Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  According to the animal scientist Temple Grandin this difference lies in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, the convoluted gray matter that covers the rest of the brain like a helmet. People have big frontal lobes that help process raw data into abstractions. Dogs have smaller ones and lack the ability to make such generalizations. However, as humans evolved big frontal lobes and dogs didn't, humans lost the ability to discriminate the tiny individual details of the world while dogs retained it. Autistic people, like dogs, also have this ability because, as Grandin points out, their frontal lobes receive "bad input." And she should know. An autistic person herself, she has turned what is usually thought of as a handicap into a gift, interpreting animal behavior as few have been able to do. Acting as a consultant to the meat industry, she has designed one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States so that animals can move through them with less stress.

  To illustrate what seeing the world in vivid detail means, she describes how a dangling chain, a dark shadow on the floor, or a bright reflection on a metal bar can all cause cattle to balk as they move through a livestock plant. Such sensitivity to tiny objects and noises is what autistic people also report. They say that they can see the flicker of fluorescent lighting or hear the hum of electric wires in the wall. People who aren't autistic miss these details and see only the big picture. They "see what they're expecting to see," Grandin writes. "New things just don't register."

  It was no surprise to me, then, that Merle froze at the sight of the first life-size bronze statue of an elk he encountered and immediately began to stalk it. He was simply reacting to the is-ness of the world. Until he found out differently, an elk was an elk was an elk. This constant attention to detail must have stood him in good stead when he was a pup roaming the desert along the San Juan River—if you notice every potential source of food, you won't starve. Now, as a grown dog, he went into a crouch thirty feet from the bronze elk, but I could see that he was growing suspicious, his body language expressing doubt. Extending his nose forward, he sniffed and crawled forward. At fifteen feet, he suddenly sagged with the knowledge that he'd been fooled and turned to me with a look that said, "Why didn't you tell me?" He never stalked that particular elk again, but if he saw a statue of another elk in another place—and also happened to be upwind of it so he couldn't smell it—he'd stalk it. In his mind, all new statues of elk had to be considered real until proven otherwise.

  Did being fooled in this way make him a lemon brain? I doubt it. It meant that he processed the world differently from humans. The result was that he and I became a highly effective team. As Grandin points out, "Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory tasks. Dogs and people coevolved and became even better partners, allies, and friends."

  The important thing to remember, she adds, is that evolution didn't get rid of our smaller, interior brain—the one all mammals share and which houses emotion—while our larger, more modern cerebral cortex was developing over it. Nor, for that matter, was our very ancient reptilian brain discarded. Every one of us still has the equivalent of a reptilian brain in our brain stem, which takes care of our basic life-support functions such as breathing. This interconnected, three-part brain structure—what the neuro-physiologist Paul D. MacLean calls "the triune brain"—is why people so often act like dogs and dogs act like people: Parts of both our brains are the same.

  This is also the reason why dogs can display what contemporary biologists have termed "Machiavellian intelligence." Another name for this sort of intelligence is "calculating reason," a concept that can be defined as the ability to work out what to do in constantly changing social situations, especially when other members of your community possess the same skill. Put simply, this means that dogs can lie.

  For many years I found this impossible to believe. I was certain that Merle was incapable of any falsity, his heart an open book. How could anyone, I thought, who persisted in taking the world at face value—deceived by statues of elk—be anything else than who he was? I had read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's Dogs Never Lie About Love, and had nodded my head in agreement when he wrote, "Dogs do not lie to you about how they feel because they cannot lie about feelings....Nobody has ever seen a sad dog pretending to be happy, or a happy dog pretending to be sad."

  Then one day I left on another assignment. We were at the new house, and as I loaded the car Merle stood on the front porch with his head slung low in despair, his eyes liquid and plaintive: "I thought we were a team. I thought we'd never part. You're leaving me again."

