For the Love of a Dog (5 page)

Emotions are profoundly basic things, seen in a myriad of species in their physiological reactions, their expressions, their brains, and their neurochemistry That’s one of the many reasons why it’s illogical to claim that animals like dogs don’t have emotions, even though some people still make that argument. If something happened right now to terrify you and your dog, his posture and expression would be a close replica of your own. This isn’t new knowledge—in 1872, Charles Darwin published
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, in which he doesn’t hesitate to illustrate the posture of a “terrified” cat or a “humble” and affectionate dog. In the book, Darwin emphasizes that basic emotions like fear and disgust have the same outward physical expression
in many species. Well over a hundred years old, the book is used in every class worth its salt on evolution or behavior.

Now that we’re able to look beyond changes in behavior and go deep inside a functioning brain, we’ve found that we share a lot more than just outward expressions with other animals. In his
book Affective Neuroscience
, Jaak Panksepp argues that mammals have the same basic emotion-related structures and the same emotion-related physiology as we do. The area of the brain that mediates emotion is called the limbic system, and it’s so basic to the brains of both you and your dog that it’s often called the mammalian brain.

The limbic system nestles deep in the middle of your brain, tucked between the truly primitive areas that keep your head up and your lungs working, and the wrinkly, newer areas of the cerebral cortex, which integrates information and makes decisions. In both you and your dog, it includes three vital little structures called the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus. The amygdala attaches emotional significance to the information coming into the brain, and has been called the command center of the emotions of surprise, rage, and fear. As we learn more about the complexity of the brain, we’ve learned that this is a vast oversimplification, but then, just about everything we’ve learned about the brain fits into that category. (The brain is so complicated that it’s almost impossible to talk about it without oversimplifying something, so bear with me.) Suffice it to say that your amygdala is a crucial player in your emotional experience and your dog’s amygdala a crucial player in his. The amygdala is not only important in generating your own emotions, it’s a key player in reading the emotions of others. People with damaged amygdalas can’t discriminate between others’ facial expressions of joy and anger.
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As we’ll see in later chapters, the amygdala is a very busy place if something happens to scare or enrage either you or your dog.

The amygdala passes on its emotional judgments to other structures that collate memories, pass information on to the cortex, and release hormones appropriate to whatever emotion has been generated. This system as a whole, relying on both innate responses and stored
memories, was a major player in my feelings of terror when I realized that Luke was in danger. We can’t know how much Luke’s internal experience was like mine, but he and I both had the same structures in our brain that mediate the fear, and it’s this structural similarity that underlies the argument of many of us that the emotions of nonhuman mammals must be similar to those of humans.

Surely, fear is the most fundamental of emotions. It’s hard to imagine living in a world full of predators and poisonous plants without a brain that motivates you to be careful when you’re in danger. Even skeptics of emotions in animals agree that fear is the most basic of emotions, an adaptive response for any animal able to make choices to protect itself in the wild. Most biologists agree that the other “basic” emotions are anger, disgust, and joy. These primal emotions are seen clearly in all individuals of our own species, and are expressed in similar ways, no matter where the person is or what the culture.
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Three of these basic emotions—fear, anger, and happiness—are so important to us (and I will argue, also to our dogs) that we’ll discuss each of them in its own chapter. Love, as a cousin of happiness, deserves its own chapter, as only seems appropriate in a book about emotions and our relationships with dogs. Besides these four basic emotions, there are others, such as guilt and pride, that appear to be more complicated. Perhaps they are combinations of basic emotions, as green is a combination of the primary colors yellow and blue. Some people argue that while all mammals experience fear, anger, disgust, and joy, emotions like guilt and pride require higher cognitive abilities and can be felt only by humans. We’ll talk about these more complex emotions later in the book, but for now, what’s important is that our basic emotions don’t separate us from the rest of nature; they link us to it. As Diane Ackerman put it in
An Alchemy of Mind
, we may have sophisticated brains, but the emotions that blossom within them are crude and primitive. At their most basic level, surely we share the experience of them with our dogs.

