For the Love of a Dog (14 page)

All this brings up a question: what about your dog? While you’re reading subtle changes on your dog’s face, what is your dog doing? How literate are dogs at reading human faces and postures? I’ve been writing as if it was a fact that dogs respond to our expressions and postures the way they would to the expressions and postures of another dog. We desperately need more research on this topic, but the anecdotal evidence, and the biology of dogs, suggest that they are brilliant interpreters of our expressions. In
The Other End of the Leash
, I wrote about how minor changes in your posture can have major effects on your dog, and I’ve yet to hear a trainer or behaviorist disagree.
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Our mutual experiences support the belief that dogs get a tremendous amount of information about our emotional state (and thus what we’re about to do next) from our postures and our faces.

There are logical arguments as well: if dogs weren’t good at reading emotional expressions on the faces of others, they wouldn’t be so expressive themselves. If the point is to communicate, then signals have to be interpreted by a receiver; otherwise there’s no point in sending them. You wouldn’t spend a half hour typing out an e-mail to someone who doesn’t have a computer. It isn’t surprising that dogs can interpret expressions on the faces of another species—not when they share many of the same expressions and are hard-wired to understand them. Surely our shared expressiveness and our mutual ability to read the expressions of others is part of what makes our relationship with dogs so emotionally powerful. We’re bonded to dogs not just because we are both emotional beings, but because we express our emotions so freely, and are so good at interpreting them on one another’s faces. (Although I suspect our dogs are better at reading our faces than we are at reading theirs!)

Sometimes what’s on our faces turns out
not
to be an accurate expression of how we’re feeling inside. A few years ago, I worked with an American Eskimo Dog who illustrated this point by reacting with friendly relaxation to the approach of one person, and nervous aggressive barking to another. The first person who approached was a relatively short woman who walked toward the dog with her body turned slightly sideways, avoiding direct eye contact and squatting down about three feet away from the dog. She kept her hands to herself, and in seconds the dog ran up to her, body loose and bendy, sniffed her hands, and leaped up to lick her face. Minutes later, a man with a hat and sunglasses approached the same dog, this time with a hand extended. Before he could get anywhere near the dog, she exploded in high-pitched barking. With rounded eyes, dilated pupils, and an offensive pucker, she made it perfectly clear that the man continued his approach at his own risk.

Any one of several different factors could have affected the dog’s response. Shy dogs are usually more afraid of men than women. (Is it their large jaws? Big chests? Deep voices? We’re not really sure, but the tendency is almost universal.) The man had walked directly toward the American Eskimo Dog—unlike a friendly dog, who would have approached laterally rather than head-on, and who would have avoided direct eye contact. The hat could also have been an issue. I think hats confuse dogs because they don’t seem to get the “removable parts” aspect of human couture. But there’s no question that sunglasses, looking like huge, rounded eyes with completely dilated pupils, are particularly scary to dogs. The dog turned out to be most affected by the sunglasses—she’d let the man approach without them, and then bark herself silly when he put them back on. Same man, same dog, same seminar room. Sunglasses on: dog barks and lunges forward. Sunglasses off: dog lets man approach and allows herself to be petted under the chin.
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I don’t know how many times I’ve taken one look at a dog and told my companion to quickly take his or her sunglasses off, but I’m convinced that by doing so I’ve avoided lots of sticky situations. I’ve also seen dogs react in my office to a beautiful painting of my first Great Pyrenees, Bo Peep, that hangs above the chairs in my office. Dogs can be in the office for an hour before they happen to look up and see two large, round, brown eyes staring right at them, at which they erupt in a volley of barks loud enough to wake the dead. Lest you feel smug that we humans are too advanced for such primitive reactions, keep in mind that even as infants, we respond to an image of two dots above a curved line by smiling in return. Our brains are so programmed to those basic units of expression that we respond to them even if they are completely out of context. Think of the popularity of the “smiley face” that is used universally to convey happiness. There’s no reason to believe that dogs don’t do the same thing, responding to what they perceive as signals on our faces that are relevant and important to their interactions with us.

