I am convinced that giving proper consideration to the emotional life of dogs is not just an academic exercise; it has real and practical implications for their welfare and their relationships with people. But not all scientists agree that dog emotion is even a proper subject for investigation. Some behavioural scientists think that every attempt should be made to explain the behaviour of other species without referring to emotions at all, because emotions are, ultimately, subjective and therefore not completely accessible to scientific investigation.1 Others think it is acceptable to ascribe emotions to our nearest relatives – perhaps just the apes, or maybe the higher primates – but are more inclined to restrict themselves to more mechanistic explanations of behaviour in less closely related species, including dogs. Of course, most pet owners would find this degree of scepticism absurd – they firmly believe in the emotional lives of their pets. These points of view are so divergent that many scientists have simply come to regard owners as deluded, while dog owners dismiss science as too out of touch with the realities of dog ownership.
But in fact the human mind is sufficiently sophisticated to comprehend both views simultaneously. Subjective and objective perspectives of emotion can exist side by side even within the same person. Scientists will casually talk about their own pets as if they have complex internal emotional lives, but if pressed will admit that there is little direct evidence that the animal is actually experiencing precisely those emotions.2 Does this mean that they are living in a fantasy world at home, in which they have fallen into the trap of behaving ‘as if’ animals have emotions, but then return to objective reality at work, and deny that such emotions exist at all? Although this seeming contradiction may appear paradoxical, I do not see it that way. Rather, I consider it a natural expression of the complexity of human thought and consciousness.
It is well established that the human mind loves to project emotions and intentions on to everything, especially things that it cannot control. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures – to phenomena such as the weather, and even inanimate objects like rivers and mountains – is an intrinsic part of human nature.3 So are zoomorphism and totemism, the complementary processes by which humans ascribe the characteristics of animals to other humans. We talk about dogs as being ‘little people’, and we may refer to a person as ‘a dog’ (though what we might mean by that will vary from culture to culture and possibly with the gender of the target!). Does that mean we do not know that dogs and people are different, not only in outward appearance, but also in their inner characteristics? We may blur the distinction from time to time, but mostly these attributions are metaphors, and we use them with full awareness of that fact.
As humans, we have the ability to stand back from a situation, detaching ourselves from its emotional component and making logical decisions on what to do next. Parents can simultaneously experience an emotional bond to their children while objectively analysing their transgressions and the motivations behind them. Our capacity to detach ourselves from our automatic emotional reaction to something they have done, in order to work out the most effective response, does not mean that the emotional response is in any way demeaned or diminished. Equally, why should we not express ourselves in anthropomorphic terms as animal-lovers, while being simultaneously aware that such projections may be the product of our imaginations? I cannot see any dissonance – as psychologists call it – in such behaviour.
Without an emotional bond, there would be no pets – and yet this bond can sometimes create problems for dogs and humans alike. The emotional bond between owner and pet is often, perhaps to some degree always, bound up in anthropomorphic projections.4 Many people appear unthinkingly to treat their animals as if they were little people. Yet most pet owners are also capable of conceiving of their animals’ behaviour in a logical way, especially when decisions have to be made that affect the well-being of that animal. It is perfectly possible to hold a logical view on the ‘otherness’ of animals, without interfering one iota with the emotional aspects of the relationship. It is when these two approaches become blurred that the relationship is destined for problems and potential breakdown. For example, owners who treat their dog as if it were a person may project responsibilities on to it that the dog is not even aware of, let alone capable of responding appropriately to. And consequently owners may feel justified in punishing the dog for something they mistakenly think the dog ‘knows it has done’.
Even owners who treat their dogs quite rationally can fall into the trap of presuming that they know more than they actually do about how their dog is feeling. In one study conducted in Switzerland,5 the investigators showed sixty-four Swiss dog owners, and sixty-four otherwise similar people with little or no experience of dogs, still photos and short video clips of dogs interacting with one another as well as with people. Both groups were able to correctly associate dogs’ facial expressions with obvious emotions and behavioural states such as fear and inquisitiveness. But this was not the case with other emotions, such as anger and jealousy; moreover, the dog owners tended to be more anthropomorphic in their descriptions than the non-owners. The closeness of their relationship was evidently affecting their judgement.
Dog owners may think they can interpret canine communication, but in actuality they are often misled by their anthropomorphism. In the second part of the same study, the dog owners were shown a video clip of an owner getting her dog ready for a walk – putting on her coat, putting the dog on the leash – and then immediately removing the leash, taking off her coat and ignoring the dog for a few minutes. The dog followed her to the door, then went back to where she kept her coat, and finally sat down watching her while she directed her attention elsewhere. Shown the whole sequence, almost all the participants identified the dog’s emotion while it was being ignored as ‘disappointment’. But of those who were shown only the last part of the scene, the part after the owner had left the picture, very few people identified the dog’s emotional state in this way. Clearly, those who had seen the whole clip were projecting on to the dog’s body-language their own sense of how they would feel under those particular circumstances. The dog’s actual behaviour was almost irrelevant. The implication, of course, is that even the most well-meaning and rational of owners may know significantly less than they think they do about their dogs’ inner lives. Those owners who regard their dog as a ‘little person’ may even unconsciously prefer explanations for their dog’s behaviour that rely more on projections of what they guess the dog is feeling than on what its body-language is telling them.
