In Defence of Dogs

by John Bradshaw

  Why are so many dogs prone to this problem? My take on this is that it is not a ‘disorder’ at all, but perfectly natural behaviour. After all, we do not say that human children have a ‘separation disorder’ when they cry for their mothers. We have selected dogs to be highly dependent on us, so that they can easily be made obedient and useful; why is it so surprising that they do not like being left alone?

  There is still a great deal of debate about how many different kinds of separation disorders exist, but two in particular have been verified. In one category are the over-attached dogs that cannot bear even to be shut in a different room from their owners.14 If they are destructive, these dogs tend to target their destruction to the area around the door that the owner has just left through.

  In the second category are dogs which seem quite confident most of the time, but have a phobia – often of loud noises – that sends them into a panic if their owner is not present to provide reassurance. These dogs typically do not show signs of separation distress every time they are left alone, because the trigger, whatever it is, does not always coincide with the owner’s absence. Such dogs sometimes leave clues of their panic, such as a ripped-up sofa cushion that they have tried to bury their head beneath.

  As noted earlier, separation disorders can be difficult to cure once they have become an established habit, in direct contrast to the ease with which they can be prevented. Such disorders constitute as many as one in three of clinical behaviourists’ caseloads, yet it is often only as a last resort that owners seek expert help – after the dog has been performing the behaviour for years, at which point some change in their circumstances forces them to take action. By then, the behaviour may have become habitual, divorced from its original cause (rather like the stereotypic pacing behaviour of big cats, or the weaving behaviour of bears confined in small, boring enclosures), and it will often continue even after the original cause has long since been removed.

  HOME ALONE: CAN DOGS BE TRAINED TO COPE?

  This book is not an instruction manual, but so many dogs seem to suffer when left alone, and prevention is so straightforward, that I have included the following summary of how to teach a dog to be on its own. More detailed advice, prepared by my colleagues Emily Blackwell and Rachel Casey at Bristol University, for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, can be found on their website at http://www.rspca.org.uk/allaboutanimals/pets/dogs/company.

  Most owners equate training with obedience – sit, stay and so on. However, this is only one role for training in responsible pet ownership. Dogs learn all kinds of connections quite spontaneously, and sometimes these need to be directed for the dog’s own well-being. Many dogs learn that when their owner picks up the car keys, an indeterminate period of loneliness follows. The trick is to link such cues to good outcomes – affection, and the owner’s return – before they can become associated with the negative outcome of separation. Thus: pick up keys, praise dog (or feed titbit if this is what motivates your particular dog ). Pick up keys, go to door, praise dog. Pick up keys, go through door, come straight back inside, praise dog. Pick up keys, go out, wait a few seconds (then a minute, then a few minutes, and so on), come back inside, praise dog. After any sign of anxiety from the dog: don’t reward, but go back a stage. The dog learns that these events predict the owner’s return (good outcome), not departure (bad outcome). Result – a dog that doesn’t get anxious when its owner goes out.

  Many dogs, even those who are not particularly emotionally affected by their owners’ absence, also get bored when left alone for long periods, and may end up destroying valued possessions simply for something to do. Such dogs, especially those that love to use their mouths, can be diverted by a meat-flavoured ‘chew’, or a puzzle-feeder filled with a favourite food.

  Because dogs rely so heavily on the scents in their environment, they can sometimes be comforted by having a piece of clothing that smells of their owner in the room where they are left.

  Finally, do not punish your dog when you get home to find he’s done something you’d rather he hadn’t. It will make him more anxious, not less.

  As well as being useful for prevention of separation distress, these tips may also work to calm a dog that has just started to become distressed when left alone. However, if they do not work within a week or two, my recommendation is to seek advice from a qualified clinical behaviourist.

  Although separation distress is far more widespread, the behavioural disorder that grabs all the headlines is, of course, aggression. What they have in common is that their emotional basis is often misrepresented. Dogs that chew up the house when their owners are out are labelled ‘naughty’; dogs that bite are labelled ‘dominant’ or ‘aggressive’, and motivated by anger. Neither label is valid, and neither diagnosis is helpful in finding a humane solution.

  Although canine aggression does not occur on anything like the scale of separation distress, it is not uncommon. Pet dogs very rarely kill other dogs, or people (although when they do, a media frenzy often follows). Pet dogs do, however, bite their owners and members of their owners’ families quite frequently. According to one recent estimate, 4.5 million people are bitten each year in the United States. Although most of these incidents are relatively minor, nearly a million require medical attention, and children are more at risk than adults. Because a dog that bites, especially one that bites children, is socially unacceptable, such cases form the greatest proportion of behaviour consultants’ caseloads. Dogs that have bitten are often euthanized. A great number of dogs would benefit if we could understand better why they bite, and, even more important, what can be done to stop aggression towards people before it gets to the stage of biting.

