by Ted Kerasote
"I'm sorry," I replied. "Beef is out."
He looked back at the vanishing cattle, heaved another sigh, then began to chew his biscuit as if it were sawdust, leaving pieces of it on the ground.
"Okay," I said. "Your feelings about this have been noted. But it's nonnegotiable. Let's go."
I began to pedal, and he followed at a sullen trot. Within a few minutes, however, he picked up speed and galloped ahead of me as if he had put the incident behind him. He hadn't. When we got to the car, I tossed the choke collar into the back, and he made a point of sitting on the opposite side of the car from it, looking at it with great distaste, a feeling that he immediately extended to all collars. Even if we were heading off to do something that he enjoyed, like skiing, and I fastened his comfortable red collar around his neck, he became instantly poker-faced, as if he were a young boy being forced to wear a suit.
It was a small price to pay. He never chased cattle again, though he never lost his passion for them. Far into his old age, he would become terribly excited if we passed a herd of them. Trembling with eagerness, eyes fixed upon them, he'd watch their every move.
The events of our first weeks together—the bison, the deer, the cattle, Merle's unwillingness to fetch, and his quick grasp of both the words and the hand signals for No, Come, Sit, Lie Down, Go Away, and Be Quiet—made me reflect on how dogs learn. Some of the ways in which they take in, process, and then utilize information are identical to ours. Touch a stove, get burned, you don't touch stoves again. Work hard, get paid, you can buy the things you want. These examples of operant conditioning explain how most of us avoid harm and acquire the things we want. They don't explain why some dogs, like some people, are smarter than others, why many of us are in the middle ranks of intelligence, and why some of us have such difficulty simply getting by. Granted, we can fall back on the notion that some individuals are born smarter, or are more talented, than their peers. And there's some truth to this. Lots of people have written plays—there's only one William Shakespeare. Lots of theoretical physicists were working during the early 1900s—only one Albert Einstein emerged. Yet Shakespeare could never have come up with the startlingly elegant equation E=mc2, and Einstein, for all his brilliance, would never have written, "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
We see precisely the same kind of specialization in dogs. A Border Collie does a magnificent job of herding sheep, a Labrador Retriever of hauling ducks out of icy water. One can probably do the other's job with training, but not as well as if it has been bred to perform certain tasks—a dog who has it in its genes, so to speak. A more accurate way of putting this would be to say that the dog has inherited a set of physiological attributes. Oily hair, for instance, would be one of these attributes. Repelling water, it makes swimming comfortable and thus predisposes the dog to that behavior.
The really interesting question, though, involves how a dog's environment affects not its specialized behavior but its overall intelligence. Will the dog who has more experiential input be smarter? In an increasingly urbanized world, the question is particularly relevant because dogs who live in New York, Delhi, or Sydney can't learn about deer, tigers, and kangaroos, all once intrinsic parts of their culture, the way children can learn, through books and television, about theirs. In other words, it may be impossible for dogs to become knowledgeable, and eventually wise, if they're not outside, being dogs.
There's a wealth of research that supports this contention. One of the first people to set the stage for this research—in general terms, determining how mammals learn—was Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spaniard, who in 1906 shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with an Italian, Camillo Golgi. Cajal demonstrated that the brain was composed of individual nerve cells and also wrote about its workings in a lyrical way. Explaining how dendrites send out random conductors in the course of their formation, he wrote, "What mysterious forces precede the appearance of the processes, promote their growth and ramification, stimulate the corresponding migration of the cells and fibers in predetermined directions, as if in obedience to a skillfully arranged architectural plan, and finally establish those protoplasmic kisses, the intercellular articulations, which seem to constitute the final ecstasy of an epic love story?"
