16. Mark Petter et al., ‘Can dogs (Canis familiaris) detect human deception?’, Behavioural Processes, 82 (2009), pp. 109–118.
17. Nicola Rooney, John Bradshaw and Ian Robinson, ‘A comparison of dog–dog and dog–human play behaviour’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 66 (2000), pp. 235–48; Nicola Rooney and John Bradshaw, ‘An experimental study of the effects of play upon the dog–human relationships’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 75 (2002), pp. 161–76.
18. Alexandra Horowitz, ‘Attention to attention in domestic dog (Canis familiaris) dyadic play’, Animal Cognition, 12 (2009), pp. 107–18.
19. Ikuma Adachi, Hiroko Kuwahata and Kazuo Fujita, ‘Dogs recall their owner’s face upon hearing the owner’s voice’, Animal Cognition, 10 (2007), pp. 17–21.
20. The results of this study were reported by Sarah Marshall and her co-workers from universities in Italy, at the 2nd Canine Science Forum held in Vienna in July 2010.
21. Nicola Rooney and John Bradshaw, ‘Social cognition in the domestic dog: behaviour of spectators towards participants in interspecific games’, Animal Behaviour, 72 (2006), pp. 343–52.
CHAPTER 8. EMOTIONAL (UN)SOPHISTICATION
1. For more detail of this approach, see the seminal article by eminent animal psychologist and neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, ‘Affective consciousness: core emotional feelings in animals and humans’, Consciousness and Cognition, 14 (2005), pp. 30–80.
2. Paul Morris, Christine Doe and Emma Godsell (psychologists from the University of Portsmouth), ‘Secondary emotions in non-primate species? Behavioural reports and subjective claims by animal owners’, Cognition & Emotion, 22 (2008), pp. 3–20. The surveyors asked 337 dog owners, all of whom had owned their dogs for an average of more than six years, to tell them how confident they were that their dogs experienced each of sixteen different emotions (there were actually seventeen, but one, disgust, was difficult to interpret because the term itself can be used in two different ways). Forty of these owners participated in the follow-up study on signs of jealousy.
3. Including Marc Bekoff, in his book The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2007), and also Jeffrey Masson, a philosopher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand; see his book Dogs Never Lie About Love (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).
4. See Alexandra Horowitz, ‘Disambiguating the “guilty look”: salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour’, Behavioural Processes, 81 (2009), pp. 447–52.
5. See Mike Mendl et al., ‘Dogs showing separation-related behaviour exhibit a “pessimistic” cognitive bias’, published on-line in Current Biology, 20 (Oct. 2010), pp. R839–R840.
6. Not over a hundred, as the urban myth would have it. Nevertheless, linguists do agree that the Central Alaskan Yupik language has between a dozen and two dozen such words, depending on the method of counting adopted.
CHAPTER 9. A WORLD OF SMELLS
1. The definitive observations were done on two Italian greyhounds called Flip and Gypsy, and a toy poodle called … Retina (only a vision scientist would call a dog that). The dogs were presented with three windows, two illuminated with one colour and the third with another, and trained to paw at the odd one out; if they got it right, they were given a tasty food treat. By varying the brightness of one of the colours, the experimenters could tell whether the dogs were really telling them apart by their colour: if they were seeing only in black and white, there would be one combination that would appear exactly the same shade of grey. The dogs could not always distinguish greenish-blue from grey, or orange from red, but they could always tell red from blue. See Jay Neitz, Timothy Geist and Gerald Jacobs, ‘Color vision in the dog’, Visual Neuroscience, 3 (1989), pp. 119–25.
2. The hearing range of humans extends up to 23 kilohertz, that of dogs to 45 kilohertz, and cats to 80 or even 100 kilohertz. In dogs, maximum sensitivity is reached between 0.5 and 16 kilohertz.
3. Of course, dogs also have a sense of taste, which apart from being rather insensitive to salt, and more sensitive to compounds called nucleotides that are common in blood – a relic of their predator origins – is much like ours. They discriminate between food flavours using a combination of odour and taste, just as we do.
