In Defence of Dogs

by John Bradshaw

  12. This has been documented by a graduate student of mine, Anne Pullen.

  13. According to another former graduate student of mine, Sarah Hall, this is the most likely explanation for why cats get bored with toys so quickly – so it is reasonable that the same principle might apply to dogs.

  14. ‘Puppy parties’ are structured socialization sessions for puppies in their juvenile period.

  15. Karen Prior has written various books on this topic, including Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training, revised edn. (Dorking: Ring-press Books, 2002).

  16. Research done by Dr Deborah Wells at Queen’s University, Belfast, and published as ‘The effectiveness of a citronella spray collar in reducing certain forms of barking in dogs’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 73 (2001), pp. 299–309.

  17. Matthijs Schilder and Joanne van der Borg, ‘Training dogs with help of the shock collar: short and long term behavioural effects’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 85 (2004), pp. 319–34.

  18. Richard Polsky, ‘Can aggression in dogs be elicited through the use of electronic pet containment systems?’, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 3 (2000), pp. 345–57.

  19. Elly Hiby, Nicola Rooney and John Bradshaw, ‘Dog training methods: their use, effectiveness and interaction with behaviour and welfare’, Animal Welfare, 13 (2004), pp. 63–9.

  20. Christine Arhant et al., ‘Behaviour of smaller and larger dogs: effects of training methods, inconsistency of owner behaviour and level of engagement in activities with the dog’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 123 (2010), pp. 131–42.

  21. Training discs should not be confused with the ‘distractor’, usually a tin can filled with pebbles thrown on the ground in front of the dog, which some dog trainers recommend. This method is one way of getting the dog to stop doing something undesirable; it gives the owner an opportunity to reward the dog for doing something else. However, in practice these are of limited usefulness, because most dogs quickly habituate to such noises. Among those that do not, the very lack of habituation is evidence that the ‘distractor’ is actually a punishment, inducing fear in those particular dogs.

  22. For example, see the blog by David Ryan, Chairman of the UK’s Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors, http://www.apbc.org.uk/blog/positive_reinforcement. Accessed 16 August 2010.

  23. Meghan Herron, Frances Shofer and Ilana Reisner (of the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Hospital), ‘Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviours’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117 (2009), pp. 47–54.

  24. In the words of David Ryan, ‘It makes good television to go head to head and dominate a dog. Unfortunately, television is not real life and tends to show short interactions where the dog is forced to submit. It is not impossible for a “handy” owner to repeatedly force their dog into submission either, but these unpleasant and unnecessary measures are not how most pet owners want to live with their dogs. Lamentably the high profile of these programmes means the on-screen warning “do not try this at home” is often not heeded.’ See http://www.apbc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Why_Wont_Dominance_Die.pdf. Accessed 9 April 2010.

  25. As wolf biologist David Mech points out in a recent article in International Wolf, it can take two decades for new scientific ideas to become fully accepted. He goes on to say: ‘Hopefully it will take fewer than 20 years for the media and public to fully adopt the correct terminology and thus to once and for all end the outmoded view of the wolf pack as an aggressive assortment of wolves consistently competing with each other to take over the pack.’ See ‘Whatever happened to the term “alpha wolf”?’, International Wolf (Autumn 2008), pp. 4–8. Available online at http://www.wolf.org/wolves/news/pdf/winter2008.pdf.

  26. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z6XR3qJ_qY. Accessed 17 November 2010.

  CHAPTER 5. HOW PUPPIES BECOME PETS

  1. Daniel G. Freedman, John A. King and Orville Elliot, ‘Critical period in the social development of dogs’, Science 133 (1961), pp. 1016–17. The authors worked at the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor (Maine), the site of many ground-breaking discoveries about dogs.

  2. It later emerged that this idea had initially been proposed almost a century earlier, by the English biologist Douglas Spalding. However, there is no indication that Lorenz knew this, and the images of Lorenz swimming in his lake, attended by his retinue of faithful goslings, will always be the first that come to mind whenever imprinting is mentioned. Equally evocative are the orphaned Canada geese in the movie Fly Away Home, which were imprinted on to a microlight aircraft.

