and perspective-taking more than it is to discover the conclusive account. Nagel suggested that no objective account can ever be made of other species' experiences. The privacy of the dog's personal thoughts is intact. But it is crucial that we try to imagine how he sees the world—that we replace anthropomorphisms with umwelt. And if we look carefully enough, imagine skillfully enough, we may surprise our dogs with how much we get right.

You Had Me at Hello
I walk in the door and waken Pump with my arrival. First, I hear her: the thump-thumping of her tail against the floor; her toenails scratching on the ground as she rises, heavily; the jingle of collar tags as she wriggles a shake down the length of her body and out her tail. Then I see her: her ears press back, her eyes soften; she smiles without smiling. She trots to me, her head slightly down, ears perked and tail swinging. As I reach forward she snuffles a greeting; I snuffle back. Her moist nose just touches me, her whiskers sweep my face. I'm home.
Here's a possible explanation for why dogs were not the subjects of serious scientific inquiry until recently: you don't ask questions when you already know the answers viscerally. The delight of my twice-or thrice-daily reunions with Pumpernickel is matched by their ordinariness. Nothing could seem more natural than these simple interactions: they are wonderful, but it is not a wonder that at once demands scientific scrutiny. I may as well dwell on the nature of my right elbow: it is simply a part of me, all the time, and I don't puzzle over its helpful placement there precisely between my upper arm and my forearm, or ponder what it might be like in the future.
Well, I should reconsider that elbow. For the nature of what in certain circles is termed the "dog-human bond" is exceptional. It is not just any animal awaiting my arrival, and it is not just any dog. It is a very particular kind of animal—a domesticated one—and a particular kind of dog—one with whom I have created a symbiotic relationship. Our interactions enact a dance to which only we know the particular steps. Two things—domestication and development—made the dance possible at all. Domestication sets the stage; the rituals are created together. We are bound together before we know it: it is before reflection or analysis.

The human bond with dogs is animal at its core: animal life has succeeded by individual animals associating with, and eventually bonding with others. Originally animals' connection with each other may only have lasted for one sex-filled instant. But the meeting of anatomy at some point evolved in myriad directions: into long-term pairings centered around raising young; groups of related individuals living together; unions of same-sex, non-mating animals for protection or companionship or both; even alliances between cooperative neighbors. The classic "pair bond" is a description of the association that forms between two mated animals. Bonded animals might be recognized by even a naïve observer: most pair bonds hang out together. They mind and care for each other, and they excitedly greet each other on reuniting.

