Thinking dogs

How Dogs Love Us

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howdogsloveus_260Gregory Berns got the crazy idea of training his dog to lie still in an MRI machine, in the hope it would provide some insight into dogs’ thinking. What he found brings scientific proof to something every dog person knows — that dogs read us, anticipate our behavior, and act on that knowledge. Dogs, in short, have theory of mind. Berns rightly argues that this scientific evidence must change the way we think of and treat dogs.

What’s especially wonderful about this story is that, at least at the beginning, Berns is not an especially savvy dog person. He loves his dogs, treats them extremely well, but hasn’t spent a lot of time trying to communicate effectively with them or train them. By the end of the book — or maybe by a few months into the research — he’s become convinced that dogs communicate and function on a very high level and that “the key to improving dog-human relationships is through social cognition, not behaviorism.” Quite a journey … in fact, it’s the same journey that I hope to push my students along in Bergin U classes on dog training, canine-human communication and understanding the dog’s perspective. (Any current Bergin U students reading this might as well order their copies now … this book is destined to become required reading in all my classes.)

The book is filled with fairly complex scientific concepts, but it is written beautifully and clearly. It is very easy to understand and, like a good adventure novel, pulls readers along with foreshadowing and suspense. I especially love the long discussion of the ethical issues Berns and his team faced in setting up the research and the insistence of all the human researchers that the dogs would always be free to opt out, at any time. I also love the dog-centric approach the research takes (read the book to find out what I mean!). This book — this whole research study —is a testament to the amazing possibilities that exist when humans acknowledge their dogs’ abilities, treat them as partners (rather than as property or as slaves), and engage with them in a respectful, positive manner.

Because I am nut for precise language, I do have to quibble with the title. Berns does not actually show HOW dogs love us. He does show, I believe, that they DO love their human family members. While he can’t really show us what dogs are thinking, though, he has shown a way to understand their likes and dislikes — and perhaps opened the door to a better ability to read in dogs other emotions that humans and dogs share.

Cali, the Ghost, and the Dog Door

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Cali ghost door3Our electronic dog door continues to be a wonderful window on the dogs’ personalities. The dog door is operated (ostensibly) by a magnet attached to each dog’s collar. The idea is that only animals with magnets can open the door, keeping out neighbor cats, possum, raccoons and the like.

Well, in one of Florida’s daily summer thunderstorms, the door suffered damage. The motor would hum but the door would not open. We summoned our electrician, ordered a part, summoned the electrician again, and, after a few dog-doorless weeks, were back in business. With a twist.

The door started opening and closing all on its own. We joked that not only had we acquired a resident ghost, but the ghost somehow had been given its own key and had learned to use the dog door. As I sit at my desk, not a dog in sight, the door will occasionally open and close. Then do it again a few minutes later. The ghost going out for a potty break and returning? Or the ghost entering for a brief reconnaissance and leaving? Hard to tell, since I can’t actually see the ghost.

Meanwhile, Cali, who learned to use the dog door in just seconds flat, has lost key privileges. She, it turns out, wants to spend all of her time outside chasing lizards. And occasionally catching them, with gruesome results for the lizard and anyone watching. She has recently taken up stalking those huge, bright yellow Florida grasshoppers that are apparently quite tasty. Her other hobby is digging small ditches all over the backyard. Some dogs, it seems, are too immature to handle the freedom a dog door brings. Unable to convince her to take up knitting, gnawing chew toys, or even sunbathing (with sunscreen!), I took her key away.

With no key, Cali has to ask permission to go out, and she now has supervised playtime. She hates that. She has figured out that she can sometimes follow her big sister Jana out. Occasionally, I think when Cali is being particularly, er, adolescent, I have seen Jana walk with her over to the door. Door opens; Cali runs out; big sis walks away with, I swear, a big smile on her face.

The next step was probably inevitable: Cali discovered the ghost. And decided to train it. She could get the ghost to let her out! Who needs a key when you have a trained ghost?

Now, when Cali wants to go out, she sits, patiently staring at the dog door. Eventually, usually within a couple of minutes, the ghost does, indeed, let her out.

Cali ghost door2Cali has had less success at training the ghost (or her big sisters) to let her back in, however. When she gives up on the ghost, she’ll sit, looking sadly at the back door and occasionally jumping on the glass, until I let her in. Twice I have come home from errands to find her outside, stretched out in the shade, waiting patiently.

I haven’t seen her sitting by the dog door on the outside, waiting for the ghost. But she has gotten back in without my help on occasion. So maybe the ghost training is going better than I think.

Sometimes, when Jana or Albee opens the door to go out, Cali seizes the moment and slips in very quickly. Jana isn’t quite as agile as she used to be, and the door only stays open for about 5 seconds. So when Cali does this, Jana is left inside. As Cali enters and the door closes, Jana gets a perplexed look. I am sure that, as she waits for the door to open again, she’s wondering why she wasn’t lucky enough to be an only dog.

