The dog behind the barrier is watching a game of tug between a person and a second dog
If I’ve given the impression that I’m trying to portray dogs as just “dumb animals,” it’s the wrong impression. I know they can be very smart, but in their way—and not necessarily in our way. One problem with much of the research on canine cognition is that there is always an implicit comparison with our own: With what children’s age are dogs comparable? Can dogs learn human language? And so on. The question that remains is this (and it would be a very difficult question to even begin to answer): Do dogs have cognitive abilities that do not have any direct counterpart in our own? For example, we know that their sense of smell is much more powerful than ours. Are they perhaps capable of processing the information they gather through their noses in ways that we do not yet understand?
CHAPTER 8
Emotional (Un) sophistication
Dogs are smart when it comes to learning about things, people, and other dogs. Nevertheless, they have their limitations. Their lack of self-awareness, their lack of awareness that we have minds different from their own, and their inability to reflect on their own actions all restrict their capacity to comprehend the world in the same way that we humans do. Furthermore, because of such limitations, dogs’ emotional lives are likely to be much more straightforward than our own, meaning that they may not be capable of feeling many of the subtler emotions that we ourselves take for granted. Nevertheless, dogs share our capacity to feel joy, love, anger, fear, and anxiety. They also experience pain, hunger, thirst, and sexual attraction. It is thus perfectly possible for humans to both understand and empathize with what they are feeling. Yet this facility is also a trap. It can seduce us into presuming that dogs’ emotional lives are identical to ours—that in any given situation (as we see it) they are feeling what we would feel. In such instances we are drawn into acting accordingly, treating our dogs as if they had exactly the intelligence and emotional capacities that we do. Since this is not the case, our actions may be meaningless to the dog—or, indeed, may mean something quite different from what we intended. Hence a thorough understanding of the full emotional capacities of dogs, and which of these capacities are simpler than our own, is essential to their well-being and to the integrity of our relationships with them.
One notable difference between dogs’ emotional lives and our own is that their sense of time is much less sophisticated. Their ability to think back into their past, to mull over what has happened—even quite recently—and make sense of it, seems almost nonexistent. Dogs are therefore much more inclined than we are to draw cause-and-effect conclusions based on the occurrence of two events one immediately after the other—even when a moment’s reflection, if only they were capable of such a thing, would make it obvious that such a connection was unlikely. Dogs don’t “do” self-reflection.
But the mere fact that dogs lack the level of consciousness that we have does not mean they lack rich emotional lives. The science of canine consciousness is still in flux, but the current consensus is that dogs possess some degree of consciousness. In other words, they are probably aware of their emotions, but to a lesser extent than humans are. Scientists generally agree that our consciousness is much more complex than that of other mammals—in part, owing to the massively larger neocortex in the human brain as compared to that of mammals like dogs.1 Indeed, we humans are able not only to experience emotions but also to examine them dispassionately, to ask ourselves questions such as “Why was I so anxious last week?” Dogs seem to be incapable of this kind of self-awareness. All of the available evidence suggests that their emotional reactions are confined to events in the here-and-now and involve little, if any, retrospection.
Consider “guilt,” something many owners are convinced, without really thinking about it, that their dogs must feel. Does the following sound familiar? Dog does something “wrong” (as far as owner is concerned) when owner is out of the room; owner comes back, looks at dog; dog looks “guilty,” owner smacks dog. But what if dogs don’t have an emotion similar to our “guilt”? If so, they will not be able to associate their bad behavior with the punishment. So what does the smack teach them? Consider this possibility: “When my owner comes into the room, sometimes I get a hug, sometimes a smack. What will happen next time?” The result: a twinge of anxiety that, if repeated enough times, can turn a sensitive dog into a cringing wreck.
The belief that dogs can feel “guilt” and similar complex emotions is widespread among dog owners. A survey of British dog owners2 revealed that almost all thought that their dogs experienced affection (for their owners, presumably); almost all thought their dogs could feel interest, curiosity, and joy; 93 percent believed that their dogs felt fear; 75 percent believed they felt anxiety, and 67 percent believed they felt anger. The only emotion that the majority thought dogs were unlikely to feel was embarrassment.
Somewhat surprisingly, a high proportion of these owners also believed that their dogs felt jealousy, grief, and guilt. These, along with the other emotions listed in the lower half of the graph, are classified by psychologists as secondary emotions: They require some degree of self-awareness and also an appreciation of what others are thinking—namely, a “theory of mind” (as discussed in the previous chapter). Despite what their owners believe, it is not obvious that dogs have the mental capacity to actually experience all or, indeed, any of these seven emotions. Since each requires a slightly different combination of self-reflection and other aspects of intelligence, each deserves to be examined separately. I will look specifically at jealousy, grief, and guilt, all of which happen to have received some degree of attention from scientists studying dogs.