In November 2003, Tammy Ogle’s head was run over by the car she was driving. She was cruising down a county road, her three Labradors lolling in the back, when her SUV flipped in circles like a spinning ball, and threw her out the window and under the wheels of her own vehicle. When the dust settled, she lay unconscious with ten broken ribs and a smashed, scalped head. Tammy’s three Labs, Double, Lily, and Golly, escaped serious injury and scrambled out of the vehicle. (Tammy told me that she always crated her dogs in the car, and has no idea why on this particular morning she let them ride loose.) Double, a handsome black three-year-old, stayed with Tammy, while Lily and Golly ran half a mile to the nearest house, where they proceeded to bark and scratch at the door until someone came out. Golly grabbed the homeowner’s sleeve to pull him toward the road, where he was able to see Tammy’s overturned vehicle
.

If you’d like to get into an argument, ask several people whether they think Tammy’s dogs were consciously saving her life. Some will say: “Of course they were. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that (1) the dogs recognized that Tammy was seriously injured and desperately needed help; (2) they loved Tammy and wanted to help her; (3) knowing they couldn’t help her themselves, they consciously decided to run down the road and find someone who could help her; (4) when they arrived at a house, they barked and scratched at the door to get the attention of whoever was inside; (5) Golly became aware that the homeowner hadn’t yet noticed the accident, so she tugged on his sleeve to try to direct his attention.

Other people will see the story above as a prime example of dog lovers being foolishly anthropomorphic, imagining mental processes in dogs that are actually exclusive to humans. People with this perspective might argue that the dogs ran down the road because they were mindlessly frightened and wanted to get away from the site of the accident. Their barking in the farmyard had no strategic purpose, but occurred because the dogs had unconsciously learned to bark around humans to get attention, or because the dogs were emotionally aroused without knowing why. Perhaps Golly often greets people by grabbing at their sleeves—heaven knows Labradors love to put things in their mouths,
and there are lots of Labradors who can’t resist a friendly “handshake” with their mouths.

You can see it’s easy to come up with stories about why an animal is doing something. Both of the stories above are just that—stories. None of us can prove that our own version is the accurate one, but no one can disprove the alternative either. In the absence of any more information, it’s pretty seductive to believe your own version and dismiss others. That’s one of the reasons why scientists have historically argued that being anthropomorphic is to be avoided at all costs. It’s easy to make up a story about what’s going on in an animal’s mind that’s based on putting yourself in the animal’s place. It’s also easy to be really, really wrong.

There are endless illustrations of the trouble we get into by imagining animals as furry people, and not just in the world of dogs. I darn near killed my first flock of sheep by closing them into the barn in winter in a misguided attempt to keep them warm. I couldn’t imagine them outdoors without my assistance when it was 20 below—simply because I couldn’t imagine staying warm if
I’d
been left outside all night. But sheep aren’t wooly people, and as long as they have enough fuel in the form of good food, they are much healthier if left in the fresh air than closed into a barn. Shut into a confined area they are likely to get pneumonia from air dampened by moisture from their own breath (which is exactly what happened to mine). Now I’m smart enough to give them the choice, and most nights they choose to lie outside, perhaps covered in a blanket of snow, contentedly dozing in weather that would chill me to the bone.

That same year I obsessively stuffed soft fresh straw into the outdoor doghouses, worried sick that the dogs who slept in the kennels at night would suffer from the cold.
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In the morning I would find that Bess, a brilliant and strong-minded Border Collie, had dug out every strand of straw. After just a week or two, during which I relentlessly ignored my dog’s behavior and continued to try to make the doghouses softer and warmer, Bess began digging out the straw before I had finished putting it in. Finally I figured it out, probably on the morning when the temperature was 5 below and I found Bess sleeping contentedly outside her doghouse, curled up on a patch of snow and ice, apparently as comfy as warm toast.