  Twenty years ago, the explanation seemed obvious. Dogs were believed to bite when they felt that their status in the household was being threatened, and so most cases in which owners or members of their families (as opposed to unfamiliar people) were bitten were described as due to ‘dominance aggression’. The majority of dog behaviour specialists now regret ever having used this term. Why have most of the experts recently changed their minds?

  One review suggests three answers to this question.15 First, owners’ accounts of the behaviour of their dogs around the time of the attacks are not consistent with the idea that they were trying to assert their ‘status’. Rather, the dogs had exhibited body postures more accurately associated with fear and anxiety, with only a tinge of anger; for example, they were often noted to have been trembling immediately before they bit. Immediately after the bite, many had engaged in appeasement and affiliative behaviour, such as crouching, tucking their tail between their legs and licking their lips. Second, most dogs that bite start biting before they are one year old, much younger than they logically should be if they were ready to ‘take over the pack’. Third, and perhaps most telling, those dogs that lived with other dogs were not especially confident with them and thus were certainly not behaving as the ‘dominant dog’ ought to.

  Although every case is different, a logical explanation for a typical dog bite often goes something like this. While they are puppies, dogs try out a number of strategies for dealing with situations that they find threatening – in other words for dealing with fear. Take the example of a dog that, to its owner’s embarrassment, launches into an unprovoked attack whenever it sees dogs of a particular kind – say, small white ones. This dog is unlikely to be a psychopath; rather, it was probably attacked by a small white dog in the past, and as a result is initially fearful of all dogs of similar appearance. Over the course of several such encounters, it will have found that the best way of quelling its fear is to threaten to attack – and the more successful this strategy is, the more likely the dog is to repeat it. This will become especially likely if the dog has not been trained properly, since its owner will be unable to intervene with a command, and by the time the dog has been dragged away its aggressive strategy will already have been reinforced. Similarly, puppies inevitably nip their owners as part
of play. If they discover that nipping gets them what they want, and if their owner happens to ignore all their attempts to communicate by signalling rather than through physical contact, then biting may become their default strategy for dealing with frightening or even just unfamiliar situations.

  If biting works better than anything else, dogs will gradually become more confident about using aggression. They will use it whenever they feel threatened, not just in the context where they originally learned it. It has been noted that people who have highly distorted, anthropomorphic relationships with their dogs are more likely to get bitten, probably because they are very inconsistent in interpreting their dog’s body-language (and potentially explaining why it is little dogs – those most likely to be anthropomorphized, because of their size – not big ones, that bite their owners most). Furthermore, puppies that have a serious illness during their socialization period, and therefore do not have as many opportunities to work out how to deal with challenging situations, are also more likely to bite later in life than dogs that had the full range of opportunities for learning before the fear reaction set in.

  A word of caution: training techniques that suppress aggression using punishment do little to resolve the underlying problem in such cases, although they are often superficially successful in the short term. Fear of a beating will temporarily inhibit the dog from performing its preferred, if unacceptable, way of resolving conflicts. However, it may become even more unpredictably aggressive, when it subsequently encounters circumstances that do not match those under which it has learned that aggression is followed by punishment, for example when the trainer who originally beat it is no longer nearby. Alternatively, it may find an outlet for its misery in some other behaviour, for example, one of the so-called ‘obsessive-compulsive’16 disorders, such as tail-chasing.

  Fear is also the underlying emotion behind some dogs’ threatening behaviour towards unfamiliar people, so-called territorial aggression. A dog that barks and bares its teeth, apparently confidently, when it sees someone passing by on the street will often be the same dog that adopts a much more ambiguous posture if that person stops by the gate. It may then begin to cower, albeit still barking loudly, when the same person actually enters the property – hence the truth in the old saying ‘His bark is worse than his bite’. That dog will have learned that barking is a good way of keeping people it is not sure about at a distance. Only if cornered may it resort to an actual attack.

  Fear is also the motivation behind aggression in dogs that have been specifically trained, using punishment, to attack intruders. In their case the fear is triggered by the memory of the handler’s beating, and they attack the intruder in order to alleviate that fear. In the case of the unruly pet dog the fear stems not from any threat posed by the owner, but from the imagined threat of an unfamiliar person. Nevertheless, from the dog’s perspective there is an underlying similarity: it is pursuing a learned course of action that enables it to avoid a negative emotion, fear.

  As far as we can tell, dogs experience the same range of basic emotions that we do, both positive and negative. Much of their behaviour, both that which we cherish and that which we do not, is driven by those emotions: joy, love, fear, anxiety, anger. The idea that animals act like robots, acting without feeling, self-evidently cannot be true of the dog (and therefore is equally unlikely to be true of other mammals); we simply find dogs to be more expressive than other animals, so their emotions are there for all to see. These emotions are part of the biological systems that regulate and guide dogs’ behaviour, and as such are essential to the capacity for learning that allows dogs to adapt to the world that they find themselves in today.

