After many millennia in which the dog has been man’s closest animal companion, cats are taking over as the most popular pet in many countries, including the United States. Why is this happening?
The new canine science reveals that dogs are both smarter and dumber than we think they are. For example, they have an almost uncanny ability to guess what humans are about to do, because of their extreme sensitivity to our body language, but they are also trapped in the moment, incapable of projecting the consequences of their actions backward or forward in time.
Getting training right is essential both to the welfare of dogs and to the peace of mind of their owners.
The “wolf-pack” approach promotes two interdependent ideas: that dogs, because of their ingrained “pack mentality,” can be controlled only if their owners adopt the role of pack leader, and that the most reliable way to ensure this outcome is by the use of physical punishment.
The widespread use of punishment-based dog training is usually traced back to Colonel Konrad Most, whose highly influential book Training Dogs: A Manual first appeared in 1910 (in German) and was translated into English, due to popular demand, in 1944.
They rarely make special reference to the dog’s origins as a wolf, since the effects of reward on behavior are universal among vertebrate animals.
From a young dog’s perspective, there’s not much difference between the training class and everyday life; the dog will learn all the time.
However, if you want to train any animal to do something, it’s easiest to start with a behavior that the animal would do anyway.
The simplest kind of learning is habituation, defined as the waning of a response to an event that turns out to have no consequences.
Associative learning occurs when two hitherto unlinked events get connected together in the dog’s mind.
Classical conditioning is automatic; it doesn’t involve the dog’s reflection on what has just happened.
However, as noted earlier, dogs don’t do mental time-travel at all well.
For dogs, like all animals, food can be an important reward, but dogs are unusual in that most also regard contact with their owner as rewarding in itself.
One recent US survey of clients at a veterinary behavior clinic23 found large numbers of owners using confrontational methods, including “hit or kick dog for undesirable behavior” (43 percent), “physically force the release of an item from a dog’s mouth” (39 percent), “alpha roll” (31 percent), “stare at or stare [dog] down” (30 percent), “dominance down” (29 percent), and “grab dog by jowls and shake” (26 percent). All of these actions had elicited an aggressive response from at least a quarter of the dogs on whom they had been used, indicating that none of them could be regarded as safe.
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.3 So are zoomorphism and totemism, the complementary processes by which humans ascribe the characteristics of animals to other humans.
Indeed, since both wolves and humans are mammals, and our brains and hormone systems are based on the same biological pattern, it is highly likely that both our emotional systems evolved from those possessed by our common mammalian ancestor.
The most basic emotions—such as hunger, thirst, pain, and sexual desire—are perhaps better described as “feelings” than as “emotions.”
The simplest of the true emotions—fear, anger, anxiety, and happiness—are often referred to as “primes.” These are “instinctive” in that they do not have to be learned: No one has to learn how to be frightened; it just happens.
Fear, anger, anxiety, and happiness all evolved as ways of responding to significant threats or opportunities. One way of looking at them is to see them as providing “shortcuts.”
It is easy to tell the difference between a fearful dog and an angry dog. The fearful dog will obviously be trying to escape, with everything from its ears to the corners of its mouth pulled backward, and if given the opportunity it will most likely actually run away. The angry dog will be stiffened and poised to move forward to counter the threat.
Dogs need to be taught boundaries, and by this I mean emotional boundaries even more than physical boundaries; permissiveness, allowing the dog to do as it pleases, is not humane. In nature, such behavior would quickly be met by either aggression or avoidance, neither of which promotes survival in a social species.
(But note that the tail may also be wagged when the dog is unsure and in conflict.)
Thorndike came up with the concept of trial-and-error learning.
However, other research11 has shown not only that dogs can copy other dogs but also that they are selective and logical about what they copy.
Play between dog and owner is such an everyday occurrence that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that inter-species play is otherwise very rare (indeed, virtually unknown outside the realm of domestic pets). To be successful, play requires well-synchronized communication; both partners must be able to convey their intentions precisely while at the same time convincing each other that they’re not using the game as a prelude to something more serious, such as an actual attack. The rarity of such play is probably accounted for by the limitations of communication between members of different species.
Nevertheless, dogs share our capacity to feel joy, love, anger, fear, and anxiety. They also experience pain, hunger, thirst, and sexual attraction.
Somewhat surprisingly, a high proportion of these owners also believed that their dogs felt jealousy, grief, and guilt. These, along with the other emotions listed in the lower half of the graph, are classified by psychologists as secondary emotions: They require some degree of self-awareness and also an appreciation of what others are thinking—namely, a “theory of mind” (as discussed in the previous chapter). Despite what their owners believe, it is not obvious that dogs have the mental capacity to actually experience all or, indeed, any of these seven emotions. Since each requires a slightly different combination of self-reflection and other aspects of intelligence, each deserves to be examined separately. I will look specifically at jealousy, grief, and guilt, all of which happen to have received some degree of attention from scientists studying dogs. Percentage of UK owners who thought their dogs could feel particular emotions
Thus the version of the world as perceived by mankind is rather atypical—even among mammals in general. Humans have highly refined color vision, reasonable night vision (which most of us rarely use), average hearing, and an utterly puny sense of smell. Dogs, by contrast, have poor color vision, good night vision, excellent hearing, and a very sensitive and sophisticated sense of smell. Mankind has exploited these differences throughout the domestic dog’s history, valuing the dog’s sensitive nose especially as an aid to hunting. However, pet dogs are often so anthropomorphized that it’s easy for their owners to ignore these differences and to treat their dogs as if they perceived the same world that we do.
It is hard to convey how sensitive dogs’ noses are without getting into some almost incomprehensibly large numbers. They can detect some odors, probably most, at concentrations in the parts per trillion. By comparison, humans generally detect odors in the range of parts per million to parts per billion—a sensitivity between 10,000 and 100,000 times lower than that of dogs.
Although the area of this surface varies from breed to breed, the German shepherd’s, at 150–170 square centimeters (roughly the area of a CD cover, spread over a labyrinth of bony structures called turbinates), is typical—and over thirty times larger than ours.
So that dogs can process all this information, their olfactory cortex—the part of the dog’s brain that analyzes smells—is roughly forty times bigger than ours.
Dogs are much more capable than humans of discriminating between very similar scents. For example, they can distinguish between the odors of nonidentical twins living together and those of identical twins living apart. (However, they seem unable to reliably distinguish between the odors of identical twins living together.)