Puppy Tries to Downsize Older Dog, Steal Her Job

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At the ripe old age of not-quite-three-months, Cali made her first play for Jana’s job. She liked the idea of a paycheck, in the form of some treats, delivered as soon as the work was complete.

The newspaper was still bigger than Cali the first time she grabbed it and dashed off ahead of Jana. Reined in by a too-short leash, Cali was soon overtaken by Jana. Jana looked at her in annoyance, then reached over and snatched “her” newspaper back.

Jana’s held this job since she was a tiny pup, and she is not ready to retire.

get the paper

Since that day, I try to get the girls to take turns, and I give each one a reward, but Cali still wants that job. And Jana is not giving up without a fight. Sometimes the paper bears the brunt of this literal tug-of-war.

Cali and the Sunday Paper

Dogs need jobs. Ever more, dogs need opportunities to earn rewards. But I think what is really at play here is that Cali looks up to — worships — Jana and wants to do everything that Jana does. Cali learns new skills very quickly and I am sure it is partly because she is watching what her adored big sister does and copying every move, albeit in her clumsy puppy way.

Still, I think the best solution might be a second newspaper subscription.

Bidding Farewell to Wylie

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Cool

Wylie is heading off to learn his new career this week. Deni’s difficult decision to let him go and to seek a professionally trained guide dog, whom we hope will be a better fit for both her personality and her needs, is described in Loving and Letting Go, an earlier post on the Thinking Dog Blog. But Wylie was part of my pack, family, life too — and saying good-bye brings up some tough issues.

I think of dogs as family members. Taking a dog into your life, I believe, is a lifetime commitment — you take it upon yourself to care for the dog for the rest of his life (or the rest of yours). Yet I believe that letting Wylie move on to a new life is the best choice for him as well as for the rest of his pack/family. I’ve been struggling to reconcile these conflicting views.

Wylie wasn’t a pet; he was a guide dog. But he wasn’t a good fit for the job Deni had assigned to him. We’re both confident that his new job, working with a veteran, will be a better match for Wylie’s personality and needs. He’ll revel in the intense companionship and enjoy his new responsibilities. He might be matched with a young, athletic guy who can give him the exercise he craves, too.

None of that makes it easy to say good-bye. What makes it hard, I think, is that for all that I try to study human-dog communication and improve my ability to communicate with dogs, I am still human — with that human tendency to be overly reliant on words. For all his intelligence and perceptiveness, Wylie is a dog who doesn’t use language the way we do. That gap is sometimes tough to bridge.

So we can’t prepare Wylie for what is happening, can’t help him understand that we love him and want him to be happy, can’t call him on the phone to find out how his training is going. He’ll be confused and sad when Deni leaves him with Jennifer, his new trainer. There’s no way to explain to him that, after some training, he’ll get to go live with a guy who will be his best friend and constant companion. While he senses that something is up, Deni says, he doesn’t understand what.

I also know that dogs are more “now” focused than most people are, which means that Wylie will quickly adapt to his new routines. He makes new friends easily. I am sure that he’ll be the star of the training class before long. Even knowing all of that, and feeling sure that it’s the best choice for him, it still feels strange and sad to say good-bye.

 

Special Delivery

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A story Deni told me about Jana has been going through my mind for several weeks now. I haven’t figured out the answer; maybe the students in my spring-semester class on the dog’s perspective will help me figure it out.

We have had a lot of work done on the house lately, and somehow, the gate to the backyard got left open. I was away.

Deni reports that the dogs woke up and took themselves out the electronic dog door as usual. Then, suddenly Wylie was back at the bed, barking at her, quite insistent that she get up. Not fully awake, Deni complied (Wylie rarely takes “no” for an answer). She noticed that Jana had not come back inside. Wylie was frantically urging Deni to the back of the house, where she noticed the open gate. And no Jana.

Now fully awake and worried, Deni quickly pulled on some clothes. Again, Wylie alerted her. This time, she followed him to the front of the house … where Jana was standing at the front door. Not only that, Jana was holding the morning newspaper (hmmm, too bad she didn’t nip out for fresh bagels while she was at it).

Relieved, Deni let Jana in and lavishly praised and rewarded her. But for what?

While Deni was delighted that Jana had stayed home, she and I both wonder how Jana understood the event.

Did Jana think she was being praised for simply doing her usual morning job of getting the paper? Or had she made a conscious decision to not seize the unexpected freedom and go for a swim or chase the cats next door? Did she understand that Deni was grateful for her restraint?

Maybe Jana finds too much freedom frightening and chose to return to safety.

Maybe she was afraid she’d get in trouble for being out and hoped that the paper would mollify Deni and mitigate punishment.

These are plausible explanations.

