The results were very clear-cut. The way that the dogs behaved depended not on what they had or had not actually done, but, rather, upon the owners’ behaviour, which in turn was based upon what they believed their dogs had done. If the dogs had really experienced ‘guilt’, they should always have looked guilty after they had eaten the treat. In fact, they performed their ‘guilty’ behaviour (each dog was slightly different in this regard) only when the owner had been told they had eaten it and therefore scolded them – even when they had not actually been given any opportunity to eat the treat. Moreover, the three dogs that were regularly physically punished (forced down, grabbed or hit) by their owners when they were disobedient were those that performed the so-called ‘guilty’ behaviour most intensely. The inescapable conclusion is that ‘guilty’ behaviour is in fact a mixture of fearful anticipation of punishment (hence the exaggerated behaviour of the dogs that were physically punished) and attempts by the dog to re-establish a friendly relationship with the owner (hence the dogs’ so-called ‘submissive’ behaviour such as rolling over, licking and paw-raising).
So what is actually going on in these dogs’ minds, if they are not feeling ‘guilty’? Let us assume that they are using their default learning ‘rule’ of associating events that occur very close together in time. So the dog understands this pattern: owner comes home, owner punishes me, I can reduce the intensity of the punishment by performing affiliative (submissive) behaviour. The next time the owner comes home, the memory of previous punishment triggers this affiliative behaviour regardless of whether the owner has any intention of punishing the dog. All the dog understands is that on some occasions the arrival of the owner is followed by punishment, and on other occasions not – in an apparently unpredictable way. As a consequence, the level of anxiety rises and the affiliative behaviour becomes more frantic, the goal being to achieve reconciliation with the owner so that the anxiety goes away. We have no evidence to support the idea that dogs can, at such an intensely emotional moment, ‘think back’ to what event in the past might be determining whether the normal friendly greeting is replaced by chastisement.
Misconceptions about canine emotion are an important issue in pet-keeping. In general, owners want their dogs to live up to the expectations they have of them; when the dogs repeatedly fall short, they may resort to punishing them, or even disposing of them. If such expectations are based on a misapprehension of what dogs are actually capable of, then they have little hope of rectifying the situation, since they will have no comprehension of why their owners are behaving in a particular way. Hence their relationship is likely to deteriorate.
There are probably few problems in store for a dog whose owner mistakenly believes it is grieving, since the owner’s reaction will presumably be an affectionate one, but the misattribution of guilt can have serious consequences for the dog. Many dogs get upset at being left alone by their owners. As a consequence of the insecurity they feel when alone, they may do things that their owner will disapprove of, chewing the frame of the door that the owner left through, for example, or trying to bury themselves under the sofa cushions and damaging them in the process. The returning owner sees the damage and immediately punishes the dog, thinking, almost certainly wrongly, that the dog will associate the punishment with the ‘crime’, and thus not do it again. In fact, quite the opposite will occur: because the punishment is associated with the owner returning, the anxiety felt during separation intensifies, making it more likely that the dog will be driven by its insecurity to do something the owner disapproves of while the owner is away. More punishment follows, and so a vicious cycle ensues, one that can last for years unless the owners seek expert help. At worst, a dog’s life can be ruined by a simple and easily corrected misunderstanding of its emotional intelligence.
However, it is not just owners who have difficulty in interpreting and understanding their dogs’ emotions. Dogs themselves, given their inability to think dispassionately about how they are feeling, are not good at dealing with their own emotions. Their lack of emotional sophistication manifests itself not only in their relatively limited emotional palette, but also in their inability to rationalize such simpler emotions as fear. Unlike us, they cannot ‘tell themselves’ that there’s nothing to be frightened of: they cannot calm themselves down. Nowhere is this more evident than in their irrational fear of loud noises.
Given that dogs have long been used as aids for game shooting, it is odd that so many of them are frightened of noises. (If there were any genetic basis to this fear, the expectation is that it would have been largely selected out by now.) Up to half the dogs in Britain react fearfully to fireworks, gunfire and so on. Although some dogs probably habituate quickly to loud noises, so that their owners never notice a problem, many instead become sensitized. It is perfectly natural for a dog to be fearful of a loud noise that happens without warning and with no identifiable source or cause. Yet this very unpredictability is what makes it difficult for the dog to know how to react, and usually whatever it does will be only partly effective; hiding behind the sofa may provide a feeling of protection, but does not serve to reduce the volume of the next bang very much. This inability to deal with the noise triggers an inability to cope, then an escalation of the emotional reaction and, in some dogs, the emergence of a full-blown phobia, such that the triggering sound, even at a low level, will set off an extremely fearful reaction. Such phobias also occur in humans, of course, but their much greater prevalence in dogs is a sign of just how much they are at the mercy of their emotions when faced with situations that evolution has not prepared them for.