It was Cajal's "neuron doctrine" that laid the groundwork for how we now view the nervous system, namely as individual neurons, or nerve cells, communicating with each other at junctions, or switching stations, called synapses. Here is where a nerve impulse triggers the release of a chemical neurotransmitter, which then modifies the adjacent neuron. A single brain nerve cell has thousands of these synaptic connections on its cell body as well as on hairy appendages called dendrites. Think of the most densely branched tree you've ever seen, amplify its branches considerably, and that will give you an idea of how the dendrites of the brain reach out across their synaptic spaces to, in Cajal's terms, kiss each other.
In the 1960s, researchers at the University of California Berkeley began to focus their attention on whether experience could produce observable changes in these complex structures of the brain. Beginning with a group of genetically similar rats (to reduce the chance of genetic differences skewing the results), they divided the twenty-five-day-old, just-weaned rats into three groups. Group 1 was called "the Isolation Condition," the rats caged singly in a dark, quiet room, with ample food and water, but unable to touch or see another animal. Group 2 was named "the Social Condition." These rats lived three to a cage while being fully exposed to the conversation and activity of the lab technicians. Group 3 was labeled "Environmental Complexity and Training." Here, a dozen rats lived together in a big cage and got to play with toys and run through mazes, the arrangements and patterns of which were changed each day. In addition, these rats were frequently handled by people.
Within four to ten weeks, remarkable changes began to take place. The cerebral cortexes of the rats in the complex environment weighed on average 5 percent more than those of the other rats. Their average body weight was also 7 percent less than that of the sedentary rats because of their daily exercise. This phenomenon—a high brain-to-body-weight ratio—is also found in wolves who live in physically demanding, experientially rich environments. Pound-for-pound, they have about 20 percent bigger brains than domestic dogs.
Using another series of experiments, the Berkeley scientists then explored whether intelligence was a function of brain size. They found that the rats who had lived in an enriched environment were more adept at moving through problem-solving mazes than those in the less stimulating environments. It appeared that having a bigger brain might mean being a smarter rat, though the researchers hedged their findings, noting that some human geniuses with triple-digit IQs have had smaller brains than humans with only double-digit IQs.
In the 1970s, William T. Greenough, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, continued this line of investigation and demonstrated that it wasn't brain size alone that made for intelligence. The rats he reared in complex environments had more dendritic synapses per neuron than rats raised in isolated environments. The increased branching created a greater capacity for processing information.
A similar phenomenon is seen in the world of canids. Wolves are better than domestic dogs at solving problems such as opening doors or escaping from pens, and they can plan and execute coordinated attacks on prey much larger than themselves, which packs of dogs are unable to do. In short, those animals who live in more challenging terrain have more synaptic kisses going on in their brains.
Then, in the 1990s, Greenough began collaborating with another researcher, James Black, in a series of experiments that attempted to outline the attributes of stimulating environments. They compared rats who were confined to a cage with no exercise to rats who ran a treadmill each day. These two groups were, in turn, compared to acrobatic rats, individuals who were taught to wend their way through and over an elevated obstacle course. The brains of the couch-potato rats and the treadmill rats weighed the same, but the
cerebral cortexes of the acrobatic rats were significantly heavier. Black and Greenough concluded that learning engaging tasks rather than merely exercising was critical.
These findings dovetailed with what the Berkeley researchers had come to understand through additional experiments designed to identify which stimuli had the most powerful effect on brain development. They, too, found that it wasn't exercise alone. Nor was it visual stimulation. Handling, petting, and love didn't produce large brains, either. Nor did pressing a lever for a food reward. The only thing that consistently improved rats' neural development was the freedom to roam a large, object-filled space.
These findings helped me to understand why Merle might not be interested in balls that jingled, in rubber bones that squeaked, or even in rawhide chews. He had grown up in one of the largest open spaces imaginable, one filled with all sorts of interesting creatures: some that would bite him, some that would kill him, some that—if he caught them—were delicious to eat and stopped his hunger pangs. He had been occupied in the most primal and engaging of tasks—staying alive. No wonder that toss-and-fetch wasn't quite his game.
