For the last time, I whispered in her ear so that only she could hear: “Lyra, I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I was deaf to what you were saying. And I’m sorry I didn’t understand what Callie was trying to tell me. If only I had taught you to go into the scanner too, maybe I would have known there was something wrong. I will miss you, always.”
By the time we got home, it was dark and it had started to rain. There was no question that Lyra would receive a proper funeral. But I would have preferred to wait until the morning.
Helen summed up the situation: “Dad, I can’t sleep knowing that her body is just lying here.”
So, with headlamps in place, Kat and I set to the task of digging Lyra’s grave in the dark. Despite the rain, the red Georgian clay did not yield easily to our shovels. Neither of us cared. After two hours of digging and prying rocks, we were staring at a hole so deep that we had to stand in it to dig any farther. We both took some comfort in the blisters that had formed on our hands. A tearing of the skin that symbolized the tearing in our hearts.
We lowered Lyra into the hole and called the girls outside.
They each placed a stuffed animal next to her, and we covered her in a favorite blanket. In turn, each of us placed a shovelful of earth in the grave.
The grief was too overwhelming for anyone to speak, so I spoke for all of us.
“Lyra, you were the gentlest, kindest dog we have ever known. You will be in our hearts forever.”
Choking back tears, and as I had upon Newton’s death two years before, I recited “The Rainbow Bridge”:
Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge…
24
What Dogs Are Really Thinking
DIA DE LOS MUERTOS 2012
IT HAD BEEN TWO years since the inception of the Dog Project, and our shrine to the dead was now one soul larger. I thought back to the weeks following Lyra’s death. Nobody in the house had been the same. Maddy missed cuddling with the big teddy bear, and Kat longed for Lyra’s happy, vacant face staring up at her from the foot of the kitchen table. Even Callie had lost a little bit of her spark and had taken to following me around the house. Helen was morose and cried herself to sleep with Lyra’s collar in her grip.
After all we had accomplished, I wondered whether Lyra had been trying to tell me something. I supposed it had been possible, but I also knew that her personality was such that even if something had been bothering her, she wouldn’t have given any indication. It was the way of the golden retriever. Unflappable and perennially friendly, these are the reasons why goldens are so popular.
But the traits that make goldens so lovable also make it harder to know what they are thinking. I had learned to read Callie but I had taken Lyra for granted. For some time after Lyra’s death I faulted myself for this oversight. But gazing at Lyra’s picture, I realized just how different our dogs had been. Callie was a hunter. Lyra wasn’t. Although Lyra had come from a line of dogs bred for hunting and retrieving, she had never displayed any of those traits. She had never even taken to swimming.
Finally, after two years, the Dog Project had begun to find clues to why we love dogs so much and how dogs became who they are. Eventually, our results might even explain why dogs and humans came together thousands of years ago. The brain data pointed to dogs’ unique interspecies social intelligence. In answer to the question “What are dogs thinking?” the grand conclusion was this: they’re thinking about what we’re thinking. The dog-human relationship was not one-sided. With their high degree of social and emotional intelligence, dogs reciprocated our feelings toward them. They truly are First Friend.
Throughout the world, the two most popular pets are dogs and cats, and both are descended from predatory species. It seems odd that the first animals that humans supposedly domesticated were hunting animals. You would think that it would have been much easier for prehistoric humans to take in more docile species. A common explanation for this is that dogs helped humans hunt while cats caught vermin. While plausible, this theory assumes that humans domesticated animals because of their usefulness in survival.
The results from the Dog Project suggest a different explanation. While the caudate activation in the dogs’ brains shows that they transfer the meaning of a hand signal to something rewarding like hot dogs, the other brain regions activating point toward a theory of mind. Our results support a theory of self-domestication based on dogs’ superior social cognition and their ability to reciprocate in human relationships. Moreover, these interspecies social skills evolved from dogs’ predatory past.
Apart from humans, strong evidence for theory of mind has been found in only monkeys and apes, which have social cognition for primates but not necessarily other animals. Dogs are much better than apes at interspecies social cognition. Dogs easily bond with humans, cats, livestock, and pretty much any animal. Monkeys, chimpanzees, and apes will not do this without a lot of training from a young age. And even then, I would never trust an ape.
The different types of social cognition may be a result of the different diets of the species. Apes eat fruits, grasses, seeds, and sometimes meat. Like humans, they are omnivorous. Dogs (and cats), on the other hand, are mostly carnivorous. This means that dogs’ ancestors, the wolves, had to hunt their prey. Apart from humans, primates do not depend on meat for a substantial part of their diet.
Hunting is hard. It is not as simple as waiting for prey to wander by. Predator species must outsmart their prey. To some extent, this means that predators must get in the mind of their prey. A lion, for example, stalks a gazelle by anticipating what it is going to do, but the gazelle only reacts. All predators, whether they hunt alone or in packs, had to evolve an interspecies theory of mind to be successful. The brain-imaging results suggested that through evolution, dogs somehow adapted their ancestors’ skills in reading the mind of other animals from a predatory capacity to one of coexistence.