A better understanding among pet owners of the emotional life of dogs would improve their relationships with their pets. It would enable them to deal with their dog’s behaviour in a reasoned and informed way, ultimately enhancing rather than diminishing the emotional depth of the relationship. Some dog owners may treat their dogs as little people, attributing mental and emotional capabilities to them that they do not actually have, simply because it has never been pointed out to them that there is a more rational basis for understanding why their dogs behave the way they do. This more rational perspective, in turn, can allow them to make sensible decisions about how to resolve any problems that arise.
In order to understand the emotional lives of dogs, we first have to come to grips with what emotions actually are. Unfortunately, psychologists are still not in total agreement about what emotions consist of or, indeed, precisely how they should be discussed. One key issue is the role that emotions play in guiding behaviour. Some philosophers have suggested that, even in man, the brain controls behaviour directly, and that what we experience as emotion is merely our consciousness commenting on what is going on. In this view, full consciousness is required for emotions to exist at all. Since dogs do not appear to have the same degree of consciousness that we have, this seems to suggest that they cannot experience emotions either, or at least not in a way that would be intelligible to us.
However, we no longer
have to think about emotional states in such an abstract way. New techniques now available to neuroscientists have enabled a fuller understanding of how emotions are generated; specifically, through an interplay between hormones, the brain and the rest of the nervous system. For example, MRI scanning can show what is going on in the brains of fully conscious humans (and one day soon, it is to be hoped, dogs too), helping to pinpoint where in the brain emotions are generated.
It is now generally agreed that what we experience as emotions are an important part of the machinery that allows us to lead our everyday lives, and not just a side effect of consciousness. They are thought to act as essential filters, enabling us to make appropriate decisions at the right moment, without waiting for our brains to come up with all the possible courses of action and attempt to choose logically between them. In this conception, emotions exist for the purpose of providing a rough-and-ready indicator of where we are in relation to where we ought to be. If I see a figure approaching me at dead of night out of a dark alley, fear will instantly propel me in the opposite direction. If someone breaks into my house while I am at home, anger will take over and make me aggressive towards the intruder. The first of these responses is probably as effective today as it was for my hunter-gatherer ancestors 100,000 years ago. The second was probably more appropriate then than it is now, and I shall have to keep my anger in check if I want to remain within the limits of reasonable force that the law allows in deterring intruders. Nevertheless, anger does channel my brain towards the immediate threat (the intruder) rather than wasting its time on less urgent tasks that can wait (such as working out how I am going to get the newly broken lock on the door repaired, or trying to remember where I wrote down the phone number of my insurance company).
If emotions are indeed survival mechanisms, then they most likely evolved to fulfil specific functions. And those functions – avoiding danger, counteracting threats, forming pair-bonds that enhance the survival of offspring – are not unique to man. They apply just as much to wolves as to our own human ancestors. Indeed, since both wolves and humans are mammals, and our brains and hormone systems are based on the same biological pattern, it is highly likely that both our emotional systems evolved from those possessed by our common mammalian ancestor. It therefore stands to reason that our emotional lives, and those of dogs, are similar. However, because millions of years of evolution separate us, it is also highly likely that they are far from identical.
In order to investigate further these similarities and differences, I am going to take it as read that emotions, far from being a luxury that only humans can appreciate, are a fundamental part of the biological systems that regulate behaviour. I am also going to assume that, like any other biological system, emotions have been selected for, and subsequently refined by, the process of evolution. The model I will adopt divides emotions into three components.6 The most primitive level involves responses of the autonomic nervous system (the part that we are unaware of but which keeps the various parts of our bodies functioning for us), acting in concert with the hormones that are associated with arousal, fear, stress and affection and so on – Emotion I in the accompanying diagram. As humans, we are not always aware of these autonomic responses (exceptions include the pounding heartbeat and sweaty palms triggered by fear) but thanks to the techniques of modern physiology they can all be measured and understood. Emotion II is the corresponding behaviour; the postures, displays and signals (and in the case of dogs, these most likely include odour signals that are imperceptible to us humans). Emotion III is what we are most interested in here, the feelings that we, as human beings, experience subjectively. They are what we refer to in everyday terms as emotions and moods, as in ‘I feel anxious’, or ‘I’m happy today’, or indeed ‘I love my dog’.
The three components of emotion. Emotion I is the sum of changes in hormone levels and in the nervous system. Emotion II is the outward expression of emotion, for example in body-language and vocalizations. These can be detected by other dogs (and people), whose reactions can be perceived and may subsequently modify how emotions are felt and reacted to. Emotion III is the subjective experience of the emotion itself, for example, ‘fear’. Arrows indicate interactions.
