Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself by Deni Elliott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Have you ever wondered how a guide dog knows how to __ ? (Fill in the blank: Find a chair, find a bathroom, find your hotel room…). Catching Sight will answer these questions and more.
When I asked the author why she wrote it, she said, “I met a dog I could trust with my life.” She then added, “Once I got past how amazing that was, I wanted to know how a dog gets to be that way.”
Catching Sight is part memoir, part training journal, and all great story. It describes the extraordinary training and inter-species communication that goes into transforming a puppy into a competent, confident guide dog — and a human with limited vision into a competent, confident guide-dog handler. In examining the guide-dog partnership from every angle, the book shares insights that might make you look at your own dog with new respect (unless she’s got her stuffed doughnut toy stuck on her nose as she dances around the living room … again).
Anyone who wonders how guide dogs work, how they know what to do, and what makes them extraordinary will get answers in Catching Sight. You’ll glean tips on how to improve your relationship with your dog (or human) family members. And, you will learn about how and why a person might hide their disability — and the author’s struggle come to terms with being publicly, obviously identifiable as a blind person.
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Barkshelf
An Immense World
An Immense World is neither a new book nor a dog book, but I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share it!
Ed Yong’s second book, subtitled “How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us,” references philosopher Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” — then goes on to explore the Umwelt or “perceptual experience” of a being, whether human or not.
Spoiler alert: You won’t learn what it’s like to be a bat from this book. Or a dog, moth, dolphin, mole, or any other creature. You will explore the many-more-than 5 senses that various creatures use to perceive, navigate, and understand their worlds.
You won’t learn what it’s like to be a bat because you can’t!
Bats, and most other creatures have senses that are so astonishingly different from humans’ few, limited means of perceiving our environments that even with a deep scientific understanding of how those senses work, we still can’t imagine or experience the world as their owners do.
There is a lot of science in this book, as well as in the copious footnotes — worth reading; some are really funny! — the 44-page bibliography, and the endnotes. Whew. It did take me more than a month to read the book, though it’s only got 355 pages of actual content. I needed time to digest each sense (each chapter) before moving on to the next. And it’s not exactly light bedtime reading!
My favorite chapter may well be the one on echolocation (humans can acquire this skill!)… or maybe the one on color. Some insects and birds can see whole other dimensions of color that human eyes cannot perceive, literally millions of additional colors.
Yong explores the ways other creatures experience the senses we humans do have, then delves into senses we do not, such as the ability to use echoes and sound to see, or sense magnetic or electric fields and use them to map and navigate our environment.
A thread that runs through the book — and which has always driven my curiosity about dogs — is that our ability to even ask the questions that prompt us to study other animals’ abilities and behavior are limited by our own experience. Which is limited by our senses, perceptions — and willingness to consider that other creatures can do amazing things that we humans cannot.
Dogs’ phenomenal ability to detect and distinguish scents gets some attention, as does a discussion of how dogs perceive color. But no one creature is the star of this book. You’ll encounter familiar and bizarre animals and learn all sorts of interesting, if not terribly useful information: For example, the description of the inky-footprint test used to help determine that European robins know to migrate southwest in the fall using their ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field is a great story … but a bit complicated for a cocktail-party chat.
If you’re a science nerd who loves animals, don’t miss this book.
Frans de Waal Was a True Friend to All Animals
All of us animals, humans and non, lost a great friend and advocate with the death of primatologist, author, and storyteller Frans de Waal in March.
Gently and convincingly, de Waal debunked the arrogant assumptions that only humans experience complex emotions, are capable of empathy, or engage in complex thoughts and behaviors.
A prolific writer, de Waal authored the bestselling “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” and “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.” His style is approachable, and the stories he shares are profound. One of my favorites is the study he did on pay equity with Capuchin monkeys. Spoiler: Monkeys recognize — and push back on — unfairness, as do dogs, chimps, and many other non-humans.
Unafraid of controversy, de Waal took on more than moral behavior in animals, addressing “alpha” male behavior, gender differences, and much more, consistently challenging “accepted” wisdom and expanding our understanding of non-humans’ abilities.