Brain research has also given us a greater understanding as to why animals who live in zoos become depressed, even when they have balanced diets, sex, and authentic though miniaturized habitats. Compared to the real thing, captivity is dead boring.
This may also be why there are so many neurotic dogs in the world: the barkers, the furniture chewers, the biters; those who defecate in their homes when left alone, who run along their fences, threatening passersby, and who will swallow most any object no matter how distantly it resembles food. As Jon Katz notes in his thoughtful book The New Work of Dogs, "Dogs are rarely permitted to solve problems." They're not given "a chance to figure out what to do. They look to humans for direction." And we humans are all too willing to give them that direction.
Some dogs, thankfully, can break us of our patronizing habits—as Merle did for me. The first time this happened, I was trying to teach him to heel. I had put on his red collar and a leash—instant sobriety—and we were practicing walking around Kelly. Not only sobered by the collar and the leash, he was also confused by the command to heel. There were so many interesting smells to investigate. Why was I intent on bypassing them? And even if I wanted to maintain that metronomic pace, why should he? He could catch up to me whenever he wished. Why this sudden boot camp, when our life had been so free and easy? I could see his eyes ask these questions, and I could also sense his confusion, so I took off the leash. "You'll see," I said as he jumped up and down joyfully by my side. "Heeling might seem silly now, but when we're walking on a road with cars, it'll come in handy. Now heel." I offered him a biscuit by my thigh.
"Ha!" he exclaimed, "sure." Taking the biscuit, he fell in by my side.
For a while he heeled quite nicely. Then we came to the main road and set off for the post office. This meant going against the oncoming traffic had there been any. Immediately, he insisted on trotting in front of me and in the middle of the blacktop, instead of upon the shoulder to my left.
I did an end run around his right flank, forcing him toward the shoulder with the sharp command "Heel!"
"Ha-ha-ha," he panted, signifying, "You don't really mean that." Grabbing the biscuit I offered him, he immediately slipped behind me, back into the center of the lane. Back and forth we went, as if doing some kind of tango.
I wondered whether he didn't want to walk on the shoulder because the gravel hurt his paws. But this couldn't possibly be the case; he ran on the gravel road from the cabin to the river virtually every day without any sign of it bothering him. Then I decided that he was just being obstinate, a strong-willed dog who was going to make his choices and mine an ongoing contest.
The following day, the same thing happened. We had a reasonable practice session in the village, but as soon as we got to the main road, he broke heel even when I offered him biscuits as reinforcement. On the third day, as we walked toward the post office, I saw some sandhill cranes gliding across the sky, calling out in their high-pitched warbles. Taking my attention from Merle, I watched the cranes for a good fifteen seconds. When I looked down, he was back in the middle of the road. I was about to yell "Heel!" when I noticed how he was walking: He had his head cocked slightly to the right, his right ear tilted back, as he both listened and looked to his rear. At the same time, his left ear and left eye were trained on the road ahead. Just at that moment, his right ear came to attention, and he instantly drifted toward the shoulder of the road. A second later, I heard it—a car approaching from behind us. It went by, and Merle drifted back into the center of the lane, his head cocked so he could monitor traffic in both directions.
I had been so intent on getting him to heel that I hadn't paid attention to what he was doing. He had developed his own way of walking down the road safely. When I tried to make him heel on my left side, his frustrated "ha-ha-ha" wasn't an indication of his being disobedient; it was his way of saying, "You're blocking my view, and I can't hear as well."
I wondered if he had learned his road-walking method by watching cars go by as he made his rounds through the desert, occasionally using the tarmac to speed his travel. Perhaps he'd actually had a close call.
Suddenly, I saw him in the desert—growing up among snakes, coyotes, and cows—his dendrites becoming denser, reaching out for each other, their tips just kissing, the synapses firing, and the doggish equivalent of an "aha!" lighting his brain. Did it give him a sense of accomplishment? Given his reaction to the bison—"I get it!"—I thought probably so.