This kind of behavior may seem unsurprising. After all, we humans spend much time trying to pair-bond, maintaining or discussing our current pair bonds, or trying to extricate ourselves from ill-advised pair bonds gone sour. But from an evolutionary point of view, bonding with others is non-obvious. The goal of our genes is to reproduce themselves: an inherently selfish aim, as sociobiologists observe. Why bother with others at all? The explanation of a selfish gene bothering to mind and greet other gene forms turns out to also be selfish: sexual reproduction increases the chance of helpful mutations. It also behooves the selfish gene to ensure that one's sexual mate is healthy enough to bear and raise the new, infant genes.
Sound far-fetched? A biological mechanism has been discovered that supports pair-bonding. Two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin (known for their roles in, respectively, reproduction and body-water regulation), are released when interacting with one's partner. These hormones make changes at the neuronal level, in areas of the brain involved in pleasure and reward. The neural change results in a behavioral change: encouraging association with one's mate, because it simply feels good. In the small, mouselike prairie voles that the researchers studied, the vasopressin seems to work on dopamine systems, which results in the male vole being very solicitous of his mate. As a result, prairie voles are monogamous, forming long-lasting pair bonds, in which both parents are involved in raising the wee voles.
But these are intraspecific pair bonds: between members of the same species. What started cross-species bonding, which now results in our living with, sleeping with, and dressing up in sweaters our dogs? Konrad Lorenz was the first to describe it. He gave a description of what he called simply "the bond" in the 1960s, well before the current age of neural science, and before human-pet relationship seminars. In scientific language, he defined the bond as revealed in "behaviour patterns of an objectively demonstrable mutual attachment." In other words, he redefined the bond between animals not by its goal—such as mating—but by the process—such as cohabitating and greeting. The goal could be to mate, but it could also be survival, work, empathy, or pleasure.
This refocus opens the door to considering lots of other, non-mating kinds of pairings as true bonds—between members of the same species, or between two species. Among dogs, working dogs are a classic case. For instance, sheepdogs bond early in life with the intended subject of their work: sheep. In fact, to be effective herders, sheepdogs must bond with sheep in their first few months. They live among the sheep, eat when the sheep eat, and sleep where the sheep sleep. Their brains are in the throes of rapid development at an early age; if they don't meet sheep then, they don't become good shepherds. All wolves and dogs, working or not, have sensitive periods of social development. Early in puppyhood they show a preference for the caregiver, seeking her out and responding to her differently than to others, with a special greeting.* For young animals, it is adaptive to do so.
There's still a big leap, though, between a bond wrought of developmental advantage and one based in companionship. Given that humans neither mate with dogs nor need them to survive, why might we bond?
BONDABLES
The feeling of mutual responsiveness: that each time one of us approached or looked at the other, it
changed
us—it effected some response. I smiled to see her look or wander over; her tail would thump and I could see the slight muscle movements of the ears and eyes that indicated attention and pleasure.
We don't need to be herded; neither are we born to herd. Nor, as we saw earlier, are we a natural pack. What, then, accounts for our bond with dogs? There are a number of characteristics of dogs that make them good candidates for us to choose to bond with. Dogs are diurnal, ready to be awake when we can take them out and asleep when we can't. Notably, the nocturnal aardvark and badger are rare as pets. Dogs are a good size, with enough variation between breeds to suit different specs: small enough to pick up, big enough to take seriously as an individual. Their body is familiar, with parts that match ours—eyes, belly, legs—and an easy mapping on most of those that don't—their forelimbs to our arms; their mouth or nose to our hands.* (The tail is a disparity, but it is pleasing in its own right.) They move more or less the way we do (if more swiftly): they go forward better than backward; they have a relaxation to their stride and a grace to their run. They are manageable: we can leave them by themselves for long stretches of time; their feeding is not complicated; they are trainable. They try to read us, and they are readable (even if we often misread). They are resilient and they are reliable. And their lifetime is in scale with ours: they will oversee a long arc of our lives, perhaps from childhood to young adulthood. A pet rat might live a year—too brief; the gray parrot sixty—too long; dogs hit a middle ground.
Finally, they are compellingly cute. And by compelling, I mean a literal compulsion: it is part of our constitution that we coo over puppies, that we soften at the sight of a big-headed, small-limbed mutt, that we go ga-ga for a pug nose and a furry tail. It has been suggested that humans are adapted to be attracted to creatures with exaggerated features—the prime examples of which are human infants. Infants come with comically distorted versions of adult parts: enormous heads; pudgy, foreshortened limbs; teeny fingers and toes. We presumably evolved to feel an instinctual interest in, and drive to help, infants: without an older human's assistance, no infant would survive on its own. They are adorably helpless. Thus those non-human animals with neotenized (infantlike) features may prompt our attention and care because these are features of human juveniles. Dogs accidentally fit the bill. Their cuteness is half fur and half neoteny, which they have in spades: heads overly large for their bodies; ears all out of proportion with the size of the heads they are attached to; full, saucer eyes; noses undersized or oversized, never nose-sized.
All these features are relevant in attracting us to dogs, but they don't fully explain why we bond. The bond is formed over time—not just on looks, but on how we interact together. At its most general, the explanation may simply be that, as one of Woody Allen's characters says, we need the eggs. He describes his own crazy pair-bonding attempts with a joke about his brother, a fellow so off that he thinks he's a chicken. Sure, the family could send him to be fixed of this delusion, but they're too happy with the protein-rich spoils of his mental disease. In other words, the answer is a non-answer: it's simply in our nature to bond.* Dogs, who evolved among us, are the same way.
At a more scientific level, the question of how bonding came to be in the nature of dogs and humans is answerable in two ways: with explanations that in ethology are called "proximate" and "ultimate." An ultimate explanation is an evolutionary one: why a behavior like bonding to others evolved to begin with. The best answer here is that both we and dogs (and dogs' forebears) are social animals, and we are social because it turned out to confer an advantage. For instance, one popular theory is that human sociality allowed for the distribution of roles that enabled them to hunt more effectively. Thus our ancestors' success at hunting made it possible for them to survive and thrive, while those poor Neanderthals who stuck it out on their own did not. For wolves, too, staying in social family groups allows for cooperative hunting of large game, for the convenience of a mating partner, and for assistance in rearing the pups.

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