4. Research done by Professor Peter Hepper at Queen’s University, Belfast, and published as ‘The discrimination of human odour by the dog’, Perception, 17 (1988), pp. 549–54.
5. You can see just how stable the boundary layer is by watching the drops of water on the bonnet of your car as you drive away after a rain shower: quite a speed has to be reached before they are disturbed by the air rushing past.
6. Research conducted by Debbie Wells, a dog behaviour expert from Queen’s University, Belfast, and Peter Hepper, and published as ‘Directional tracking in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris‘, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 84 (2003), pp. 297–305.
7. Although our vomeronasal organ has disappeared, we still make a few of its receptors (V1Rs) – but they are now found in the regular olfactory epithelium. It is unclear what they are used for, but some scientists implicate them in the perception of human ‘pheromones’ that may affect our reproductive behaviour.
8. Deborah Wells and Peter Hepper, ‘Prenatal olfactory learning in the domestic dog’, Animal Behaviour, 72 (2006), pp. 681–6.
9. This study was done by my student Amanda Lea, who was able to establish the basics of such dog–dog encounters after a few dozen hours of sitting on park benches pretending to sketch dogs (in case anyone became curious as to what she was doing in the same place day after day). It was published as ‘Dyadic interactions between domestic dogs during exercise’, Anthrozoös, 5 (1993), pp. 234–53.
10. Stephan Natynczuk, then a student at Oxford University, and I spent many a happy hour collecting samples of anal sac contents from beagles, and then putting them through a mass spectrometer in order to demonstrate this gradual change scientifically. Every now and again we’d fail to line up the collection pot correctly and end up with a very smelly lab coat – or worse.
11. Sunil Pal, ‘Urine marking by free-ranging dogs (Canis familiaris) in relation to sex, season, place and posture’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 80 (2003), pp. 45–59.
12. Ádám Miklósi and Krisztina Soproni, ‘A comparative analysis of animals’ understanding of the human pointing gesture’, Animal Cognition, 9 (2006), pp. 81–93.
13. The UK charity Medical Detection Dogs (http://hypoalertdogs.co.uk) has recently trained an Affenpinscher to alert its owner to onsets of hypoglycaemia. These flat-faced toy dogs are unlikely candidates for such a role, but the successful training outcome shows that the breed’s sense of smell cannot be totally impaired.
CHAPTER 10. PROBLEMS WITH PEDIGREES
1. Federico Calboli et al., ‘Population structure and inbreeding from pedigree analysis of purebred dogs’, Genetics, 179 (2008), pp. 593–601.
2. Research published by Danika Bannasch, a veterinary geneticist working at the vet school at Davis, California, with Michael Bannasch, Jeanne Ryun, Thomas Famula and Niels Pedersen, ‘Y chromosome haplotype analysis in purebred dogs’, Mammalian Genome, 16 (2005), pp. 273–80.
3. During the week of Crufts’ national dog show in 1989, Celia Haddon wrote in the Daily Telegraph : ‘The question of what a scientist, tinkering in a laboratory, might be able to do with an ordinary cow, sheep or pig is regularly aired. But one form of genetic engineering is already going on, and has been changing the face of Britain’s most popular domestic animal, the dog, for decades.’ See also veterinarian Koharik Arman’s article, ‘A new direction for kennel club regulations and breed standards’, Canadian Veterinary Journal, 48 (2007), pp. 953–65.
4. Summaries are available in several expert reports, including those commissioned by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, http://www.rspca.org/pedigreedogs; the Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, http://www.apgaw.org/reports-a-publications/pedigree-dog-report; and the UK Kennel Club in partners
hip with the rehoming charity Dogs Trust, http://dogbreedinginquiry.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/final-dog-enquiry-120110.pdf.
5. From the RSPCA report: ‘Syringomyelia. The formation of cavities in the nervous tissue of the spinal cord. In dogs, this is often but not always accompanied by “referred” pain (perceived at a site adjacent to or some distance from the site of the cavity) or irritation. The dog is clearly in discomfort and tries to scratch at or near the shoulder or face, in the position from which they perceive the pain to originate.’
6. Published as ‘Paedomorphosis affects agonistic visual signals of domestic dogs’, Animal Behaviour, 53 (1997), pp. 297–304.