Dogs’ limited capacity for emotional self-control can therefore have real consequences for their welfare. Dogs cannot ‘pull themselves together’. Their instincts tell them to be frightened of sudden, novel events, and when they find such events incomprehensible (such as when they hear the loud bang of a firework from behind a closed curtain), they are not capable of dismissing the event as irrelevant. On the contrary, some dogs become more and more frightened every time. Similarly, since dogs lack the mental abilities to feel ‘guilt’, let alone its more abstract cousin ‘shame’, owners who punish them on the basis that they ‘obviously know they have done wrong’ are doing them a great disservice. The scientific exploration of canine emotions and moods is still in its infancy, but there will surely be new developments in the near future. In particular, a new technique allowing dogs to tell us how they are feeling may have great potential (see box – ‘In the Mood?’). But there can be little doubt that emotions are part of their minute-by-minute experience of their existence.
IN THE MOOD?
In humans, anxiety and depression are associated with negative judgements of ambiguous situations – ‘the glass is half empty’ syndrome. If such biases could be detected in non-human animals, they might provide a way of probing ‘moods’ in other animals. Following up studies done on rodents, colleagues of mine at Bristol University have examined whether dogs might also show such biases.5 Twenty-four dogs awaiting rehoming at a rescue shelter were first given a separation test, which is designed to predict whether or not a dog will display separation behaviour when left alone once it has been rehomed. The dogs were then trained to perform a spatial discrimination task in which one location always contained food (in the diagram, the white bowl to the dog’s left – although in actuality all the bowls were the same colour) whereas another an equal distance away never did (in the diagram, the darkest grey bowl). Once they had learned which of the two locations contained food, the two bowls were replaced with one (empty) bowl, which could be in any one of five locations – two in the same locations as in the original training, and three in intermediate ‘ambiguous’ locations (shown as intermediate shades of grey): note that, although the diagram shows all five locations, only one was occupied by a bowl at any one time. The dogs were then tested to determine how quickly they ran to each of the locations. Faced with a bowl placed in one of the three possible intermediate locations,
a ‘pessimistic’ dog might think ‘There’s nothing in that bowl, it’s not where the food was last time’, while an ‘optimistic’ dog might think ‘That bowl’s near the place where the food was last time, it’s worth giving it a look’. The dogs that had exhibited separation distress when left alone ran slower than the rest, so they may be more ‘pessimistic’ than average. It is tempting to speculate that such ‘pessimism’ is the crucial underlying factor that distinguishes dogs that cannot cope when left alone from those that can.
Finally, I must allow that even the detached, scientific approach to emotion that I have tried to adopt contains at least one residual trace of anthropomorphism: I have discussed emotions using the names that we humans give them. The most basic emotions are so rooted in mammalian physiology and the more primitive parts of the mammalian brain that it is reasonable to assume that they are fundamentally the same whether experienced by a dog or by a human, even though the details of that experience may differ. However, when it comes to the simpler self-conscious emotions, such as jealousy, can we be sure that dogs possess only those that we humans have, and can put a name to? While I am reasonably confident that dogs do not feel guilt (as one example), it does not necessarily follow that their emotional lives are any less rich than ours, just different. For instance, since they are such social animals, perhaps they compensate for their less sophisticated cognitive abilities by having more fine-grained emotions? If the Inuit can have fifteen words for snow,6 maybe dogs can experience fifteen kinds of love.
9
A World of Smells
Show any dog-lover a picture of a cute dog, and you will get an instant reaction. Show the same picture to a dog, and you will probably not get a reaction at all. (Unless it is your own dog, in which case you might get a puzzled expression that clearly signifies ‘Whatever are you up to?’)
Dogs may inhabit the same physical space as us, but they do not experience the world the way we do. We like to think that our version is ‘the’ version, but it is not. Like every other species, we pick up the information about the world that we need in order to survive, and we discard the rest. Or, more accurately, we pick up information that helped our primate and hominid ancestors survive (we have not lived our current lifestyles nearly long enough for our senses to have been modified by evolution). Dogs live in a world that is dominated by their sense of smell – a world that is quite unlike ours, which is constructed around what we see.
It is easy to ignore the fact that we, too, get an edited version of what is going on around us. We cannot ‘see’ the light beam that comes out of our television remote controls, but it does consist of light – it is just that its wavelength is too long for our eyes to pick it up. The mere fact that it is invisible to us does not mean it is not there. Hence it is worth reminding ourselves of what we do and do not pick up from our surroundings before going on to consider what dogs could tell us about what we are missing out on, if only they could talk.
First of all, we are colour junkies, at least by comparison with most other mammals. Although we have only three types of cone – yellow-, green- and violet-sensitive receptor cells (many animals have four, some even more) – it has been estimated that our eyes can distinguish about 10 million different colours. (When I say ‘our’, strictly speaking I am referring only to men; some women, possibly as many as half of them, have a fourth type of receptor in the yellow-green area and thus are able to distinguish between millions more shades of red, orange and yellow than the rest of us.)