But Jana has had other opportunities to run through open gates, and she’s never passed one up. Just this week, when the roofers were packing up, I inadvertently let her out the back door before the back gate was closed behind the roofer’s truck. Within seconds, she was in the back alley. She did return immediately when I called her, though. And she’s often wandered off on her own during walks or hikes, farther than the front porch (but never so far that she could not see me or Deni).

She’s never gotten more than a scolding (and a leash) when she’s wandered too far afield in the past, so fear of punishment is unlikely.

She may have simply made the choice to stay close to home because she knew that that was the “right” thing to do. Could she have understood that Deni could not easily pursue her?

Which begs another question: Why did Wylie go to alert Deni rather than seize the moment, as it were, and go for a run? He has done so in the past. Was he worried about Jana or about keeping his pack intact? Was he delighted at the role reversal — that he got to be the good dog (and the tattletale) this time?

Though many people do not believe that dogs are capable of such deep, conceptual thinking, I do believe that Jana and Wylie are capable of making the judgment to do the “right” or the expected thing, even in the face of temptation. I have seen it many times in working dogs (including Wylie) — as well as in Jana and other pet dogs. I’ve also seen  both Jana and Wylie give in to temptation and follow their impulses or their instincts. Just as we humans sometimes “do the right thing” and sometimes do what’s fun or feels good, so do dogs.

All things considered, my best guess about that morning is that she didn’t want to miss breakfast. Your thoughts are welcome.

Jana and Wylie Go to College

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Jana and Wylie got accepted to Eckerd College and, last week, attended their first class, a math class. They were students in the Dog Behavior Project, a cognition study run by the psychology department. Your dog can participate too, if you live in the Tampa Bay area! The application is simple.

The dogs were excited when we got there. A human class was just letting out, and some of the students said hello. The dogs got to explore the psych lab for a few minutes, and they could tell that other dogs had been there.

Then it was time for class. Jana got to go first, so we went into the testing room. There was a chair for me, two bowls on the floor at the other end of the room, with one student serving as tester and a student who recorded what Jana did.

The current study is hoping to determine whether dogs can count or judge quantities. The tester drops treats into bowls, and the dogs get to choose one of the bowls. For each trial, she drops a different number of treats into each of the two bowls, with the dog watching. Jana got Charlee Bears, which she loves.

We went in and sat down. I told Jana to wait and held her collar loosely. She sat facing the tester. Once the treats were in both bowls, Jana was allowed to choose which bowl she wanted, run to the bowl, and eat the treats. The researcher is supposed to grab the treats in the other bowl while the dog is eating. Some “control” trials have treats in only one bowl.

No one looks good in these graduation hats!

Jana watched intently each time treats were being dropped into the bowls. When I said OK and let go, she ran to a bowl. She chose the larger number of treats eight out of 10 times; I have no idea what happened those other two times. She was definitely paying attention. She also, not surprisingly, ran to the second bowl each time she finished eating her treats and barked at the researcher when she found it empty. What tells me that she was really paying attention is that, in the “control” trials, when the researcher had not placed treats in the second bowl, Jana did not bother going there.

When Jana finished the last trial, she brought me the empty bowl. I am sure Jana thought this was the best class ever! She would happily have done 20 or even 50 trials.

Then it was Wylie’s turn. Unfortunately,  in his first two trials, the researcher forgot to pick  up the treats from the second bowl, and he was able to get both sets of treats. From then on, he showed a clear “side bias,” always choosing the same bowl. He only got the larger number of treats six out of 10 times, but in his defense, I think he was misled about the nature of the task. My guess is that he figured that it didn’t matter which bowl he went to first. Also, he’s just not that excited about Charlee Bears. If she had put tennis balls in the bowls …

Both humans and dogs enjoyed participating in this study, and we’d do it again. Some of the studies are longer-term, with the same dogs coming back for several sessions. It’s a fun way to spend time with your dog and learn more about how her mind works.

It also shows how far dogs have come. Even as recently as 15 years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find published academic research that focused on dogs. Now, researchers all over the world are exploring dogs’ thinking and problem solving abilities. Some of the best work is being done in Hungary, at the “Family Dog Project” at Eötvös Loránd University.

But it’s not necessary to go that far afield. Eckerd is just one of several U.S. colleges and universities where dog cognition labs recruit local canine “students.” Others are the University of Florida, Duke University, Barnard College, and the University of Kentucky. Researchers are looking at a variety of topics ranging from canine facial expressions, such as the “guilty” look to dogs’ responses to human gestures to how dogs form trusting relationships.

I get excited about anything that gives me a window into my dog’s mind. I often wonder what she’s thinking. These studies might help us better understand of our doggy best friends and improve our relationships with them. Then again, the researchers might confirm something that I have long suspected about Wylie — that he regards humans as bumbling, inept, and not very smart, and he knows that, if only dogs had opposable thumbs, the world would be a very different place.