I knelt and called to him, roughing up his fur as he stood before me. "You are one smart dog," I said. "I am sorry."
He immediately looked serious. He didn't like my tone of voice when I apologized. So I stood up and motioned him down the road with my extended hand. "Lead on, Sir."
"Ha!" he snorted and gave his head a happy shake. Then he set off in front of me, prancing like a Lipizzaner stallion. I had seen the light.
He never heeled again, at least not on roads. And his method worked. He walked on the park road for his entire life without incident. In the backcountry, however, he evolved an entirely different strategy, one relying on his nose and my eyes. Watching him there, I learned that it was perhaps the dogs, not the humans, who had first realized what a team the two could be.
Chapter 4
In the Genes
Merle and I were walking on the ice of Yellowstone Lake, only a few yards from shore, when I heard a slow rumble. Under my feet, the ice began to move.
Merle's eyes widened with wonder and a little fear. Together, we whirled toward shore. Too late. The ice broke and we plunged into the freezing water. For a moment, we floated. Then the current took us. I heard a roaring and looked ahead. Iceberg after iceberg fell over the horizon. The lake had turned into a cataract.
Merle and I glanced at each other. His eyes were now calm, and his calmness filled me. Side by side, we began to swim.
Waking, I shook my head. Sunlight streamed through the windows.
Then I remembered the coyotes howling around the cabin, sometime around 3:00 A.M.
Merle had been beside himself with agitation—rushing to the window, going to the door, whining, waking me up by shoving his nose under my arm, his bright eyes saying, "I need to go out there! I want to go out there! I must go out there!"
This was nothing new. For the past few evenings the coyotes had been howling in the field below the cabin, sending Merle into an ever-increasing frenzy. This morning, unable to stand him any longer, I had jumped from bed and cried, "Okay! You want to go out there, go ahead."
I had thrown open the door, and he was gone in a flash, his long golden form streaking through the moonlight and disappearing into the sage. I listened. Silence. I listened some more, the moon hanging over the Tetons, the hum of the Gros Ventre River coming up through the forest. I called his name. I whistled. He didn't come.
I had left the door open and gone back to
bed, regretting my decision. Yes, dogs long for freedom, I told myself, but sometimes they needed to be protected from their own instincts or their lives could be very short. Nor did familiarity with the wild always improve a dog's odds. The wolves of Yellowstone, for instance, live only 3.4 years on average. They die at the hooves of elk and moose; they drown fording rivers; they're caught in avalanches; and they're killed by other wolves.
When I awoke from my dream of swimming with Merle toward an icy cataract, he wasn't by my bed. I went to the door, called, and whistled. When he didn't appear, I ran into the sage field. No sign of coyotes or my dog. I threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, got in the car, and drove down the hill, calling out the window and stopping periodically. Driving through Kelly, I looked left and right. Still no Merle. I turned onto the dirt road that led to the trailer, and there he was, pressed so hard against the trailer's front door that it looked as if he were trying to break in.
He heard the car, looked up, and saw me. As I parked, he ran to greet me, standing and hanging his paws inside the open window. "Arowh, rowh, rowh, arowh," he said in a kind of yowling parlando. "You can't believe what happened to me! Those coyotes. There was a whole pack of them—" On and on he went, throwing his head from side to side.
I got out of the car and looked him over, running my hands along his flanks, turning up his ears and paws, peering under his belly. He appeared unscratched. I gave him his favorite massage, kneading the thick fur around his neck and shoulders, and crooning to him that he was a brave dog. But he didn't relax. Instead, he pressed himself to my legs, trembling.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go in. You look like you're thirsty."
Tail between his legs, he glued himself to me as we went inside the trailer. He drank almost the entire bowl of water I put out for him. As I went to the bathroom and washed up, he followed me. As I answered the phone, he lay over my feet. As I switched on my computer and sat down to work, he huddled against the back of my chair. Turning around and looking down at him, I tried to imagine what had happened.