I would guess that anyone who’s ever owned a dog believes strongly that their dog gets a tremendous amount of information from looking at their face. Certainly our dogs look to our faces all the time when they are confused and want more information. Herding dogs who are unsure of what to do will turn their heads and look back at their humans, in apparent hope of additional direction. Just as children who are unsure of how to solve a puzzle will turn and look at an adult’s face for more information, performance dogs will stop what they’re doing and turn and look at their handler’s face. We can get a tremendous amount of information by looking at an individual’s face. What we see there may not always be an accurate reflection of what’s going on inside his head, and it may only give us part of the picture, but the study of faces is one of the best means we have for gathering information about the world around us. That appears to be equally true for both people and dogs.

Surely one of the reasons we have such amazing relationships with dogs is our shared reliance on facial expressions in social interactions. These expressions are windows to what is perhaps the most astounding aspect of our shared biology—the mammalian brain. You can’t have emotions without having a brain, so the next chapter takes a look at your brain and your dog’s brain, and how they function to create emotions.

I met Bo Peep when she was an eight-week-old fluffball who grinned and thumped her tail as I approached. She lay curled up in the barn, close to the sheep that Great Pyrenees dogs like her were bred to protect. There was no worry that she’d get into the trouble common to young pups, playing too hard with the lambs or eating the grain meant for their hungry mommas. Bo Peep was born with back legs so crippled that she couldn’t stand up; she could move only by hauling her hips forward with her front legs. After two months of life, with little chance to develop muscle, that wasn’t far
.

Euthanasia was a reasonable consideration, and her breeders had discussed it at length. But they couldn’t bring themselves to put her down, so they called a veterinarian to discuss their options. Bo Peep’s back legs didn’t work because her kneecaps were on the sides of her legs rather than the fonts. The problem could be fixed surgically, although this major operation was usually done on small dogs, not ones that grow up to weigh over a hundred pounds. Their vet said he’d give the surgery a try, as long as they understood the outcome was uncertain. He was sure about one thing: Bo Peep would need extensive rehabilitation during her long recovery. The breeders had full-time jobs, several young children, and about a dozen Great Pyrenees. That’s where I came in
.

One horrible day I lost twenty-nine ducks to a stray dog not long after a neighbor lost a calf to coyotes. The rolling hills of southern Wisconsin may not look like a dangerous wilderness, but stray dogs and coyotes are common. After my own loss, and after neighbors regaled me with stories of attacks
on their horses, goats, and chickens, I started looking for a working guard dog. Only one problem: my flock of eight ewes was worth about $800, and I couldn’t afford the $2,000 to $3,000 it cost to buy a mature, working Great Pyrenees. Bo Peep’s breeders knew my story, and thought they’d found the perfect solution. “You could have her for fee,” they told me on the phone, “and the vet will do the surgery for only the cost of materials.” Bo Peep would need a tremendous amount of care, they said, but with luck she’d grow up to be a happy, functional guard dog
.

“Well, I’ll come look at her,” I said, as if meeting a helpless fluffy white puppy would help me make an objective decision. I don’t need to tell you what happened next. If you care enough about dogs to be reading this book, then you know that my fate was already sealed. Granted, after I met her I said I’d go home and think about it, maintaining the pretense of making a carefully considered decision. I thought about it, all right—I couldn’t think about anything else all night long. I brought her home the next day
.

Weeks later, I watched in fascination as the vet cut open Bo Peep’s leg filed grooves in the bones for the appropriate tendons and then, straining and groaning his foot on the table for leverage, pulled her knee cap into place. After a few weeks of recovery in a cozy pen in the barn, it was time for Bo Peep to begin walking on her first newly repaired back leg
. (
We had decided to do one surgery at a time.) But Bo Peep had never walked on her back legs, and things didn’t turn out as expected
.

No amount of coaxing or luring could motivate her to take even a single step. Bo Peep had spent her entire life, short as it may have been thus far, lying in one place within a flock of sheep, licking the faces of lambs who came to visit and thumping her tail when humans approached. For the life of me, I couldn’t get her to try to use her new leg. Somehow I had to get her walking. During one frustrating attempt, I carried her a few feet away from the barn, perhaps just to get us into the warmth of the sun. For the first time in her life, Bo Peep was out of sight of sheep, and finally she was motivated to try to move. She began pulling with her front legs in an attempt to get back to her sheep, and I was able to curl my arms around her hips and lift her hindquarters so that her new hind leg could straighten and begin to carry her weight
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