  However, dogs and humans may experience even these basic emotions in subtly different ways. One of the paradoxes of human behaviour is that we actively seek out and apparently enjoy some self-evidently negative emotions such as fear, sadness and anger: how else to explain the popularity of horror films, thrillers and tearjerkers? But there is nothing to indicate that dogs ever do this, suggesting that consciousness has given humans a unique capacity to evaluate, and then attempt to distance themselves from, such emotions. Conversely, dogs may experience fear, anger, joy and love more intensely and in more nuanced ways than we do, precisely because they are less able to reflect on and damp down those feelings by rationalizing them. The difference in intelligence between our two species may in turn be reflected in different subjective worlds. While acknowledging the basic similarities in our experiences of emotions, we therefore need to be careful when projecting all our own awareness of emotion on to our dogs.

  7

  Canine Brainpower

  Some people treat their dogs as if they are as smart as humans, others, as if they were particularly dimwitted children. They are neither! Dogs are as intelligent as dogs need to be – which means that their intelligence is not like ours. Canids evolved in environments different from those that shaped the human race, so it should hardly be surprising that they do not think in exactly the same way we do. That said, there are some similarities; for example, their associative learning capacities, as well as the emotions that drive them, follow the general mammalian pattern and are therefore the same as ours. Like us, dogs try to avoid situations that have scared them in the past and repeat experiences that they have found rewarding. It is their more complex cognitive abilities that are likely to be qualitatively different from ours, since these will have been selected to match the canid lifestyle. For example, the usefulness of guide dogs depends upon their ability to ‘think outside the box’ – to use their canid brain to predict what is going to happen next in the ever-changing environment with which their owners are interacting1 – a skill that may be derived from the wild canids’ ability to predict their prey’s next move.

  After decades of neglecting the topic, scientists have recently begun to probe the ways dogs ‘think’. Biologists and psychologists interested in canine intelligence are now examining the more complex things that dogs’ brains can do – and, indeed, what they apparently cannot do. What is becoming clear is how domestication may have affected their ‘intelligence’, and also why it seems to mesh so well with our own. Recently, primatologists have come to realize that domestic dogs can outperform even chimpanzees in some very specific ways (although there seems little doubt that overall chimps are more ‘intelligent’, however that is defined, than dogs). Some researchers in the field have even proposed that dogs have a special brand of intelligence, unique in the animal kingdom, which they ‘co-evolved’ with us humans, as part of the process of domestication.2

  Other scientists make direct comparisons between the cognitive abilities of dogs and those of human children, but these are not necessarily helpful. For example, in one study dogs’ word-learning abilities were claimed to be comparable to those of a two-year-old; their ability to understand goal-directed behaviour to that of an infant between three and twelve months old; and so on. Such attempts to anchor the dog’s abilities to a particular stage of human development may be illuminating in some respects, but, inasmuch as they are entirely anthropocentric, must also underestimate the dog’s capacity to just be a dog. How, for example, can one use this approach to quantify the dog’s ability to detect bombs by their odour alone – something an adult human, let alone a child, could never do unaided? In any case, it is not clear to me what this approach tells us about how dogs perceive people; it seems unlikely that this aspect of canine intelligence could ever be encapsulated in a simple statement like ‘Dogs think of their owners in the way a three-year-old child thinks of his parents’. Dogs are much more complex than such a statement implies, and, as already noted, their intelligence is unique, shaped by evolution (when they were wolves) and then by domestication. Moreover, it seems but a short step from comparing their intelligence with that of children to regarding them as children, albeit four-legged ones, and treating them as ‘little people’ rather than as the dogs they actually are.

  Analysing canine intelligenc
e is not straightforward. Just as we can never be sure precisely what the inner world of canine emotion is really like, we shall probably never be certain whether dogs think the same way we do. Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what human consciousness consists of, let alone that of animals. However, it is possible to examine scientifically whether dogs can or cannot do various things, and then to infer the kinds of thoughts they might have, bearing in mind that, as dogs, they may not have the same priorities that we (or other animals) have in the same situation.

  I have a good reason for delving into the dog’s actual intellectual capabilities, rather than assuming, as many owners and even some scientists seem to, that their abilities are simply marginally inferior to ours. If we overestimate their ability to reason, we are led into the trap of making them accountable for their actions in situations where they are actually unaware of what they are doing. If a dog could really work out what its owner was thinking when he or she arrived home to find a cushion in tatters, then punishment for that ‘crime’ would work: the dog would be able to reason that it was being punished for something it had done a while ago, rather than what it was doing when it heard the sound of the key in the door. As soon as we start treating dogs as little people, rather than the dogs they are, our actions become incomprehensible or misleading. Indeed, our actions are of such importance to dogs (as confirmed by every piece of research done on their cognitive abilities) that they cannot but become confused and distressed when unable to understand us.