Percentage of UK owners who thought their dogs could feel particular emotions
Jealousy in humans springs from a suspicion that someone might displace us in a relationship with a person we love. What we feel initially may be unfocused fear or anger—the extent of which may depend upon our previous experiences with close relationships. However, this is quickly modified by our cognitive evaluation of the specific threat: what we know and feel about the person who is doing the displacing, what has been our relationship with that third party, and so on. A moment’s reflection will also confirm that how jealous we feel, or how guilty, depends on how attached we are to the person to whom the emotion is directed.
To feel jealous, an animal would have to be capable of recognizing others as individuals and to possess some concept of the quality of the relationships between those individuals. Because dogs are self-evidently very attached to their owners, it seems logical that they should feel jealous when their owner pays attention to another dog. There is also good evidence that dogs do have some comprehension of relationships between people and other dogs. Thus there is a prima facie case for taking seriously the belief that dogs can feel “jealous.”
One strand of evidence comes from the consistency with which dog owners describe the triggers for “jealousy” in their pets. In a study where researchers asked owners to report what specific behaviors their dogs engaged in that suggested jealousy, and under what circumstances, all said that these behaviors occurred when they were giving attention, and especially affection, to another person or dog living in the same household. 3 The owners consistently described in their pets what clinicians classify as attention-seeking behavior. Half the dogs simply leaned or pushed against their owners, usually in between the owner and the object of the “jealousy.” More than a third made some kind of vocal protest—barking, whining, or growling. In connection with the growling, several owners reported aggression, to the extent of biting any other dog that the owner made a fuss over. Thus dogs’ behavior, when confronted with situations in which we might expect them to feel “jealousy” toward their owners, appears consistent with our expectations of this emotion. They behave as if they were trying to interfere with an interaction that (as they see it) is threatening their relationship with their owner. Often, as noted earlier, they literally interpose
themselves between their owner and the object of the unwanted attention—whether that is the owner’s spouse or a dog visiting the household.
In short, it’s entirely plausible that dogs feel something we would label “jealousy.” Of course, whether or not jealousy “feels” the same to them as it does to us humans is essentially unknowable. In dogs, it may be little more complex than a feeling of anxiety. But it seems to occur only at the specific moment of interaction between, for example, the owner and another dog: We have no evidence that dogs can feel jealous about their recollections of that interaction—a major feature of jealousy in human relationships. There is thus no sign, for instance, that they can become obsessively jealous.
The evidence that dogs can experience any emotions more complex than jealousy, however, is flimsy. Many psychologists believe that self-consciousness is required for feelings such as guilt, pride, and shame to exist. Scientists point to the massive expansion of the neocortex in the evolution of our own species, as the physical site where such advanced information processing takes place. By comparison, the dog’s cortex is tiny, suggesting that it simply does not have the capacity to generate self-consciousness.
Nevertheless, a minority of academics4 have used largely anecdotal evidence to support the idea that some mammals, at least, do have sufficient self-consciousness to experience more than the basic set of primitive emotions (see the box titled “The Changing Face of Animal Emotion”). For example, dogs have been described as capable of compassion, gratitude, and disappointment—all of which require self-reflection.
Because our understanding of emotion in our own species is intimately connected with language, it is not easy for us to conceive of what the more complex emotions might feel like to animals. The basic emotions—including fear, joy, and love—appear during the first year of a human baby’s life. We know this because such emotions manifest as facial expressions. However, the more advanced emotions—guilt and pride, for example—are not linked to universal facial expressions. Moreover, they require learning about what is expected and disapproved of in the society the infant is being raised in, and we have no reason to suppose that dogs can form such concepts. Evidence that human children actually have such feelings does not appear until between eighteen and forty months of age (depending upon the emotion), and few children can describe them completely until they are about eight years old; it appears that they have to go through a period of emotional education, based on the reactions of other people, before they can pinpoint precisely what they are feeling. Because we rely so much on speech to articulate our more complex feelings, it’s difficult for us to imagine what form they might take in a species that is incapable of symbolic language. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that language and symbolic thought are sufficiently necessary to the production of such human emotions as embarrassment, guilt, and pride that dogs are very unlikely to be able to feel them—or at the least, not in a form that would be recognizable to us.
Grief, for example, requires complex cognitive abilities that we thus far have no evidence for in dogs. Many two-dog owners report that when one dog dies, the other dog in the household stops eating, loses interest in going for walks, and generally hangs around looking sorry for itself. Other owners, if pressed, will admit that the death of one dog seemed to make little impression on the surviving dog. I don’t doubt that many dogs react to the disappearance of a dog (or a person) that has lived alongside them for a long time, but I see no reason to suppose that their subjective experience of this is qualitatively different from their reaction to any other protracted separation, emotionally rooted in anxiety. Of course, if the owner of the deceased dog is visibly grieving, the survivor may be having to cope simultaneously with both the disappearance of its canine companion and an inexplicable and unprecedented change in its owner’s behavior. The finality of death is a sophisticated concept, one that even we humans do not develop until we are about six years old, and it is difficult to conceive of why or how such a capacity would have evolved in dogs.