  3. Peter Hepper, ‘Long-term retention of kinship recognition established during infancy in the domestic dog’, Behavioural Processes, 33 (1994), pp. 3–14.

  4. Although the research to prove the occurrence of such learning has not, as far as I know, been done on wolves themselves, there is an extensive scientific literature on kin recognition mechanisms in other mammals, based on cross-fostering experiments. Something similar happens in our own species, hence the Westermarck effect, whereby unrelated individuals who spend their childhood in the same household find each other sexually unattractive.

  5. Given dogs’ reliance on their sense of smell, it is surprising that no one seems to have taken into account the role of olfaction in their concept of what constitutes a human. Perhaps, unknown to us with our comparatively feeble noses, there are one or two smells that definitively signify ‘human being’.

  6. This capacity may have a parallel in the way young children learn languages. Many of the children in the world – though not so many in the UK or the USA as elsewhere – grow up hearing two or more languages spoken, and their brains adapt to this very well; each language seems to be stored separately, and the child quickly becomes competent at not mixing them up when forming sentences.

  7. See, for example, John L. Fuller, ‘Experiential deprivation and later behavior’, Science, 158 (29 December 1967), pp. 1645–52.

  8. Michael W. Fox, ‘Behavioral effects of rearing dogs with cats during the “critical period of socialization”’, Behaviour, 35 (1969), pp. 273–80.

  9. Mother cats seem to rely on a straightforward rule of thumb to identify their offspring: ‘If it’s the size of a kitten and it’s living where I keep my kittens, then it must be one of mine.’ Hence the ease with which Michael Fox was able to persuade queens with litters to accept Chihuahua puppies as if they were their own. Many queens will also accept the introduction of kittens younger than their own, a phenomenon that some animal rescue organizations capitalize on to raise orphans.

  10. David Appleby, John Bradshaw and Rachel Casey, ‘Relationship between aggressive and avoidance behaviour by dogs and their experience in the first six months of life’, Veterinary Record, 150 (2002), pp. 434–8.

  11. This outcome was initially reported as an effect of simple handling by the people looking after the rats concerned; however, it later emerged that the return of the pups, smelling of human, stimulated the mother to take extra care of them. The extra care, rather than the handling itself, was what corrected their development.

  12. See Susan Jarvis et al., ‘Programming the offspring of the pig by prenatal social stress: neuroendocrine activity and behaviour’, Hormones and Behavior 49 (2006), pp. 68–80.

  13. David Tuber et al., ‘Behavioral and glucocorticoid responses of adult domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to companionship and social separation’, Journal of Comparative Psychology, 110 (1996), pp. 103–8.

  14. Subsequent research has shown that dogs’ stress hormone levels are different depending not only on the gender of their owners or carers (lower if they are women) but also their personalities (lower if the owners are extroverts).

  15. Sharon L. Smith, ‘Interactions between pet dog and family members: an ethological study’, chapter 4 in Aaron Katcher and Alan Beck (eds.), New Perspectives on our Lives with Companion Animals (Philadelphia: University of Pen
nsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 29–36.

  CHAPTER 6. DOES YOUR DOG LOVE YOU?

  1. This tradition is usually ascribed to C. Lloyd Morgan, one of the founders of comparative (i.e. animal) psychology. Writing in 1894, he proposed what has become known as Morgan’s canon: ‘In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.’ (For the word ‘lower’, we would now substitute ‘simpler’.) Morgan came to realize, however, that this was unnecessarily restrictive, and in 1903 stated: ‘To this, however, it should be added … that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes if we already have independent evidence of the occurrence of these higher processes in the animal under observation.’ In other words, if we can show that dogs experience a particular emotion, then that emotion can be invoked as a potential explanation for any dog behaviour.