His final work, on how humans’ thinking about animals has evolved, will be released next year, according to the New York Times obituary for de Waal.
A Wolf Called Romeo
In preparation for a recent trip to Alaska, I read A Wolf Called Romeo by Nick Jans. I’ll warn you straight up: It ends predictably. That means that it’s wonderful until about two-thirds of the way through. The last sections are devoted to the inevitable end, a detailed description of the thug who killed Romeo, the many other laws that vile person broke, and the utterly predictable lack of any kind of justice.
However, up to that point … it’s a magical story.
Romeo, a solitary black wolf, appeared one day on a frozen lake near the Mendenhall glacier outside of Juneau, Alaska. The wolf did not flee the humans out walking and skiing. Even more surprising, he seemed interested in meeting those humans’ dogs.
The dogs were equally intrigued, and the first up-close meetings occurred between dogs who slipped their leashes or pulled away from their humans’ to go meet this large new playmate.
Over the next several months and years, Romeo made friends with several dogs and a few humans. He’d watch for them to arrive, follow them, hang out, play with the dogs, and otherwise conduct himself as any walking partner and friend would.
Jans and a few other humans who spent considerable time with the wolf share their stories as the book unfolds — as well as their fears of the wolf becoming too comfortable around humans. An even greater fear: Naive or clueless humans doing something stupid that resulted in a dog or child being harmed.
Despite many somethings stupid, such as parents pushing their toddlers into the wolf’s company to get a photo, the wolf never harmed a human. On a couple of occasions, he did respond to small dogs as he would to prey, grabbing them and running off … and then he released the dogs unharmed.
As the wolf’s fan club grew, so too did the band of wolf haters. One such individual claimed that the wolf ran off with his dog. The dog never did reappear, but there was also no evidence of the wolf’s involvement. Over several years and hundreds or thousands of human and dog encounters, that was the worst harm reported.
I recommend this book with the caveat that it ends badly. If you can take that (or stop reading in time), you’ll enjoy a beautiful story that shows how a wolf in the prime of his life seeks friendship from close relatives and enjoys playing and hanging out with both dogs and humans. It’s a unique perspective on wolf behavior and cross-species friendships.
Doctor Dogs
Most people are aware of guide dogs, mobility service dogs, and possibly hearing dogs. But dogs help people with medical issues in myriad ways beyond these service dog roles. In her latest book, author Maria Goodavage explores dozens of the tasks dogs perform to diagnose, treat, heal, and comfort humans. And the epilogue and acknowledgements sections briefly describe dozens more that were omitted from the main sections of the book (the end sections might have been my favorite part …).
Dogs who detect COVID are in the news; but fewer people are aware of dogs’ ability to detect several types of cancer, as well as diabetics’ sugar highs and lows. Goodavage even has wonderful stories of dogs who detect their human partners’ impending seizures or cardiac incidents …
Moving beyond physical ailments, Goodavage devotes several sections to dogs who assist in times of crisis and trauma, whether serving an individual with PTSD or showing up at court to comfort children testifying in abuse cases, the dogs are on the job.
The book is a comprehensive catalog of ways that dogs help people, but it’s more than that. The thread connecting all of the stories is the human-canine relationship. For many of the “services” dogs perform, neither their partners nor the dogs’ trainers can identify what the dog is detecting. The dogs are deeply connected to their humans and figured out a pattern, decided that the human needed some help, and came up with a way to let them know.
For example, Goodavage is careful to explain that it’s not really possible to train a dog to detect an impending seizure. Many organizations do train dogs to respond in specific ways if their partner has a seizure, though. Some of these trained dogs figure out a pattern of behavior, chemical changes, or something else that reliable predicts a seizure and begin to warn their person. Or a parent, in the case of a child. There are even stories of untrained dogs figuring this all out on their own.