Misplaced anthropomorphic concerns about animals go far beyond the boundaries of dog lovers. In a classic case, a British committee charged with improving the welfare of commercial chickens was about to mandate that the chickens be housed on wire thicker than what was commonly used. The traditional wire was so thin it looked as though standing on it with bare feet would be painful. Rather than dispensing tennis shoes to the chickens, the committee thought that producers should provide thicker wire. But before the producers were forced to spend millions of dollars on new caging, good science prevailed in the form of objective tests to see what the chickens preferred. Contrary to all expectations, the chickens chose the wire that to humans seemed intuitively the least comfortable. Subsequent tests showed that the thin wire actually dispersed pressure more effectively, and was far kinder to the feet of the chickens than one would have thought.

Forgetting that other mammals are not furry people with paws is a mistake that dog lovers frequently make. In an earlier book,
The Other End of the Leash
, I talk about how humans hug as a sign of affection, while a dog’s version of hugging is a display of social status. Dogs may love to be stroked and massaged, but hugging around the shoulders and chest is something most dogs only tolerate in exchange for cozy couches and a guaranteed dinner. I’ve learned to be careful when I talk about hugging dogs, because some people get angry with me when I suggest that their dog doesn’t adore being squeezed around the shoulders. Hugging is such an important part of expressing affection in our species, it’s impossible for some people to imagine that their dogs don’t necessarily like it. This is compounded by the fact that we can’t see the expression on our dog’s face when we’re hugging her. If you change perspectives, and watch a dog’s face when someone else is doing the hugging, you’ll get an entirely different picture. I have about fifty photographs of people hugging dogs, in which the human is beaming and the dog is looking miserable.

Usually this difference in interpretation doesn’t lead to serious problems, but sadly, many dogs don’t tolerate our bizarre need to squeeze them around the shoulders. They take our hugs as serious violations of canine social rules, and lash out in protest. This has resulted in countless numbers of dog lovers being bitten, and countless numbers
of dogs being put down for biting a child on the face. Of course, we all should be working toward breeding and raising dogs that tolerate typical human behavior, but we’re also always going to have to acknowledge that if we’re the “smart” ones, then we have to meet dogs more than halfway. The fact of the matter is, dogs don’t always want what we want, and forgetting that can cause a lot of pain and suffering.

Most examples of this aren’t so dramatic, but can still cause great harm. I’m amazed at the number of people who still believe that their dog potties or chews in the house to “get back at them” for being left alone during the day. People imagine that their dog is angry because she’s been left behind, and assume that the pile of poop in the living room was left as a statement of disgust. But there are a lot of problems with this scenario, not the least of which is the fact that dogs aren’t disgusted by poop. They love the stuff. Eating feces, whether that of another dog or a pile deposited by sheep or horses, seems to be a highlight in the life of many a dog. When people visit my farm they often envision their dog, finally off-leash in acres of safely fenced countryside, running like Lassie in a television show, leaping over fallen tree trunks, shiny-eyed with joy at the chance to run free in the country. While they’re imagining that heartwarming scene, their dog is most likely gobbling up sheep poop as fast as he can. Dogs aren’t people, and if they have their own image of heaven, it most likely involves poop.

Why on earth, then, would a dog defecate in the house to get back at you? If he was trying to communicate with his owners by defecating (which I doubt), the message would more likely have been “Look what I’ve left you! A really great pile of poop!” Neither does it make sense that a dog would chew on the couch (or the remote control—one of the all-time favorite chew toys for dogs, by the way) as a way of punishing you. It’s far more likely that the dog is either frustrated, anxious, or bored. Short of going on the Internet or watching soaps, what is your dog going to do besides chew on something?

So often people think their dog “knows” she shouldn’t potty in the house because she greets them at the door looking “guilty,” with her head and tail down, her eyes all squinty and submissive. But this is a posture of appeasement, not guilt. The poor dog has learned that her owners are going to yell at her if there’s a puddle on the carpet when they come home. All that crouching and groveling is a white flag to avoid her owner’s wrath, not a sign she’s aware she’s broken some moral
code of dog/human relationships. A dog cowering at the door when the owners come home is trying to keep them from yelling at her, poor thing, and it’s the last thing she’ll think of later on in the week when they’re gone and she needs to pee. But people still yell at their dogs, hit them, and shove their noses into puddles in the belief that the dog looked guilty when they returned home, and therefore has proved that she “knew” better all along.