The Dog's Mind: Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

Acknowledgements

A personal thank you to my head nurse and people-minder, Jenny Berry. I had worried that an intermittent absence from my veterinary clinic while researching and then writing this book might have had a deleterious effect on the practice. I should have known better. Thanks too, to Roger Abrantes in Denmark for sending me a copy of his book Hundesprog and for his permission for Anne Wilson to use his illustrations as inspiration for some of the marvellous sketches that follow.

Introduction

There are millions of species of life that exist on earth today but of all of these the dog is almost certainly the animal that is closest to our hearts. Dogs are, of course, a fact of life in certain cultures, primarily European, American and Japanese. In these cultures we have lived with them for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. We have allowed them to share our dens, our food, our companionship. Of all the hundreds of millions of species that have ever existed on this earth, surely the dog has become the one we should understand the best.

     Yet we have a problem for there is something about dogs that makes us irrational. Ask a cat owner what he enjoys about his cat and more likely than not he'll tell you that he enjoys observing the natural quality of its behaviour. Cat owners – cat LOVERS – are observers and draw a clear line between themselves and their pets. In fact we do so with all species of animals yet, for some reason, we blur it with dogs. 'She's my best friend', I'm told almost daily in veterinary practice. 'I love her as much as my children', pet owners will confide. 'He's part of the family', I universally hear. And let me lay MY cards on the table now. I'm also one of the 89 per cent who talk to their dogs and think of them as members of the family, but in doing so, in creating little furry people out of our canine companions, we lose the ability to understand them as they really are. We think of their behaviour in human terms.

     Just as often as I'm told of the love and devotion my clients have for their pets, so too do I hear of the fidelity, love and everlasting affection that my patients have for their owners. And it's not just average pet owners who think this way either. 'Every dog that ever followed its master (gives) an immeasureable sum of love and fidelity,' wrote the Nobel prize winning ethologist Professor Konrad Lorenz in his book Man and his Dog.

     Konrad Lorenz, in attributing the feeling of 'love' to dogs, was talking about how they feel – about what goes on in a dog's mind, but exactly what is the mind? Can a dog really think? Do dogs have a culture? What is canine intelligence and how should it be defined? These are quite basic questions that I feel I should try to explain now so that you will know what terms of reference I'm using.

     First of all, I should explain that I have quite intentionally not called this book, 'The Dog's Brain' or 'The Dog's Behaviour'. It's called 'The Dog's Mind' for several reasons. The brain is simply one of the body's organs – a brilliant and poorly understood organ. In each brain there are billions of cells all with specific functions. In my dog's brain there are more cells than there have ever been dogs! These cells produce their own drugs such as the endorphins, the body's natural pain killers, and these drugs, in turn, affect the 'mind'. The word 'brainy' also denotes intelligence and we naturally assume that we are superior to all other animals because we're the 'brainiest' animals around. That's one of our little conceits. Our brains are certainly different to other animals and have allowed us to become the dominant species on earth, but to argue that our brains are superior is the same as arguing that a cow's intestines are superior to ours because they can digest cellulose fibre.

     The philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote an article called, What is it like to be a bat? in which he discussed the philosophical problems of imagining what it is like to be what you are not.

     He depicted the bat's ability to echo locate, something that is so alien to our abilities that it's almost impossible to understand, and described how difficult it is for us to imagine that another animal is actually BETTER than we are at something. Nagel's argument applies to the dog too. The dog's brain has an ability to interpret scents and smells that is infinitely different to ours. You could say 'superior' but that is simply a value judgement. They simply can't be compared.

     I've avoided the word 'behaviour' in the title for similar reasons although I will in fact use it a great deal in what I describe in the forthcoming chapters. 'Behaviour' brings to mind rats in Skinner boxes, conditioned to press buttons to get food rewards. When the Russian Pavlov conducted his original experiments on dogs, the experiments where, for example, he discovered that a dog could be made to salivate at the sound of a ringing bell if that dog had been trained to associate the sound of the bell with food, he too had a problem in describing what was going on in what part of the dog's body. Other languages don't necessarily have words that are synonymous with the English word 'mind'. In French, 'tête', 'intelligence' or 'esprit' only come close. Pavlov initially used the Russian word 'ym' but later changed this to a phrase which in translation means 'higher nervous activity'.

     A further problem with using the word 'mind' is its association in Christian culture with the soul. A few years ago, I conducted a survey of British veterinarians concerning their attitude to pet death. One out of five practising veterinarians believed that a dog has a soul and an afterlife. (Two out of five believed that humans have souls and an afterlife.) When the same survey was applied a year later to practising veterinarians in Japan (where the Buddhist and Shintoist traditions allow for an afterlife for all living things), every single veterinarian surveyed believed that dogs have souls and an afterlife!