7. Steven Leaver and Tom Reimchen (University of Victoria in British Columbia), ‘Behavioural responses of Canis familiaris to different tail lengths of a remotely-controlled life-size dog replica’, Behaviour, 145 (2008), pp. 377–90.
8. Ray and Lorna Coppinger put forward this theory in their book Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution (London: Crosskeys Select Books, 2004).
9. http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/services/public/breeds/Default.aspx. Accessed 6 December 2010.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. This study was published as a book, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, by John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
13. The dog’s breed is often recorded by hospital staff from eyewitness accounts, or by police officers. Rarely is an expert in identifying dogs involved in such reports.
14. Taken from Stephen Collier, ‘Breed-specific legislation and the pit bull terrier: ‘are the laws justified?’, Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 1 (2006), pp. 17–22.
CHAPTER 11. DOGS AND THE FUTURE
1. The following is part of a statement issued by the UK’s Centre of Applied Pet Ethology: ‘There are still huge numbers of “stamp and jerk” dog trainers and whisperers at large with their choke chains, spiked collars, shock collars, rape alarms, correction sticks and bullying attitudes … such dog trainers, whisperers and behaviourists are simply being “Cruel to be Cruel”.’ See http://www.coape.org/awsn.html. Accessed 21 April 2011.
2. For example, UK trainer Charlie Clarricoates, quoted in Your Dog magazine (Dec. 2009), pp. 44–6: ‘We are seeing dogs now who are spoiled rotten, and never have any discipline, mainly because owners are force-fed incorrect impractical information … This moralistic attitude that you can only train dogs by loving them and being kind is ridiculous. There are some dogs you can’t do this with because it doesn’t work, even if you have a year with them.’
3. US veterinarian and behaviour specialist Dr Sophia Yin summarizes her stance on punishment as follows: ‘Punishment isn’t always inappropriate. It’s just incredibly overused – and in most cases it’s performed incorrectly … My goal is to use whichever techniques will work best with the least likelihood of side effects in the pet. If that best technique involves a punishment such as … a pinch collar “pop” or reprimand, or booby trap of some sort, or even an electronic collar, then I will use it. But it rarely does. Consequently I use punishment 100 to 1000 times less than a traditional trainer and relevant rewards 1000 times more.’ See http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance. Accessed 20 September 2010.
4. See, for example, Bruce Johnston, Harnessing Thought (Harpenden: Lennard Publishing, 1995).
5. See, for example, a paper by Pauleen Bennett and Vanessa Rohlf, ‘Owner–companion dog interactions: relationships between demographic variables, potentially problematic behaviours, training engagement and shared activities’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 102 (2007), pp. 65–84.
6. According to Jean Donaldson, Director of the San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers: ‘Dog training is a divided profession. We are not like plumbers, orthodontists or termite exterminators who, if you put six in a room, will pretty much agree on how to do their jobs. Dog training camps are more like Republicans and Democrats, all agreeing that the job needs to be done but wildly differing on how to do it.’ She goes on to say: ‘dog training is currently an unregulated profession: there are no laws governing practices … Provided it’s in the name of training, someone with no formal education or certification can strangle your dog quite literally to death and conceivably get off scot-free’; see http://www.urbandawgs.com/divided_profession.html (accessed 24 September 2010). Likewise, the UK’s Companion Animal Welfare Council concluded recently that ‘there is no nationally accepted benchmark for qualification and skill in training or behaviour modification … With no minimum standard there can be no assurance of quality.’ See The Regulation of Companion Animal Services in Relation to Training and Behaviour Modification of Dogs, published in July 2008, http://www.cawc.org.uk/080603.pdf, p. 5.
7. Gillian Diesel, David Brodbelt and Dirk Pfeiffer, ‘Characteristics of relinquished dogs and their owners at 14 rehoming centers in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 13 (2005), pp. 15–30.
8. The bush dog is a rare social canid found in South America. Its stumpy tail, round head and furry feet would probably, if married to a suitable temperament, be rather appealing.