What is the point, then, in also labelling both the underlying physiology and the associated behaviour as ‘emotion’? In the context of improving our understanding of dogs, this model emphasizes that if we can measure a change in the underlying physiology (for example, a sudden increase in the stress hormone adrenalin), and at the same time observe the corresponding behaviour (the animal runs away), we can be reasonably sure that the dog is also experiencing the matching emotion (fear). Quite what that experience is like for the dog, we can never entirely know – just as we cannot even know precisely how another human being is feeling. Feelings are private, but that does not mean that we cannot and do not take them into account. When dealing with other people, we just make a best guess and proceed accordingly – and if our first guess is wrong, there is a good chance that the other person will let us know. Dogs, however, may be less good at letting us know when we misjudge them, or perhaps we are not as clever as we should be at decoding their signals. Either way, what is important is trying our hardest to understand their emotional lives.
My second reason for considering this three-level conceptualization of emotion to be helpful is that it proposes that emotions are useful to the animal: they act as special-purpose information-processing systems, alongside the general systems of learning and cognition (to which humans have added symbolic language). Emotions are an essential aid to survival, and if dogs possess the two ‘lower’ levels (and without a doubt they do), then it is difficult to maintain that they do not also experience the third level, the emotional reactions.
My third reason is that this conceptualization emphasizes an evolutionary continuum. It posits that human emotions, while possibly unique in some respects, have evolved from those of mammals, which in turn have evolved from those of reptiles, and so on. Unless one subscribes to the view that human-type consciousness and self-awareness are absolutely essential to the experience of all emotion, it is very difficult to deny – even from such an apparently dry, purely scientific viewpoint – that dogs must experience at least some form of emotion.
Alongside the many advantages of this model, however, there is one major disadvantage: the implicit assumption that subjective emotion (Emotion III) always emerges as overt behaviour (Emotion II). In humans, most emotions are also linked to facial expressions that vary little from culture to culture, thus serving as a near-universal language of feelings. However, we can all think of situations in which we try to hide our feelings, or project emotions that are different from those we are actually feeling. Dogs, too, have expressive faces – and bodies – that give away much, but possibly not all, of what they are feeling.
It is worth briefly considering why dogs have evolved such expressive faces. Cats have not. Cats suffer in silence. Cats can communicate extreme fear, or extreme anger, but what about anxiety, or joy?7 This striking difference between cats and dogs stems from their evolutionary histories. Domestic cats are descended from solitary hunters, an ‘every man for himself’ culture: two male (or female) cats are essentially lifelong competitors in the business of passing on their genes to the next generation. A gene that made one cat likely to look pleased with itself when it had just returned from an especially successful hunting trip would die out, because it would contribute to its rival’s success at finding food, not its own. The absence of a connection between communication (Emotion II in the model) and the physiological and subjective components of emotion (Emotion I and Emotion III) can thus sometimes be in the animal’s own interest.
In fact, across the animal kingdom as a whole, the honest display of emotions is favoured only in certain quite specific circumstances – namely, when co-operation is the desired result. Humans are among the most co-operative species alive, and indeed many of these special factors apply to us. A
s a species we evolved in the context of extended-family groups, and so, according to the theory of kin selection, we should tend to be honest with one another. Also, we are extremely good at recognizing other individuals of our own species and recalling our previous encounters with them. Accordingly, we have highly sophisticated cognitive mechanisms for detecting deception among those familiar to us. In other words, most of us are very good at detecting when someone we know is hiding his or her true feelings.
It is worth detouring briefly to look at the evolution of human body-language – to see why the connection between facial expression and some emotions should be so transparent in our own species – before going on to speculate on whether the same might apply to dogs.
The human face is particularly expressive. And our facial expressions for the more primitive emotions – such as fear, joy and anger – seem to be the same the world over. Human expression is clearly a species-typical, evolved trait. The idea underlying this trait was first proposed by Charles Darwin, who attempted to apply the same principle to dogs (see box, pp. 158–9 – ‘Darwin’s Dogs’). Indeed, scientists have recently discovered that the facial muscles used to generate these particular expressions are common to virtually all humans, whereas other facial muscles vary widely between races and between individuals. As a species, we cannot function socially without facial expressions – facial paralysis leads almost inevitably to isolation and depression.
Our facial expressions are directly connected to our emotions. Just watch someone’s face when she is talking to a friend on the phone: she will smile, frown and so on, just as though the other person can see her. One of the functions of our facial expressions – perhaps even their primary function – is to let people know what we are feeling, not only while we are talking to them, but also while we are listening to them. Especially when listening, we often express the emotions that we think we should be feeling, even if we’re not actually experiencing them. The intention in such instances is to convince the speaker not only that we are paying attention to her, but also that we are on her emotional wavelength. Overall, our unconscious facial expressions tend to reassure those around us that we are trustworthy.
In Defence of Dogs Page 19