In the case of dogs who are trained to detect the scent of hypoglycemia, for example, or bladder cancer, Goodavage muses about “rogue” doctor dogs — dogs alerting random strangers while out and about. It’s not impossible; some trained dogs have raised the alarm without prompting.
The book is a great read. Goodavage is a stellar storyteller, and she’s done deep research. In addition to interviewing dozens (hundreds?) of trainers, handlers, and people partnered with doctor dogs of all specialties, Goodavage leads readers through all the current research (with a 20-page reference list to back her up) on how dogs do this and how effective they are. Despite the deep dive into science and research, the book is engaging and readable.
Hats off to ‘Thoughts of Dog’
Thoughts of Dog is more than a book or a calendar. It’s a peek into the mind of a loving, sweet, sometimes silly golden retriever and their human. The dog, who is nameless, has a constant companion named Sebastian (Sebastian is a stuffed elephant). Dog also has a human of course.
That human is named Matt Nelson.
And they are simply brilliant.
Nelson & dog capture the human-dog relationship perfectly. They’re poignant, laugh-out-loud funny and sardonic in turns. Always spot-on.
Nelson got started sharing his uncanny dog wisdom a couple of years ago (don’t know HOW I missed it …) with “We Rate Dogs.” You can see some examples on this blog post: 50 Times People Asked To Rate Their Dogs, And Got Hilarious Results.
I first heard of Thoughts of Dog when a friend shared a page from last year’s calendar. I immediately ordered the 2021 calendar.
Highly recommended whenever you need a lift or a laugh.
Treat Everyone Like a Dog
While I do think that I’d like to come back as the dog of some of my friends and family members, this column isn’t about that. It’s actually a book review!
Karen London, a well-known (& wonderful) dog trainer’s book, to be specific: Treat Everyone Like a Dog: How a Dog Trainer’s World View Can Improve Your Life. An added bonus: Patricia McConnell wrote the foreword.
It’s really a book about changing behavior, which is a topic I write about a lot in my real life, where I work for a bunch of online learning companies. Corporate training is mostly about shaping and changing behavior. Parenting is mostly about shaping and changing behavior. And dog training is pretty much about … shaping and changing behavior.
London does a brilliant job of explaining how to change specific behaviors (in dogs), why the techniques work — and how to apply them to similar situations with humans, whether those humans are your children, spouse, coworkers, friends … It sounds manipulative, but it’s no more (or less) so than the tactics we’re probably already using — and which are not working.
London talks about motivation, using positive reinforcement to motivate as well as reward, and why fear of failure can be so crippling in influencing what dogs (and people) do. Her emphasis is on positive methods of changing behavior and she draws a clear contrast between the shift to positive approaches in dog training — and the lack of a similar shift in human educational and workplace settings.
The book will teach you about things like the jackpot effect and intermittent reinforcement and why it’s so hard to change behavior when a dog (or human) is sometimes rewarded for the very behavior you’re trying to eradicate.
The book is filled with funny and familiar stories and examples. It’s got to be the best book on learning theory I have ever read. Her section on “learning styles” initially had me worried, but her take on it makes far more sense than the thoroughly debunked idea of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners! She talks about the value of short, spaced lessons, rather than trying to learn a new skill or complex material all at once — another topic I encounter over and over again in my work.
There’s a lot of great information packed into this book. I suggest reading and digesting it chapter by chapter — and trying out some of the strategies on your dog (or your kid!). You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond
I was excited about reading Alexandra Horowitz’s latest dog book. She’s the person I want to be when I grow up, after all … But, though I enjoyed it, I was also a little bit disappointed.
Her best work so far — aside from her academic papers — is Being a Dog, with its deep dive into the world of scent and how dogs experience it. Our Dogs, Ourselves lacks the insights into dog-focused science I hope for from Horowitz. It also shares little of her fascinating and groundbreaking work in dog cognition.
It’s about life with dogs. Mostly, her life with her dogs, with a few broader forays into the lives of the rest of us and our dogs — or at least the dog-owners she encounters in her New York City life with dogs.