Doggy Enforcers and Tattle-tails

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Gracie, left, and Willow (Photo by James Cramer)

Some time ago, in a post published on the Creative Loafing website, I described an incident where Jana “told on” Wylie and Oriel when they broke the house rules. A brief recap: The dogs, wet and sandy following a swim in the bay, had been gated into our office, which is at the back of the house. A few minutes later, Jana started barking. I told her to stop, then yelled at her, then, finally, went back to see what was up. She was alone. Wylie had knocked over a barrier, gone out the dog door, and walked around the house to open a French door that leads into the master bedroom. He let himself (and Oriel, who had followed) into the main part of the house.

The funny part, so revealing of their different personalities, was that, just as I was chastising Jana, Wylie marched triumphantly out of the bedroom to proclaim his jail-breaking prowess to the world. Oriel had quietly curled up on a dog bed in the bedroom, wisely not advertising her rule-breaking to anyone.

So. Is Jana the only rule-bound dog I know? Not by a long shot!

Not long ago, Willow, a family friend (also a golden retriever), was visiting a favorite plant nursery with her newly adopted sister, Gracie. Willow is an exuberant dog who has never met a stranger. The entire world is her stage and all of us, her admirers. This particular nursery is a favorite because the staff adore her — and because whenever she’s there, she gets a treat if she greets the cashier and sits nicely.

This visit progressed much like all others, Willow’s dad reports, until the nice cashier asked the dogs to sit. Willow sat. Gracie, new to this routine and a little nervous about new things, did not sit. Willow wanted her cookie. The nice lady asked Gracie to sit. Willow grew impatient. When Gracie did not sit, Willow stood up, lifted a paw, and whacked Gracie on the head. Gracie sat. When the humans stopped laughing, both dogs got treats.

Was Willow really enforcing the rules? Was Jana? Can dogs tell “right” from “wrong”? If so, to what extent can we hold them accountable for their actions?

These are big questions that dog world is increasingly willing to discuss — though dog lovers and researchers are nowhere near reaching agreement. Whole Dog Journal editor Nancy Kerns discussed this very question in a recent blog post, and I plan to teach a course that centers around this very issue next spring at the Bergin University of Canine Studies.

As we examine dog behavior more deeply and consider interpretations beyond categorizing every action as a mechanical or instinctive response, and as biologists and ethologists explore the behavior of an enormous range of non-human animals, we see growing evidence that many animals besides humans think about their actions and weigh potential consequences. The TED talks website has a fascinating presentation on animals and morality by Frans de Waal that shows empathy and cooperation in the animal world.

For now, I am considering these questions about dog behavior — and collecting stories. Has your dog ever tried to get another dog to do something? “Told on” a sibling dog who broke the rules? Or done anything that suggests that he or she thought about rules or consequences before acting? Please share your stories here or by email to: thinkingdogblog@gmail.com

 

Looking into the Future

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Can dogs anticipate? Can they visualize a future event or state?

Certainly, our dogs learn our routines and recognize the signs that, say, we’re getting ready to take them for a walk or go to work. They might try to guess whether they get to come along on an outing. Wylie, our resident super-optimist, seems to anticipate doggy fun any time we get on a highway that has, once, led to a dog park. Then there’s mealtime. Jana gets agitated if we go out anywhere near (defined as “within a few hours”) a mealtime.

That’s all pretty typical stuff reported by many dog owners.

But Daisy, a very intelligent thinking dog who lives in Massachusetts with my friend Nancy, does something exceptional. She’s 13, and it’s possible that regular access to the “little dogs’ room” is more important to her than, say, to little brother Brandon (age 5). But she’s normally on a pretty regular going-out schedule, and is reputed to have enormous staying power. Nevertheless, she has recently started to pay close attention to Mom’s “leaving” cues. If Nancy is indicating that the outing is by car, Daisy will request an unscheduled pee break. Is she anticipating needing to go and not knowing when Mom will be home?

A similar question arises when I consider Jana’s habit of not drinking water when I am not home. I first noticed this when we lived in an apartment, and I was often gone for a few hours at a time. This was a new predicament for Jana, who has been an extremely lucky dog in mostly having a stay-at-home mom, or being able to accompany me to work, or having access to her yard via dog door. But things had changed.

I first noticed that the water bowl would be untouched while I was out. I also noticed that, the minute I came home, she’d say hello and then head straight for her bowl. The odd thing is, the not-drinking behavior persisted, even after we moved into a house with a dog door.

So, can dogs anticipate needing to go out when their human servants are not around to open the door? What else can they anticipate? How far ahead can they look forward? Is anticipation part of what dogs are doing when they warn people of impending seizures?

We’ll probably never know the answers to these questions (though I’d love to hear your thoughts!). But it seems yet another way that dogs constantly surprise and amaze us with their abilities.