     I've avoided all of this and used the word 'mind' intentionally. To me, the dog's mind is a function of its brain, of evolution, of genetics, of the senses, of hormones and of learning and I will discuss each influence in its own chapter. Because learned behaviour is what we have most control over I will devote several chapters to this influence on the dog's mind.

     The mind can feel elation or depression, anger, sadness, thirst or hunger, pain or exhilaration. Dogs are sentient beings, aware of their own personalities. They have minds as much as we have and that's why I've used the word, even if its use waves like a red flag at some people. This isn't a dictionary definition but is rather my own definition and is based on the difference between objectivity and subjectivity which I feel also needs an explanation.

     In 1953, on Koshima Island in Japan, a monkey named Imo discovered that she could rub the mud off the sweet potatoes she had been given if she washed them underwater. This behaviour, potato washing, soon spread to her playmates, her mother and aunts and later to her own infants who also copied her. By the 1960s, over half of the entire troop of Koshima monkeys washed their potatoes before eating them.

     Imo's activities were, of course, observed by scientists who were interested in monkey behaviour but when they published their observations, they were severely criticized by Western animal behaviourists for being too anthropomorphic, for attributing too much human behaviour to their monkeys.

     Classically, the objective scientist has never interpreted what an animal perceives or thinks. In fact, animal behaviourists in the West almost universally adhered to this non judgmental approach. They were the Skinner box brigade who gave their animals code names and numbers and who tried to be as rational as possible.

     Japanese scientists, and under the influence of Nikko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, other scientists in Europe, continued their more subjective study of animals by getting to know them. The Japanese described their approach as 'kyokan', a term that is difficult to translate into English but which suggests an empathy and an understanding with the animal that is being studied. Their perseverance was of course correct and by the 1970s, the Japanese pattern of long-term studies of individual animals, 'kyokan', became the norm in the western world too.

     My approach throughout the coming chapters will be both objective and subjective. I'll describe objective research into the dog's mind but I will also liberally describe subjective and anecdotal observations. By definition, that means that I will discuss, to some extent, how a dog thinks. 'Thinking' brings into question whether dogs have a culture, what is cognition and what is intelligence? Aristotle said that animals can learn and can remember but cannot think. Washoe, the chimpanzee that was taught American sign language, has forever banished the thought that animals are incapable of thinking. Washoe taught us that chimpanzees think a lot – so much so that they can actually lie and be deceitful. But it's not just primates that think.

     Ask any shepherd and he will tell you that his sheepdog thinks about what he is going to do. In fact, ask any veterinarian and he will say the same. Dogs dream. During their sleep they go through periods of rapid eye movements (REMs) that on the electroencephalograph are the same as those we experience when we are dreaming. Dogs grieve. This is something that objectively can never be determined but subjectively is apparent to all keen observers of canine activity.

     The questions of culture and intelligence, however, are more difficult to define. John Tyler Bonner, in his book, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, defines culture as, 'the transfer of information by behavioural means'. Using his definition then, Imo the monkey was creating a new culture when her troop learned to copy her and wash their sweet potatoes underwater.

     All is not as clear with dogs. Certainly there are dramatic 'cultural' differences between breeds of dogs. Some are more dexterous than others. Some are fiercer than others. Some are louder and more gregarious than others, but in most instances these 'cultural' differences are as a result of genetic changes, genetic changes which occur under our influence. There is no question that one dog can observe another dog doing something and that it can copy it, but most differences in 'culture' are, in the dog, genetic rather than through learning. That means that to a great extent canine 'culture' is under our control. When left to nature, when dogs are allowed to revert to basic behaviour, almost invariably the result is a dingo-like animal, a dog with a basic culture. We put an extra veneer of culture on the dog's mind through selective breeding and imprinting certain characteristics.

     Calculating intelligence in dogs is much more complicated than in other species simply because of the great morphological range within the species. Intelligence can be called the ability to use or call upon past experience in order to adapt to a new experience or situation. But intelligence is not simply an efficiency in adaptive behaviour. All living animals have evolved to be good at this. It doesn't mean smart, clever or academic either. Nor does it mean dexterous. Dogs can be taught to operate handles and bars but little more. But what is it that we really measure when we talk about canine intelligence?

     Intelligence tests are always tailored to a species but how can you compare a Chihuahua with a German shepherd. Different breeds have different stamina, sensory perceptions, size, agility and, yes, emotions. We breed dogs for different functions and this makes any comparison of intelligence almost ridiculous. Canine TRAINABILITY and canine OBEDIENCE, on the other hand, are easily measured, which is why there isn't a police force in the world with brigades of Scottish terriers on guard.