While much of the book reads like a collection of blog posts or short essays, a couple of chapters explore larger, more serious issues. These chapters, in my opinion, redeem the book:
- “Owning Dogs” examines dogs’ status as property. Horowitz clearly articulates how and why that’s wrong and at odds with how we think of dogs — spelling out the need for a status between “property” and “person.” Her vision of a “living property” status requires attention to dogs’ welfare as well as enabling “full dogness” — opportunities to do truly doggy things, like sniffing, digging, chasing, and chewing.
- “The Trouble with Breeds” spells out the history and harms humans have caused through generations of selective inbreeding. She also describes related damage. One example is breed-specific laws that fail to account for individual dogs’ differences or for actual behavior. Another is many humans’ tendency to choose a breed that looks appealing to them — without considering “genetic tendencies” that, for example mean that border collies are miserable spending their lives as pets of busy, apartment-dwelling humans.
- “Against Sex” lays bare the harms we do to dogs by “de-sexing” them, especially at very young — prepubescent — ages. Horowitz dispels many myths surrounding spay and neuter, from the impact on euthanasia rates (negligible) to a long list of the health problems it causes in our pets, including the risks of the actual surgery. She bravely confronts the uncomfortable truth that neutering our pets is an easy out for humans; we don’t have to think about, much less manage, our dogs’ reproductive lives.
- Finally, “Humorless,” paired with the chapter on “Dog Stuff,” struck a chord with me. Horowitz eloquently describes something I share — an inability to see the “fun” or “humor” in some cultural trends that poke fun at dogs, often by projecting human feelings and motivations onto our dogs. From dog-shaming websites to embarrassing dog clothing to the thousands of so-called funny videos of dogs and kids, where the dogs look stressed and terrified, much of what humans laugh at about dogs amounts to ridiculing or even abusing the dog. This is not always the case, of course, and some functional dog clothing is fine or necessary.
But many dog find humor in situations that really are not funny. This is largely due to misinterpreting dogs’ body language. The worst results of this are, of course, dog bites. But, and I say this as a reformed dog owner, who is guilty of putting past dogs into Halloween costumes: A lot of what’s fun or funny to humans is unpleasant or worse for the dog. A scared or frightened dog who cannot escape is likely to defend himself, possibly with a bite. Who hasn’t heard a story of a bite “with no warning,” often from people who simply missed many clear signals from the dog.
Overall, there’s enough strong chapters that I do recommend the book — it’s a fun read in parts, more serious in others. But, if you’re expecting a more scientific look at dogs, stick with Being a Dog.
Fifteen Dogs
Fifteen Dogs, by Andre Alexis, is an interesting read for philosophically inclined readers or people who think about what separates humans from animals. But it’s a terrible book. I do not recommend it.
Even so, it’s worth a blog post. It is a story of, you guessed it, fifteen dogs. These dogs are given “human consciousness,” as part of a bet between Hermes and Apollo. Well, they’re given human consciousness if by that you mean human language. I view consciousness differently from the author. I also believe that dogs have many of the elements of consciousness already, with no need for intervention by mythical gods.
The dogs are boarders at a kennel when they are given these abilities; they form a pack and escape.
One troubling aspect of the book is how rapidly most of the 15 dogs are dispatched to pretty unpleasant deaths. Several are killed by their packmates, which raises another philosophical question: Why is it that at the center of the human-like dogs’ behavior is cruelty, cliquishness, and a propensity to murder their friends? The situations and means of the dogs’ deaths at their colleagues’ paws are easily imaginable among humans, but are very undoglike behavior.
The other aspect of “human consciousness” that the author obsesses over is language. All of the dogs develop an uncanny (!) ability to understand some phrases and words in English after repeated exposure, much like, oh, every other dog in the world. They also develop their own language, with elements of English and elements of Dog. One becomes a poet (in the new language), which really annoys several of the others. A couple learn to speak weirdly accented English that some humans can understand.