The Changing Face of Animal Emotion
Charles Darwin, a devoted dog lover as well as the proponent of natural selection and the father of modern biology, appears to have been uncertain about how complex dogs’ emotions might be. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, keen to emphasize the evolutionary continuity between man and the other mammals, he wrote: “Most of the more complex emotions are common to the higher animals and ourselves. Everyone has seen how jealous a dog is of his master’s affection, if lavished on any other creature.... [A] dog carrying a basket for his master exhibits in a high degree self-complacency or pride. There can, I think, be no doubt that a dog feels shame, as distinct from fear, and something very like modesty when begging too often for food.” However, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published the following year, he restricted his explanation of canine body-language to simpler emotions, such as fear and affection. So perhaps he had changed his mind.
The nineteenth-century psychologist Lloyd Morgan, also a devoted dog owner, condemned such attributions of complex emotions as anthropomorphisms. This idea was taken further by some animal psychologists, such as John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, who restricted their concept of behavior, even human behavior, to observable processes and thus had no need for such hypothetical constructs as emotions. In the mid-twentieth century, zoologists studying animal behavior were generally dismissive of the inclusion of emotions as explanations for what they observed—although Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, in his book Man Meets Dog, wrote: “[J]ealousy, to which dogs are very prone, can cause horrible effects,” implying that he believed dogs had the capacity for such a complex emotion. Since the genesis of cognitive ethology in the 1970s, more and more biologists are invoking subjectivity as a legitimate area of study in animals, and many would now regard Darwin’s later, if not his original, position as entirely reasonable.
Guilt is another emotion that requires cognitive abilities that, so far, we have no evidence for in dogs. Psychologists classify guilt, along with pride, envy, and one or two others, as self-conscious evaluative emotions. In addition to requiring a sense of self and an understanding of relationships between third parties (as in the case of jealousy), these emotions, at least as experienced by humans, require an extra evaluative capability. For instance, to feel guilt one must be able to make comparisons between memories of one’s own behavior and mental representations of standards, rules, or goals. In humans, these standards are learned and strongly influenced by culture. Moreover, it is believed that they do not begin to develop in children until their third or even fourth year—a year or more later than is the case with the simpler self-conscious (nonevaluative) emotions such as jealousy.
Guilt is widely believed to be a feature of the dog’s emotional life. Owners often describe their dogs as looking “guilty” if they return home to find that the dog has done something it isn’t allowed to do when they are at home. This could be something as simple as sleeping on the sofa or something more serious, such as chewing one of the owner’s shoes. In order to feel guilty, a dog would have to have some mental representation of what it is and is not allowed to do—which seems reasonable. But it would then have to compare this with what it has actually done over the past few hours, while the owner was away. This seems more problematic, as the dog would need to recall not only the events in question but also their social context (i.e., owner not there). Biologists are fairly sure that dogs do not have the mental capacity to understand the impact of social context on their own actions; if they were, they should be capable of, for example, deception. Biologists are even less sure that dogs can recall the specific contexts in which individual events occurred, after the events themselves had ended. At present, then, there has to be considerable doubt about whether dogs can actually experience an emotion similar to our “guilt,” since it is doubtful that they have all the cognitive abilities necessary.
However, let us for a moment give dogs the benefit of the (cons
iderable) doubt and assume that they can feel guilt. In order for dogs to communicate that guilty feeling, they would have to behave in some specific way that unequivocally signaled that feeling to their owners, before the owners became aware that the dogs had done something to feel guilty about. Although dogs could conceivably learn some specific piece of behavior that would convey this message, it’s very difficult to surmise why such an ability might have evolved. Would it be sensible for a young wolf to walk up to its father and confess that it had eaten the best piece of meat of a kill while his back was turned? Unlikely. However, let’s entertain for a moment the possibility that this is one of the cognitive abilities that dogs are supposed to have gained during the course of domestication. What happens after a dog signals its “guilt”? Most likely, it will be punished by its owner. Why would a dog learn a social signal that immediately triggers punishment? The punishment should inhibit the performance of the signal, not promote it.
Thus it is probably not surprising that, in a study examining the kinds of behavior that dog owners took as evidence of guilt in their pets,5 all that the scientist found were signs of fear or affection. Owners were asked to describe what their dogs did that made them believe the dogs were feeling guilty. They came up with a long list of behaviors, including avoiding eye contact, lying down and rolling over, dropping the tail, rapidly wagging the tail in this lowered position, holding the head and/or ears down, moving away, raising a paw, licking, and so on. But all of these behaviors are evident in other situations too—some associated with fear, some with anxiety, and some with affection. None could reasonably be claimed as diagnostic of “guilt.”
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