  I petted him, told him I loved him a half dozen times, and I'd be back in three days. Scott would pass by after work and pick him up so he could stay at the ranch. I drove off, watching him stand on the porch, his entire posture wounded to the core. I got slightly beyond the post office—he had realized after several more attempts at running to the P.O. that I wouldn't take him along—and it was here that I discovered that I had forgotten my wallet. I drove back. Only two minutes had elapsed since I had left him, and there he was, not on the front porch, but trotting jauntily toward the village, his tail high and wagging in that eager way he had when he set off on his rounds.

  If he were truly someone who could not practice deceit or lie about his feelings, one might have said that he was simply being a dog: a being who was totally immersed in the moment. Two minutes before, he had been sad at my departure. Now, heading down the road—out to snag a biscuit, chase some ground squirrels, or see his friends—he was happy. He lived utterly in the present. But his behavior in the next few moments belied this notion.

  His ears went back—he had heard the familiar sound of the Subaru's engine—and, as he wheeled, his expression went from happy expectation at what he would find in the village to startled surprise at my return. His face then took on a look of sheepishness.

  He approached my car with his head and shoulders lowered, his tail wagging hard, but held far below the horizontal, which he only did when he had been caught at something he ought not to be doing, like exploring empty elk wrappers in the trash. He was clearly embarrassed. I stopped the car, and he came up to the door, grinning hugely at me, the corners of his lips pulled back in the classic pose of a submissive dog. "Ha-ha-ha," he panted. "You're back! What a surprise!"

  "You, Sir," I said, wagging a playful finger at him, "are a faker."

  "Ha-ha-ha," he continued to pant, and now he began to whine, a plaintive little protest: "I really do miss you when you're gone. I really do. But—"

  "I know, I know," I finished for him. "A dog's got his own life. And you, Sir, have an especially rich one. 'I thought we were a team. I thought we'd never part. You're leaving me again.' You should be on stage, Señor."

  "Oowoo." His whine turned into a woof of protest. "I do miss you. I really do."

  "I know you do." I laughed, scratching his ears.

  I fetched my wallet, petted him again, and got in the car. He watched me drive off. He no longer looked chastised. He wore a fatalistic expression, like someone who has been caught in the act and who realizes that he has no defenses whatsoever. His MO had been discovered: He wasn't quite as downtrodden when I left as he had tried to make me believe. In short, he had been milking me for sympathy.

  When I tried to apply Morgan's Canon to explain Merle's behavior, the result was unsatisfactory. Merle did not go from sad to happy and remain happy at my return, which would be the response expected from a dog who lives in the moment, is overjoyed to see his person return, and has no calculating reason. Instead, he became flustered and embarrassed. To fully appreciate what was happening during our interchange, it's important to note that Merle had never before greeted me in the fashion I've described. Either he was overjoyed to see me or he bayed in frustration, signifying that I had stayed away too long. Embarrassment had never been part of his repertoire. Why? I had never before immediately returned once I had left on a trip.

  Most of us act
the very same way when we've been caught dissimulating. Clearly, the principle of parsimony doesn't always explain what our dogs are doing. Their behavior can be as complex as ours, and when it is—when they operate from the parts of their brains that function in a similar way to the human brain—their actions deserve an equally complex explanation.

  The work of the veterinarian Nicholas Dodman, the head of the Animal Behavior Department at the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, has substantiated this idea. Dodman has pioneered the treatment of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder in dogs with the very same psychotropic drugs that have been so successful in treating these disorders in humans. "In my practice," he says, "I work on the basic principle that pets are as emotionally invested as we are, experiencing anger, fear, boredom, loneliness, jealousy, and other sophisticated emotions. Acting on this firm belief, I am able to diagnose and explain behaviors to myself and to owners....The very success of pharmacologic treatments ... is testimony to the basic similarity between the mental processes of humans and nonhuman animals."

  I continued to wonder, however, if a similarity between the mental processes of human and nonhuman animals necessarily implies that dogs have the ultimate hallmark of consciousness—self-awareness. Do dogs know, staring at themselves in a mirror, that this body, containing these thoughts, is me?