  2. In his book The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow and Empathy – and Why They Matter (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2007), American ethologist Marc Bekoff, himself an ardent proponent of the reality of animal emotions, describes his perplexity at the seemingly self-contradictory behaviour of a colleague, whom he refers to simply as Bill (presumably to save his blushes). Apparently they had met up immediately before Marc was due to give a lecture on animal cognition, and for five full minutes Bill had regaled him with stories about his dog Reno, how much Reno loves to play, how anxiously he misses his master when Bill’s not there, how jealous he becomes when Bill is talking to his daughter, and so on. However, in the discussion session after the lecture, Bill accused Marc of being too anthropomorphic in his explanations of animal behaviour. In response, Marc reminded Bill of the conversation they’d had about Reno only an hour or so previously. Bill, somewhat embarrassed, retorted that, while he’d described Reno’s behaviour in terms of emotions, he had no idea of what Reno was actually feeling, and doubted that any of the words he’d used to describe his dog’s emotions were an accurate picture of what had actually been going on inside the dog’s head at the time.

  3. Stephen Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at Reading University, has gone so far as to argue that anthropomorphism can be traced back some 100,000 years, to the merging between the part of our brain that dealt with our social behaviour and the part used to identify and classify animals, giving us the ability to ‘think like animals do’. See his book The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996).

  4. According to James Serpell, Director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and a world-class expert on human–animal interactions: ‘[A]nthropomorphism is the primary force cementing these [i.e. pet–owner] relationships.’ This quote comes from his chapter, ‘People in Disguise: Anthropomorphism and the Human–Pet Relationship’, in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (eds.), Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 131.

  5. Zana Bahlig-Pieren and Dennis Turner, ‘Anthropomorphic interpretations and ethological descriptions of dog and cat behavior by lay people’, Anthrozoös, 12 (1999), pp. 205–10. This is one of only a few studies of owners’ abilities to understand their dogs’ body-language, which is surprising given how important this skill must be in ensuring that dogs’ emotional needs are met.

  6. This model was proposed – for humans – by, among others, Ross Buck, Professor of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, and author of the classic text Human Motivation and Emotion (New York: Wiley, 1976).

  7. While owners well attuned to their cats can probably detect anxiety from the cat’s body-language, joy is harder to detect. For example, purring does not indicate joy, although it is often assumed to – cats will purr even when in extreme pain. It appears to be an all-purpose care- and comfort-soliciting signal, meaning anything from ‘Is it OK that I’ve curled up next to you?’ to ‘Please help, I’m in distress here’.

  8. Patricia McConnell gives a graphic account of such a response, exhibited by her Great Pyrenees bitch Tulip, in her wonderful book For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), pp. 115–16.

  9. On the other hand, allowing coyotes to find and feed on sheep carcasses laced with an emetic (lithium chloride), though it certainly put them off eating sheep meat, did not stop the coyotes from hunting and killing them. (Indeed, hunting and eating are separately motivated in many carnivores.) Sheep mortality was therefore unaffected, and other means had to be sought for limiting coyote damage to free-ranging livestock.

  10. This study was performed by the late Professor Johannes Odendaal, a pioneer of studies of human–animal interaction in South Africa, working with Professor Roy Meintjes of the Pretoria vet school. Their paper, ‘Neurophysiological correlates of affiliative behaviour between humans and dogs’, was published in Veterinary Journal, 165 (2003), pp. 296–301.

  11. See the paper by John Bradshaw, Justine McPherson, Rachel Casey and Isabella Larter, ‘Aetiology of separation-related behaviour in domestic dogs’, Veterinary Record, 151 (2002), pp. 43–6.

  12. See the paper by John Bradshaw, Emily-Jayne Blackwell, Nicola Rooney and Rachel Casey, ‘Prevalence of separation related behaviour in dogs in southern England’, in Joel Dehasse and E. Biosca Marce (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th ESVCE Meeting on Veterinary Behavioural Medicine, Granada, Spain (Paris: Publibook, 2002), pp. 189–93.

  13. The latter figures are based on a limited number of similar interviews conducted by a student of mine in upstate New York in 2001.