The focus on language reinforces a conceit that is common among people who study animals with the goal of proving how and why humans are superior. Many argue that only humans have language. Only humans have human language, but many species use language: A communication system with rules (“grammar” or rules of syntax) that is widely understood by members of the speakers’ culture. Some nonhuman species go one better: Their language is understood by all members of the species, regardless of culture or geography. Humans aren’t there yet.
The crux of the bet is that if even one of these human-like dogs dies happy, Hermes wins the bet; if they are as miserable as humans, Apollo wins. Since most of the dogs die in terrible ways, Apollo takes an early lead. But even that is absurd: Anyone can live a mostly happy life but at the moment of her death be scared or sad or surprised or in terrible pain — and not necessarily happy. Does that cancel out her entire life?
I’m not sure that the ability to speak English would make most dogs happier. Or more miserable. And I am not sure that dog happiness is much like human happiness. But above all, I really don’t think dogs need divine intervention to either understand humans or be happy. Cali has done both quite well since the day we met.
What It’s Like to Be a Dog
I’ve had a serious crush on Dr. Gregory Berns ever since he published his first MRI studies. Those showed that dogs’ brains’ pleasure centers light up when they catch the whiff of a beloved human (or dog). There’s so much to love about his papers and his book How Dogs Love Us. So I was really excited about reading his newer book, What It’s Like to Be a Dog.
It’s well worth reading, and I enjoyed it. But … it wasn’t what I was expecting. There’s some really cool stuff, like the explanation of how dogs’ brains look when they’re doing the equivalent of the Marshmallow Test. I’ve played around with that a bit with Koala and Alberta, though I lack access to an MRI machine. So I was very interested in his findings. It turns out that some dogs do well with deferred gratification and others … not so much. You might notice that I haven’t talked about doing a marshmallow test with Cali. I don’t need a fancy machine to tell me that she lacks impulse control.
I was a little disappointed with some of the detours from living dogs’ brains into the long-ish discussions of the brains of deceased seals and Tasmanians. And I was distressed by the chapter on dogs and language.
I know that any sentence that pairs non-human animals with language raises the hackles of many people, scientists and non-scientists alike. I also think that there are many, many definitions of language and that dogs, particularly those with close human connections, understand a lot of what we say and do and they communicate with us in sophisticated ways. Lack of understanding of their “language” does not diminish its value. I get irritated when people choose a very narrow, very human-centered definition of language, such as one that is focused on semantics and grammar and written representation of a language, and then say, ‘see, only humans do this so only humans have language.’
Dogs communicate. They use their whole bodies — ears, tails, hackles, eyes, facial expressions, as well as scent and sound, to communicate. And dogs excel at reading the nonverbal communication of other dogs, humans, and often of other animals like cats. Other non-humans do this as well. Dogs are able to read humans far better than humans can read humans.
And dogs understand a lot of what we say to them. They might be assigning meaning to a combination of words and body language cues to understand our feelings, our desires, our mood rather than attaching the specific meanings that we do to individual objects or concepts. While I don’t expect Cali to speak to me in English or read the newspaper, much of the communication that I have with Cali — and especially what I had with Jana — is clear and meaningful.
Berns’s discussion of language, how he tested dogs’ understanding of words, and his interpretation of those results are very, very human-centric. He talks about the mirror test, which I believe is not a fair test for dogs. His comments on dogs’ lack of a sense of self or others: “My beloved Callie probably didn’t have abstract representations of me or my wife or my children. No, I was just that guy who feeds me hot dogs …” are off-base.
Dogs’ sense of self and others is primarily rooted in scent, not sight or sound. Berns himself showed that dogs recognize the scent of family members and respond differently than to the scent of unfamiliar humans or dogs. So I was mystified and saddened by what felt like a dismissal of the individuality of dogs’ selves and their relationships with key humans (or non-humans).
Despite a few disappointing chapters, I do recommend the book. I the insights into how dogs’ brains work are fascinating, and even where I disagree with Berns’s conclusions, I enjoy learning about his research and his understanding of dogs. Dr. Berns is still my favorite neuroscience researcher, and he’s a great writer. Check out both of his books if you haven’t already!