Our ability to see all these colours has evolved only recently. Although reptiles (and birds) can see the full range of colours and ultraviolet as well, sometime during the course of the early evolution of mammals the ability to see both ultraviolet and red disappeared. It is possible that, because those early mammals were nocturnal, they needed the space on their retinas for rods, the receptor cells that are used in low-light vision, which are responsive only to black and white. The Old World monkeys and apes, most of which forage in daylight, ‘re-evolved’ trichromatic vision about 23 million years ago, probably as a way of fulfilling a need to distinguish tender leaves and ripe fruits by their colour alone.
What the eye can detect is only half the story; the brain still has to turn raw data into pictures. All the information gathered by our eyes is integrated together in the brain to form the three-dimensional colour image that we consciously perceive as ‘seeing’. Although our brains can put together a 3-D image using the information from just one eye (try closing one eye and moving your head around very slightly), the most accurate and instantaneous information comes from our binocular vision. Our brains constantly compare the pictures coming in from each eye, using the small discrepancies between them to generate a full-colour 3-D image. To make this process as efficient as possible, our eyes point in exactly the same direction. (This is unusual among mammals; even cats, with round flat faces like ours, have eyes that point slightly out to the sides, at about an eight-degree angle. By contrast, animals like rabbits that primarily use their vision to detect approaching danger have their eyes on the sides of their heads, sacrificing binocular vision completely in order to have the widest possible field of view.) And so humans are extremely visual creatures. Scientists estimate that our brains receive about 9 million bits of information from our eyes every second, ten times more than a guinea pig does, for example. There are various theories as to why we evolved this ability; among them is the supposition that as primate society became more complex, so the need to monitor the facial expressions of everyone else in the group increased, resulting in especially detail-orientated visual acuity.
Although humans see more than most mammals do, we do not hear nearly as much; hearing is evidently not as important for primates as it is for many other mammals. Mice and bats can hear much quieter and much higher-pitched sounds than we can, and dogs and cats can hear pretty much everything we can, and much more besides. We are also not as good as most other mammals at judging where sounds are coming from. Looking back to our evolutionary roots as hunter-gatherers, we can surmise that vision would have been much more useful than hearing for gathering edible plants and fruits, and for tracking game as well. However, our brains are probably much better than dogs’ brains when it comes to distinguishing between very similar sounds, a skill we have evolved in order to decode speech.
It is our sense of smell that is really feeble compared to that of the rest of the animal kingdom (except birds). We can train ourselves to discriminate between different smells, provided they are strong enough for us to detect in the first place, but most of the odour information in the world around us simply passes us by. As a consequence, apart from a few professionals such as wine tasters and perfumiers, we do not even have much of a language to describe the quality of odours.
Why is the human nose so insensitive? First of all, we have a tiny olfactory epithelium, which is the skin inside our nostrils that removes odour molecules from the air we breathe and sends messages to the brain about what they are. Second, the parts of the brain that deal with incoming odour information are greatly reduced in all the Old World primates and apes, and there has been, if anything, a further reduction during our own evolution. Third, by comparison with almost all other mammals, we have a very limited repertoire of odour receptors, which cuts down on the amount of subtlety we can extract from any particular odour. We still have the relics of the genes that mice (for example) use to make the much greater range of receptors that they possess, but our versions of these genes do not work, indeed they stopped working millions of years ago, during the evolution of the higher primates. As a result, although we can probably detect the same range of odours as mice, we extract less detail from them. And of course we also need much more of the odour to be present to smell anything at all.
The phasing-out of odour perception in humans roughly coincided with the evolution of three-colour vision, and scientists believe that these changes are connected. The original primates were mainly nocturnal, like many ma
mmals then and now, and had the standard mammalian two-colour vision. When our ancestors evolved three-colour vision, this new ability was accompanied by a substantial enlargement of the visual cortex in the brain, and a simultaneous shrinking of the areas that process olfactory information. (There appear to be limits on how much information any brain can process, and so enlargement of one area is often accompanied by shrinkage of another.) Then, as the apes and man evolved, the brain enlarged further, becoming a processor of social information, especially information gathered visually. In the process, the ‘ancient’ olfactory part of the brain became buried underneath the cerebral cortices.
Thus the version of the world as perceived by mankind is rather atypical, even among mammals in general. Humans have highly refined colour vision, reasonable night vision (which most of us rarely use), average hearing, and an utterly puny sense of smell. Dogs, by contrast, have poor colour vision, good night vision, excellent hearing and a very sensitive and sophisticated sense of smell. Mankind has exploited these differences throughout the domestic dog’s history, valuing the dog’s sensitive nose especially as an aid to hunting. However, pet dogs are often so anthropomorphized that it is easy for their owners to ignore these differences, and to treat their dogs as if they perceived the same world that we do.
The visual world that dogs inhabit is similar to ours in many ways – indeed, close enough that the differences are rarely apparent, and present no problems for the dogs themselves. Dogs can see slightly more than we can during the night, slightly less in daylight. With one notable exception – namely, their perception of colour – their visual abilities are not so different from ours that their subjective world and ours would look substantially different. Whatever we can see, they are likely to see also, if in slightly less detail.
In Defence of Dogs Page 27