  Watching Merle pass by the mirror in my bedroom, I doubted it. The mirror was tall and narrow, by my closet door, in a place that Merle rarely went. The few times I saw him pass it, he glanced at his reflection without giving any apparent recognition that the dog facing him was himself. In fact, he completely ignored his image in the mirror, as do most dogs and most other animals except chimpanzees and dolphins.

  Occasionally, researchers have seen a dog, parrot, or monkey interact with its reflection, but with the sort of greeting gestures that indicate that it considers its reflection another member of its species and not itself. When, after a while, the animal doesn't get the expected response, it ignores its reflection until the mirror is moved to a different location, and then it repeats its social interaction as if the reflection were a new animal.

  Experiments with chimpanzees and dolphins, however, show that when a mark is placed on their bodies in a location that they can't see without a mirror, they use the mirror to investigate the mark. In the case of chimps, they will touch the mark with their fingers and then inspect and even sometimes smell their fingers. One dolphin, who had a mark placed on his tongue, immediately swam to the mirror and opened and closed his mouth as he examined the mark—behavior he had never exhibited before. Researchers have therefore concluded that only chimpanzees and dolphins have the same sort of self-recognition that we do.

  I remembered, though, how Merle had recognized the echo of the howling dog on the San Juan River as his own voice and responded to it with a tail whose excited wagging clearly stated, "That's me!" Could a dog have acoustic but not visual recognition of himself? Now and again, I puzzled over this question.

  Then one day I went to get some physical therapy for a pulled muscle in my back. The practitioner, a sports trainer named Jen Fuller, was a great fan of Merle's and said he was welcome to come along to her studio. As we entered, I noticed that one wall was entirely mirrored. Merle noticed it, too. He turned his head and watched the man and the dog walking across the carpeted room side by side.

  Merle stopped dead and looked sharply up at me; then he looked back to the mirrored wall and gazed at my reflection. His mouth parted slightly and he cocked his head quizzically. I was obviously standing beside him, but I was also standing alongside that dog in the mirror. He next stared at Jen's reflection and then to the woman herself, standing a few feet from me. He glanced to me, then back to my reflection. I raised my hand, and he saw my reflection raise its hand. Leaning forward, he gazed with intense concentration at the man and dog in the mirror and tentatively wagged his tail. The reflection of the dog wagged its tail.

  As if the rug had been pulled out from beneath him, Merle sat down. He turned his head up to me in wonder; he looked back to the mirror; then he looked back to me. He began to wag his tail with considerable vigor.

  "I get it," his expression said. "I see who I am."

  The big mirror, taking in the entire room and all its occupants, had apparently let him see himself alongside people whom he recognized from the real world. It had provided him with the necessary context to understand what a reflection was. Suddenly, that reddish-gold dog in the mirror wasn't some strange, odorless, two-dimensional dog to be ignored, but the dog who walked with Ted. He had an identity. He was Merle. To paraphrase Descartes, who will more than likely turn over in his grave hearing his famous words recast so as to describe the mind of a dog, "I see myself within my world and therefore I am."

  What Merle did next corroborated my translation. He walked to the mirror and lay down before it, facing his own reflection. As Jen and I began to discuss my exercise routine, he turned his head left and right, raising his chin and watching how his reflection did exactly what he did. He showed none of the behavior typical of his interaction with other dogs—no smelling, no posturing, no tail flagging. He was intently studying different views of himself, as he had never done before.

  "That's you," I said encouragingly.

  He wagged his tail very hard.

  From that day on, every time we visited Jen's studio, Merle would first say hello to her, then he'd lie in front of the mirror as she and I talked over my exercises. He'd turn his head this way and that, studying himself first head-on and then in profile. If his body language could be trusted, not only did he know who he was, he continued to be pleased with his image. And the next time he passed by the bedroom mirror, he walked directly to his reflection and gave himself a look, his wagging tail proclaiming, "Yep, that's me."