Different breeds have different stamina, sensory perception, size, agility and emotions.

     However, ALL dogs have magnificent cognitive powers. Cognition is defined as the brain processes through which a dog acquires information about his environment. The dog's mind is eminently good at cognition. They are amazingly perceptive to nuance and observe the most imperceptible changes in us. That's how they know you are going on holiday days before the bags come out, or how they know you'll be taking them to the vet, before you even reach for the car keys. The dog's mind works this way by watching our body posture and he will express what's on his mind through the position of his ears and eyes, how he holds his tail or head and how he moves (see Chapter Five).

     What finally makes dogs so difficult to understand is that in many ways they are actually very similar to us. Pack dogs live in groups of mutually interrelated individuals who are each independent but who work as a unit for a common good. They hunt in packs. They enjoy body contact and relish the companionship initially given by their mothers and then latterly by their peers and then others. Social activity is important for them and playful mock aggression, sex and exploration are all a part of their behaviour and ours. The lucid and articulate Stephen Jay Gould believes that there is an analogy between childhood wonder and adult creativity. He says that we humans are neotenized apes – that is, we are apes that have maintained juvenile characteristics into adulthood, both physical and mental characteristics, and that it is these juvenile characteristics that have been responsible for our success as a species. In selectively breeding dogs as we have, there is no doubt that we have neotenized them too. Both morphologically and mentally, dogs have been bred to retain the juvenile characteristics of play, exploration and subservience to the leader. Now, of course, the root stock of the dog, the wolf, already has in its developmental repertoire a whole range of neotenized behaviours. Gould argues that neoteny can be a natural occurrence in animals other than the human, but isn't it curious that of all the species we chose to blur the barrier with, the one we have chosen is the one that, like ourselves, perpetuates juvenile behaviour throughout adult life? That is probably an answer to the question, 'Why dogs?'. What this also means is that to understand the dog's mind we must first briefly look at where the dog has come from, the wolf.

     Dogs are wolves, although sometimes they look like they are in sheep's clothing. We have altered their morphology, creating dogs that look like big sheep (the Maremma or Pyrenean Mountain Dog) so that they can live with the flock but protect them from danger. The dog might look like a sheep. It might actually THINK it's a sheep, but the entire basis for its behaviour is what it has inherited from the wolf.

     Wolves are opportunists. They evolved to fill the niche of attacker and scavenger and although the true wolf, Canis lupus, is a mammal of the northern hemisphere, other wolf-like animals evolved elsewhere in the world to fill the same niche. Certainly the oddest was the thylacine, the Australian pouched wolf, a marsupial – related to the kangaroo but wolf-like in body and mind. The last one died in a zoo in the 1930s. (Australian dingos are true dogs brought to Australia by the Aborigines around 10,000 years ago.)

     Although it has been postulated by Michael Fox and by others that the domestic dog, Canis familiaris, is the descendant of a now extinct European dingo-like wild dog, no fossil of this animal has ever been found and all genetic, behavioural and anatomic evidence firmly supports the belief that our dogs are descended from a small subspecies of wolf that lived in the Near East in the southern part of the wolf's Old World range. The wolf, Canis lupus, is one of the most pleomorphic of all mammals alive today. They have great physical elasticity with the largest breeds of wolf in the north and the smallest in the southern part of their range. Canadian Arctic Tundra wolves can weigh up to perhaps 200 pounds. One weighing 175 pounds was once shot by a forest ranger near Jasper in the Canadian Rockies, not far from the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics. The Arabian desert wolf, on the other hand, weighs only 45 pounds.

     Although there were probably over thirty breeds of wolf at the turn of the century at least seven of these have become extinct since then. The massive white Newfoundland wolf, over six feet long, died out early in the century. So too did the small Japanese wolf, an animal only 35 inches long and 14 inches at the shoulder. The specimen in the British Museum has a 12 inch long dog-like tail.

     The Texas red wolf, a 40–60 pound breed, 28 inches at the shoulder, has become extinct in the last decade. The German shepherd-size Texas grey wolf and the much larger cinnamon coloured Cascade Mountain wolf have also gone.

     The extinction of these breeds is a pity because aside from their different morphological characteristics, each breed has behavioural differences too. The small Asian wolf, Canis lupus pallipes, doesn't howl. The Chinese wolf, Canis lupus laniger, hunts alone. From old stories and fables it appears that the European wolf, Canis lupus lupus, hunted in large packs and was content to live within close proximity to man.