9. This list of desired traits is drawn from a paper by Paul McGreevy and Pauleen Bennett, ‘Challenges and paradoxes in the companion-animal niche’, Animal Welfare, 19(S) (2010), pp. 11–16. Pauleen Bennett and colleagues at Monash University in Australia presented further refinements of the ideas behind this list at the 2nd Canine Science Forum held in Vienna in July 2010.
Acknowledgements
I’ve spent the best part of thirty years studying dog behaviour, first at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, then at the University of Southampton, and finally at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. Some of what I’ve learned about dogs has come from direct observation, especially in the early days, but much has been informed by collaborations and discussions with many colleagues and graduate students. The original research described in this book owes much to them, though of course I take full responsibility for the interpretations presented here. In roughly chronological order, they are: Christopher Thorne, David Macdonald, Stephan Natynczuk, Benjamin Hart, Sarah Brown, Ian Robinson, Helen Nott, Stephen Wickens, Amanda Lea, Sue Hull, Sarah Whitehead, Gwen Bailey, James Serpell, Rory Putman, Anita Nightingale, Claire Hoskin, Robert Hubrecht, Claire Guest, Deborah Wells, Elizabeth Kershaw, Anne McBride, Sarah Heath, Justine McPherson, David Appleby, Barbara Schöning, Emily Blackwell, Jolanda Pluijmakers, Theresa Barlow, Helen Almey, Elly Hiby, Sara Jackson, Elizabeth Paul, Nicky Robertson, Claire Cooke, Samantha Gaines, Anne Pullen and Carri Westgarth – and many more too numerous to list. Two deserve a special mention: Nicola Rooney, who in addition to producing consistently world-class research on dog behaviour and welfare for the past dozen years, has also been the social life and soul of my research group; and Rachel Casey, arguably the UK’s leading veterinary behaviourist, and unarguably an indefatigable champion of evidence-based dog training and behavioural therapy. I am grateful to Emily Blackwell and Nicola Rooney for their comments on parts of the manuscript. My thanks also to the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and especially Professors Christine Nicol and Mike Mendl, and Dr David Main, for nurturing the Anthrozoology Institute and its research.
Our research has relied on the co-operation of literally thousands of volunteer dog owners and their dogs, to whom I express my gratitude. Also, much of our research would have been impossible without the facilities and co-operation offered by the UK’s leading animal rehoming charities: Dogs Trust, the Blue Cross and the RSPCA.
There are many other academics and dog experts that I’ve met only briefly, but whose published work has been an enormous inspiration. Many I have been able to mention specifically in the notes. Like any branch of science, the systematic study of dog behaviour embraces many approaches and opinions, and sometimes these can be expressed quite forcefully. Yet there is a crucial difference between canine science and c
anine folklore; scientists are ready to evaluate evidence gathered by others, and to change their opinions if that evaluation indicates that they should. Canine scientists are not in the business of peddling opinion as if it were fact; they contribute to a body of knowledge which, while never complete, continually gains strength from being the product of many heads and much discussion. I am grateful to them all, even those whose views are now largely discredited or unfashionable. Science advances through the replacement of one hypothesis by another that better fits the data; without the first to act as a stimulus to creative thought, the second might never have been conceived.
Condensing all this science into a book of reasonable length has not been easy, but my agent Patrick Walsh, and Lara Heimert and Will Goodlad, my editors at Basic Books and Penguin respectively, have all taught me a great deal about how to aim for a wider audience than the academic community that I have mainly written for in the past.
I’ve been amazed and delighted by how my old friend Alan Peters’ drawings have brought my descriptions of dogs and canids to life. He’s not only a wonderful artist, he’s also a skilful gundog trainer (and falconer) and so was able to bring to the task a lifetime’s experience of how dogs move and interact.
Finally, to my family. My wife Nicky has been an unwavering source of support throughout all the years of my academic career, and especially during the year or so it has taken me to write this book – I cannot thank her enough. Thanks also to my brother Jeremy for giving me the encouragement to start this book in the first place. Netty, Emma and Pete, thank you for refreshing my brain with music; Tom and Jez likewise but with ales, Rioja and cricket.
ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
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In Defence of Dogs Page 37