  14. Yet, paradoxically, some dogs that behave like this when their owners are at home seem not to be distressed when they’re left on their own.

  15. Andrew Luescher and Ilana Reisner, ‘Canine aggression toward familiar people: a new look at an old problem’, Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, 38 (2008), pp. 115–16.

  16. Some veterinary behaviourists tend to label the repetitive behaviour that biologists call ‘stereotypic’ as ‘obsessive-compulsive’, by analogy with human behaviour. Others, however, argue that such syndromes require conscious thought, and that this terminology should therefore not be applied to dogs.

  CHAPTER 7. CANINE BRAINPOWER

  1. See, for example, the book by guide-dog user and trainer Bruce Johnston, Harnessing Thought: Guide Dog – a Thinking Animal with a Skilful Mind (Harpenden: Lennard Publishing, 1995).

  2. Notably Dr Brian Hare, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. See his article, written with Michael Tomasello, ‘Human-like social skills in dogs?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9 (2005), pp. 439–44.

  3. Sylvain Fiset, Claude Beaulieu and France Landry, ‘Duration of dogs’ (Canis familiaris) working memory in search for disappearing objects’, Animal Cognition, 6 (2003), pp. 1–10.

  4. Nicole Chapuis and Christian Varlet (from the Institute of Neurophysiology and Psychophysiology in Marseille, France), ‘Short cuts by dogs in natural surroundings’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, sect. B, vol. 39 (1987), pp. 49–64.

  5. In other experiments, we have shown that short-term stress actually makes dogs keener to learn, probably because it heightens their perception of the world around them, though they also make more mistakes than relaxed dogs do: Emily-Jayne Blackwell et al., ‘Rapid shaping of behaviour associated with high urinary cortisol in domestic dogs’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 124 (2010), pp. 113–20.

  6. Specifically, they claimed that Rico actually knew the words for each object, and could learn new words for new objects, recognizing them simply because they were new: see Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call and Julia Fischer, ‘Word learning in a domestic dog: evidence for “Fast Mapping”’, Science, 304 (2004), pp. 1682–3. Subsequent studies have cast doubt on this claim (Rico’s data are al
so explainable by a combination of simple habituation and an ability to identify objects as unfamiliar by their smell), but this dog’s memory was remarkable nevertheless.

  7. See also the paper by Patricia Kaulfuss and Daniel Mills, ‘Neophilia in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and its implication for studies of dog cognition’, Animal Cognition, 11 (2008), pp. 553–6.

  8. Britta Osthaus, Stephen Lea and Alan Slater, ‘Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) fail to show understanding of means–end connections in a string-pulling task’, Animal Cognition, 8 (2005), pp. 37–47.

  9. Rebecca West and Robert Young, ‘Do domestic dogs show any evidence of being able to count?’, Animal Cognition, 5 (2002), pp. 183–6.

  10. Claudi Tennie, Josep Call and co-workers, (from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig), ‘Dogs, Canis familiaris, fail to copy intransitive actions in third-party contextual imitation tasks’, Animal Behaviour, 77 (2009), pp. 1491–9.

  11. Friederike Range, Zsófia Viranyi and Ludwig Huber, ‘Selective imitation in domestic dogs’, Current Biology, 17 (2007), pp. 868–72.

  12. József Topál et al., ‘Differential sensitivity to human communication in dogs, wolves, and human infants’, Science (Washington), 325 (2009), pp. 1269–72.

  13. Both of these experiments were performed by Dr Florence Gaunet, a cognitive ethologist working in the Museum of Natural History in Paris: ‘How do guide dogs of blind owners and pet dogs of sighted owners (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for food?’, Animal Cognition, 11 (2008), pp. 475–83; ‘How do guide dogs and pet dogs (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for their toy and for playing?’, Animal Cognition, 13 (2010), pp. 311–23.

  14. Josep Call et al., ‘Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans’, Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117 (2003), pp. 257–63.

  15. Juliane Bräuer, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, ‘Visual perspective taking in dogs (Canis familiaris) in the presence of barriers’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 88 (2004), pp. 299–317.