     The domestic dog, Canis familiaris, has the same number of chromosomes as the wolf, seventy eight, and this is different from other related canids. Jackals, for example, have seventy-four chromosomes. Red foxes have thirty-eight. Dogs were probably first domesticated from one breed of wolf, the small Near Eastern breed. The most tractable were bred from, the least tractable eaten, and then over the ages, local admixtures of genes from other breeds of wolf augmented the diversity of the dog leading to the great genetic variation of today. This change is still going on naturally amongst wild canines. Dingos in Australia are breeding with domesticated dogs, irreversibly altering for the future how dingos think and behave. The same is happening in the State of Maine in the United States. There the indigenous wolf no longer exists. In its place is a composite wild animal, part wolf, part coyote, part domestic dog.

     Human intervention in breeding has meant that the dog has smaller teeth and shorter jaws than the wolf, probably indicating a decreased natural selection for ability to catch and kill. (Little Red Riding Hood was certainly right about the wolf. What big teeth they really do have!) Early dogs undoubtably helped in the hunt but just as undoubtably they benefited from humans feeding them too. Interestingly the frontal sinuses on the dog's head are more inflated than those of the wolf – the snout slopes down more. There doesn't seem to be any reason for this other than perhaps an ages' old subconscious human preference for dogs that looked intelligent. This is a curious fact today where breeds with prominent frontal bones are said to look more intelligent than others. Indeed, it has been interesting to see that amongst golden retrievers, the breed that I have, those with more prominent frontal sinuses almost invariably win at dog shows although this is not the case in field trials where looks are not as important.

     Breeds of dogs evolved from the adaptive genetic pool already present in the wolf and have perpetuated the high degree of social organization and communication that stabilizes communal relationships in the wolf pack. Because the wolf pack works as a group of individuals all unique but all working towards the same goal, pack society always allowed different personalities to develop. One wolf might hunt best. Another might be the best strategist.

     Adolph Murie, after years of studying wolves in the wild, wrote that his strongest impression was of the wolves' friendliness to each other. In his books Murie describes how adult wolves play tag, how they romp with a rocking horse gait as they play with pups. Murie mirrors Stephen Gould's contention that some species of animal are naturally neotenized and describes how adult timber wolves will suddenly jump out of hiding places and scare each other for no apparent reason other than play, how they bring things to each other, especially food, and how they will prance and parade around with sticks in their mouths. This is the genetic, sensory, morphological, hormonal and evolutionary root stock of the dog and to understand the dog's mind it is absolutely essential to understand that he has come from here. But how?

     Earlier this century Russian fox breeders discovered, almost unwittingly, that it was possible to tame silver foxes within twelve generations of controlled breeding, simply by selecting for a stable temperament and tractability. (We humans have been breeding dogs for at least 1000 generations.) John Peters at the University of Arkansas did the exact opposite with pointer dogs. He produced UNSTABLE pointers within a generation. Starting with 'Allegheny Sue', a promising show bitch who produced 'spooky' pups, Peters produced a line of nervous, neurotic and unstable bird dogs. Allegheny Sue's pups were more timid, fearful and panicky than other pointer pups. If, for example, a red fire extinguisher was stood beside their food bowls they wouldn't eat. The pups were this way for at least two reasons. The first was their genetic make-up. These pups had inborn emotional and cognitive problems inherited from their mother and I will discuss this in the next chapter. The second reason was that Allegheny Sue was simply a rotten mother and imprinted unwanted characteristics onto her pups during their first weeks of life. I will discuss maternal imprinting in Chapter Six.

     The fact, however, is that it takes very little time to even unwittingly select for temperament in the canine. Twenty thousand or so years ago, when dogs were first domesticated, those with a tendency to bark were selected as guards, the fast and silent ones as hunters. (With our knowledge today it is easier and faster to select for temperament. The Pyrenean Mountain Dog is a classic example. Bred for hundreds of years as a guard and protector of mountain sheep, this powerful dog has been, through selective breeding over the last twenty years, 'modified' to become acceptable as a companion animal with a more benign and giving behaviour.) It was in this way that different canine cultures emerged – hunters – herders – guarders – and then, more recently in the last 200 years, breeds that would flush, point, corner, retrieve or sit quietly on satin cushions.

     Different climates, geography, predators and parasites also influenced the production of different breeds or races of dogs as did our own intervention in their reproductivity. Certain aspects of wolf behaviour became modified. Dogs are more fertile than wolves. A she wolf has one reproductive cycle a year while most dog breeds (except the Basenji) have two. Dogs also reach puberty earlier than wolves do and have larger litters, almost certainly, in part, because we help raise them. Most importantly, the socialization period of dog pups is longer than that of wolf pups making it easier for us to train them.

     In almost all breeds of dogs we have taken basic wolf characteristics and accentuated them to such a degree that in