Around twenty-seven thousand years ago, a subspecies of wolves domesticated themselves and became dogs. During this period, the ice sheets had reached their greatest extent, stretching as far south as Germany in Europe and New York City in North America. The ice sheets would have pushed humans who had previously migrated north to move south again. The wolves, who were well adapted to cold climates, also would have moved south following the ice sheets. As a result, both humans and wolves probably came into contact with each other more frequently.
Why wouldn’t they have eaten each other? Perhaps they did. But more likely, a few wolves realized that they could hang around humans. Some researchers have suggested that the wolves survived by scavenging from human leftovers. However, John Bradshaw has pointed out that wolves require a prodigious amount of food, and it is unlikely that a wolf could have survived exclusively off human garbage. Others have suggested that wolves helped humans hunt. This might have been possible, but even modern dogs need to be trained to help the hunter. And wolves are not nearly as trainable as dogs. Moreover, dogs appear almost nowhere in prehistoric cave art that otherwise depicts human hunting activity.
The results from the Dog Project, however, support a much simpler theory. Because wolves were predators, they were already well evolved for intuiting the behavior of other animals, which meant that wolves had a high level of interspecies social cognition, perhaps even a theory of mind. For wolves used to hunting, it would have been a trivial mental feat to learn the habits of humans. If humans fed them, it would have been simply because they liked having them around, not because wolves provided any survival function. Anthropologists have long known about the universal human tendency to take in animals as pets. Everything from reptiles to birds to mammals. In almost all cases, pets provide no useful function other than it makes humans feel good.
It is not hard to imagine a nomadic tribe of Ice Age humans running into a pack of wolves. A friendlier and more curious wolf might approach the tribe, tentatively at first. A friendly and curious human might leave some food on the perimeter. It wouldn’t take l
ong for the two individuals to get close enough to achieve physical contact. Initially, the wolf would probably split its time between the pack and the humans. However, when either the humans or the wolves moved on, the wolf would have to make a choice of whom to follow. It is easy to imagine an exceptionally social wolf, probably a juvenile male, choosing the humans. The human, also probably a child, would see that the wolf was following her and continue to divert food to the wolf.
This scenario, however, would not result in any physical changes in the wolf, at least not for a long time. It is unlikely that an individual group of humans could have supported more than one wolf. As a result, there would have been no opportunity for the wolf to breed with other like-minded wolves. I suspect these “one-off” domestication events happened sporadically throughout the period from twenty-seven thousand years ago until about fifteen thousand years ago. Only when humans stopped being nomadic and stayed in one place long enough to span the reproductive cycle of the wolf did physical evolution start to take off, and the wolf morphed into the dog. The remaining wolves—those who wanted nothing to do with humans—gave rise to the wolves we know today. Modern wolves must represent the opposite end of the canid spectrum from dogs.
The defining trait of dogs, therefore, is their interspecies social intelligence, an ability to intuit what humans and other animals are thinking. Wolves do this to hunt prey. But dogs evolved their social intelligence into living with other species instead of eating them. Dogs’ great social intelligence means that they probably also have a high capacity for empathy. More than intuiting what we think, dogs may also feel what we feel. Dogs have emotional intelligence. Just like people, if dogs can be happy, then surely they can be sad and lonely.
Throughout the Dog Project, I had been struck by how perfectly dogs and humans complemented each other. Humans, even with our powerful brains and capacity for abstract thought, are still slaves to our emotions, which dogs will pick up on and resonate with. And the most powerful emotion of all is love. Despite the complexities of human relationships, the fundamental attribute of love is empathy. To love, and be loved, is to feel what another feels and have that returned. It really is that simple. If people do this with each other, it seems perfectly natural for us to do it with animals. People become intensely attached to their pets. Every day, on my way to work, I pass a professional building with a sign advertising grief counseling for pet loss. It is not an exaggeration to say that for many people, their pets are their primary relationships and that they love their cats and dogs more than people. This is why it hurts so much when we lose them.
We were not a one-dog household. The grief at Lyra’s passing had been profound, but the emptiness had been worse. Eventually, the entire family, including Callie, once again took a trip to the animal shelter. This time, Callie was there to help pick a new dog to join the family.
Walking down row after row of barking dogs, Callie look-alikes were everywhere. It seemed that every cage held a gaunt village dog. Black fur, white chest, tail in a C. And every single one had the breed listed as pit bull terrier mix. A feist by any other name. The temptation was strong to get a twin for Callie, but Helen insisted on a puppy. Something soft and cuddly—like Lyra, but different.
We zeroed in on a fluffy brindle puppy. He had a long snout and droopy lips and floppy ears that were too big for his head. No doubt about this one. He was a hound. Unlike his neighbors, he wasn’t barking. I crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it in the corner of his pen. He bounded over to it and brought it back to me. This was supposedly the single best test of puppy temperament. A puppy that retrieved an object indicated a predisposition to work with humans. I was sold.
Callie gave him a good sniffing and wagged her tail. It was unanimous.
Continuing our tradition of literary names, Helen and Maddy called him Cato, after the character from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Never mind that Cato was the most dangerous enemy to Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the novel. At least he was bold and single-minded of purpose.