  Chapter 12

  The Mayor of Kelly

  I called Merle by many names in addition to his own: Ski Dog, Señor, Monsieur, the pup of my dreams, Sir. Sometimes, when he was looking very royal on his dedicated quadruped couch, I would joke with him, "Ah, le roi des chiens," oh, king of dogs, and, alerted by my tone of voice that I was pulling his tail, he'd look away and ignore me.

  Others called him Merley, Mooey, Moo-Moo, Merlster, Mooward The Pooward, Love Sponge, Golden One, and Merle The Pearl. But of all the nicknames he received, none was so widely used as The Mayor.

  It's hard to say who first appointed him to the office, although the honor may go to Arthur King, a short, convivial man who owned the spread on which Scott and April lived. Handsomely retired and with free time on his hands, he perhaps saw a kindred soul in Merle. Arthur liked to linger at the post office, telling stories of his horses, dogs, and grandchildren, and consequently often ran into Merle, who, just as often, went to the P.O. to socialize with other Kellyites as they came to get their mail.

  "And how's the mayor today?" Arthur would say, leaning over his ample middle to greet Merle face to face.

  Taking an appreciative sniff of Arthur's trouser cuffs, redolent of horse corrals and Springer Spaniels, Merle would give a hearty wag of his tail: "Better now, Arthur."

  It was our new house, however—near the junction of the park road and the only road into the village—that was the springboard that launched Merle's political career. Everyone had to pass by our drive to get into or out of Kelly, and Merle, in between making his thrice-daily inspection tours around the village, would lie by the entrance to our drive, greeting cars as they went by.

  Standing, he'd peer into the vehicle's driver-side window and give his tail a wag: "Hey, good morning, how are you? Lovely day, isn't it?" And he'd often be there in the late afternoon when people returned. He'd rise from the warm tarmac and walk in front of an approaching car, so it had to slow down. Proceeding to the window, he would say, "Welcome back."

  Nothing pleased him more than to have two cars stop at the same time, each going in opposite directions, both drivers leaning out of their windows to give him a
pat on the head.

  "You are a traffic stopper, Sir," I'd tell him when he'd trot back inside.

  He'd do a little two-step with his paws: "Just keeping in touch with my constituents."

  Of these he soon had many, a large percentage of them female, whom he'd visit in a clockwise direction, making a great circle route around the village, like some 747 dropping off packages of good cheer and taking on fuel for the next leg of its journey.

  His first stop was the Kents', across the road from us. He'd slip under their buckrail fence, go to their side door, and stand on his hind legs, front paws hanging limply while he peered through their kitchen window to where Gladys and Donald were having their morning coffee. I'd see the door open and in he'd go.

  About a half hour later, out he'd come, trotting around the back of their log cabin, to emerge from their far drive and head south down the main road. His next stop was at Eric Moore's. A songwriter, Eric liked to compose on his guitar while sitting on his front steps. Merle would join him there, and they'd have a sing-along. Later, Eric named one of his CDs Song Dog, after the coyotes who lived around Kelly, but also after Merle, who is pictured in the album's cover pamphlet, standing next to Eric's shoulder, both their heads close together, mouths open as they croon to the sky.

  A woman named Jill Oja lived in the same house, and she'd often collect the surrounding dogs, taking them like a pied piper for a long walk by the river. If Merle couldn't find a song or a walk with his friends, he'd proceed to the eastern side of Kelly, where he'd visit Beverly Wood and her collection of horses, mules, and Golden Retrievers. Like Gladys, Beverly was always a soft touch for a biscuit.

  From Beverly's Merle would circle south and west along the banks of the Gros Ventre River, stopping in to visit whomever he'd find at home. Eventually, he'd pass our old trailer and meander around it, taking in its scents. From our new house there was an unimpeded view of where we had lived, four hundred yards across the field, and I could sometimes catch a glimpse of him through my binoculars, zigzagging around the porch, smelling, speeding up, and slowing down to give a spot half a minute or more of deep consideration.