Our Cato, though, was a goofball. Gangly and awkward, he ran around the house, tripping over his feet and doing somersaults. Because of his penchant for putting everything in his mouth, he was dubbed the “fur ball with teeth.”
By the time Cato was six months old, his personality had begun to emerge. He seemed to move through the teething stage without too much destruction, although he had an obsession with the tags on clothing. He also liked to unravel toilet paper rolls and drag a trail of paper out of the bathroom.
Kat noted the eerie similarity to Newton.
“I think Cato is Newton reincarnated,” she said. “Those are the exact same things Newton used to do.” She was right. Even though Cato had been, in some way, a replacement for Lyra, he was closer to being a new Newton.
Helen, now thirteen years old, wanted to be primarily responsible for raising Cato.
“Do you know what that means?” I asked.
“I will have to let him out at night until he is housebroken.”
“Yes.”
“And I will have to train Cato to sit and stay and walk.” Cato heard his name and jumped into Helen’s lap. He started licking her face.
“You will feed him?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“And you will pick up his poops on walks?”
Helen hesitated and thought about it. “Umm, I don’t know about that.”
I signed up Helen and Cato for puppy class at CPT. Mark’s class was a gentle introduction to basic training for both puppies and owners and let the puppies socialize with other dogs in a safe environment. Helen beamed in delight when she learned how to get Cato to sit and lie down. Like Callie, his love of hot dogs made training a breeze.
Of course, there was more to raising a puppy than basic training. If I had learned nothing else in the Dog Project, it was how to communicate better. Dogs come ready-made to soak up the social rules of the household. It was our human inconsistencies that made it difficult for them.
Humans emit a constant stream of signals. We talk constantly. Our bodies are in motion. We wave our hands in wild patterns in feeble attempts to communicate emotions. It isn’t at all clear how much of this verbal and physical chatter is actually necessary. I realized that Callie ignored most of the family’s gesticulations, instead reserving her attention to the signals that carried useful information. I respected her regal demeanor. What, two years ago, I had mistaken for aloofness, I now understood to be an economy of attention. She had revealed herself to be capable of great feats of mentalizing when working with me as part of the Dog Project. If she wasn’t interested in what I was saying, I realized that it was because I wasn’t being clear in what I wanted.
After spending hours staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Callie, we had achieved a level of communication that I don’t think I had ever had with a dog. Not even Newton. I had learned to read some of Callie’s body language, especially her eyes. Her flicks of attention telegraphed what caught her interest. The photographs and video footage from the Dog Project made it obvious that the dogs’ attention was focused on the humans. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but when I replayed the footage, it was impossible to ignore. The dogs were watching us, trying to figure out what we were thinking and how to shape their own behavior to fit in.
Consistency and clarity. That was the ticket. I resolved to be more consistent—with both dogs and humans alike.
After one of the puppy classes, Helen asked me, “Could Cato be in the Dog Project?”
“He’s too young,” I replied.
“How old does he have to be?”
“At least a year old.”
“But,” Helen opined, “he’s really smart. I bet he could hold his head still.”
“He probably could. But puppies’ brains aren’t fully grown. We wouldn’t know how to compare his brain to an adult brain like Callie’s.”
Helen took this in. “Could I start training him so that he’ll be ready by the time he’s
one year old?”
“Sure,” I said. “But why do you want him to be in the Dog Project?”
Helen stroked Cato’s head. “So I can know what he’s thinking.”
I smiled. I knew exactly how she felt.
Epilogue
Two years and two dogs. Two dogs scanned and two dogs gone. The Dog Project started as an idea born from the grief of losing our pug Newton but blossomed into something bigger than any of us could have expected. Up until that point, I had kept my feelings toward dogs mostly to myself. But after we published the initial results with Callie and McKenzie, there was an outpouring of support from people all over the world. I was moved by how strongly people wanted to know what their dogs were thinking.
One of the first people I heard from was Jessie Lendennie, a poet and managing editor at the publisher Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Jessie was kind enough to send me an anthology of poems, Dogs Singing, that she had compiled from poets all over the world. It is a remarkable tribute to the powerful effect that dogs have on people. I found it inspiring as the Dog Project progressed beyond just two dogs.
Moving forward was a risky move. We still had no funding to speak of. The only reason we got as far as we did was through the volunteer efforts of Mark and Melissa and all the people in my lab, especially Andrew. Scanner time still cost $500 an hour, and there were no freebies in that department. I had paid for scan costs out of discretionary research funds that I had accumulated over the years, but at the end of the hot dog and smell experiments, we had to ask ourselves: What now?
We had the only dogs in the world that were trained to go into an MRI. We could keep dreaming up questions to ask about how the canine brain worked, but there were limits in what we could learn from just two subjects. If the Dog Project was to continue to decipher what our furry friends think about us, the path was clear: we needed more dogs. If we had more dogs, we could sort out the questions about how many of the differences between Callie and McKenzie were because of their genetics, their environment, or just random day-to-day fluctuations in their mood, which surely must happen, just like humans. We all wanted to know about the differences in breeds.
How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain Page 21