Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (16 page)

Research looking at the range and rate of signals used by ten physically dissimilar breeds found just this. Comparing the behavior of dogs from the Cavalier King Charles spaniel to the French bulldog to the Siberian husky, there was a clear relationship between the breed appearance and the number of signals they used. Those animals that had been most changed physically in domestication from wolves—the King Charles, at the extreme—sent the fewest signals. These
pedomorphic
or
neotenous
dogs, who retain more features of juvenile members of canid species into adulthood, look least like adult wolves. The huskies, which have the most wolflike features and are genetically closer to
Canis lupus,
do the most wolflike signals.

Given that many bodily signals provide information about one's status, strength, or intent, the necessity for dogs to send these signals is presumably diminished in a world where humans chaperone dogs through life. But the same signals used to convince a dominant animal of benign intent may also be used to communicate information to humans. Walking through the city, I turn a blind corner and nearly step on an unfamiliar dog pulling on a long leash. Seeing me, she crouches, wags her tail furiously between her legs, and licks toward my face. It may have begun as a submissive gesture, but now it is adorable.

After sleeping late and enduring the slow pace of my morning rituals, Pump's first move when we get outside never varies. She takes two steps out the door and unceremoniously squats. She crouches deeply, fully committed to the pose, with only her tail—curled high out of the way—pulling her body up. The torrent of urine released (surely record-breaking this time) seems accompanied by a relaxing of the muscles of her face—and by a growing guilt on my own that I made her wait so long. She watches the stream of her own urine wandering by her as it finds cracks in the sidewalk in which to divert itself cleanly.

As much as is being said with a bark, snarl, or wagging tail, vocalization and posture are not the only media of communication for dogs. Neither is a match for the informational possibilities of smells. Urination, as we saw earlier, is the means of odorant communication most conspicuous to us. It might be hard to believe that the release of the bladder is a "communicative act" right up there with a polite conversation between friends or a politician orating before his constituents. At some level, it is like both of these: it is part of normal dog sociality, and it can also be a bellowing self-promotion writ on a hydrant.

You might balk at calling the moist message left high on a lowly fire hydrant the same kind of communication that humans use—and not just because they are talking out of their rumps, not their faces. Crucially, we communicate (most of the time) with
intention:
rather than yammering out loud to our own left hand, we tend to direct our communications to other people—people who are near enough to hear us, not otherwise distracted, who know the language, and can understand what we're saying. Intention distinguishes communication done with others in mind from the automatic
oof!
uttered on being hit in the belly, blushing at a compliment, a mosquito's constant buzzing, or the unmindful bit of information imparting done by traffic lights and flags at half-mast.

Urine marking is peeing with intention. The morning's blissful release relieves the strain on the bladder, but most of the time some is held back for later use in marking. Presumably the urine is the same urine: there's no evidence of an independent channel or means by which to modify the odor they are emitting. But marking behavior differs in a few key ways. First, in most adult males, and some gender-bending females, marking is characterized by a prominently raised leg. There are individual and contextual variations on the so-called "raised-leg display," from a modest retraction of the rear leg up toward the body, to hoisting the leg up above the hip points, above vertical—certainly also a visual display for any other dogs in the vicinity. Both allow for a directional flow of urine, aimed to land at a conspicuous site. (One can squat and mark, too, although it is a quieter affair, perhaps for messages better whispered than shouted.)

Second, the bladder is not emptied when marking; urine is doled out a little at a time, allowing for greater distribution of scent over the course of the dog's travels. If you've left your dog indoors long enough that he races outside to squat, this urgency might preempt his ability to cache some urine for later marking. Thus the fruitless raised-leg displays you may witness, waving dryly at bushes, lampposts, and trash cans.

Finally, dogs usually urine mark only after spending some time sniffing the area. This is what elevates the odor exchange from Lorenz's notion of flag planting to a kind of conversation. Researchers keeping careful tally of dogs' marking behavior over time found that who has marked before them, the time of year, and who is nearby all affect where and when they mark.

Interestingly, these message bouquets aren't left indiscriminately: not every surface is marked. Watch a dog sniff his way down the street: he will sniff more locations than he will squirt. This indicates that not every message is the same—and the message this dog will leave may be intended for certain audiences only. Countermarking—covering old urine with new—is a common behavior of male dogs, when the old urine is that of less dominant male dogs. Everyone's marking increases when there is a new dog around.

If it is not territorial, what is the message in the mark? The first hint is that puppies don't urine mark: the communication must have to do with adult concerns. From the position of the anal glands and the compounds in the urine, we know that they are at least saying something about who they are: their odor is their identity. This is a fine message, but it is probably fairly unintentional. I may communicate something about who I am by merely walking into a room and being seen, but the very fact of my person is not a continuous, intentional communication about my identity (except when I was a kid and dressed to be seen).

What does look intentional in this communication is that dogs don't bother to say it if there's no one else around. Dogs who are kept penned by themselves spend very little time marking. The males rarely lift a leg to urinate, and neither sex bothers to deposit just a small amount. Dogs kept in similar-sized enclosures with other dogs mark much more frequently, and they mark regularly, every day. The Indian feral dogs marked to audiences—and audiences of the opposite sex. This makes sense if the message conveyed is about sex: seeking it oneself, or declaring oneself fit to be seeked. They did the most raised-leg displays (even without urinating) when other dogs were present. A leg held high only gets someone else's attention if someone else is already there to attend to it.

It also makes sense if the mark is communication for communication's sake: a comment, an opinion, a strongly held belief. There is no scientific evidence that it is so, but it is consistent with communication done only to an audience. Researchers have found that dogs raised in isolation make many fewer communicative noises than those raised with other dogs. When finally around others, though, they begin producing vocalizations at the same rate that the socialized dogs do. In other words, they speak when there is someone to speak
to.

Just as they mark with intention, so too do dogs read intention in our markings: in our gestures. As we will see in the next chapters, they interpret the body language of humans with the attention they bring to reading each other. As a young child toddles toward a treasured toy, a dog can see where she is going and get there first. A turn of the head in thought garners little attention, but a turn of the head that looks at the door—there is intention in that turn. And dogs know it. They realize that there is a difference between gazing toward the door and turning to look at the clock on the wall; they can distinguish a finger pointing toward hidden food, and a point done while lifting one's arm to check a watch. We speak loudly with our bodies.

A confession: a dog has dictated this entire chapter to me. She sat by my chair, head on my foot, and patiently waited while I struggled to translate her words to the page. It is from her that the insights of the book come, from her that evocations spring, from her that the scenes and images and umwelt emerge.

Alas, it is not quite so. But to see the remarkable number of volumes purportedly written by dogs one must imagine that this is what we all want: the story straight out of the dog's mouth—but in our native tongue, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a peculiar kind of autobiography began to appear in bookshops: it was the "memoir" of your cat, your old dog, or the animal gone missing in that winter storm. This form, narrated by talking animals, could be considered the first prose attempt to get at the point of view of the dog. When I read one of these—and there are many to choose from, among even such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf—a strange discontent washes over me. It's a sham: there is no perspective of the dog in them. Instead, it is a dog with the human's voice box transplanted to the dog's snout. Imagining that dogs' thoughts are but cruder forms of human discourse does the dog a disservice. And despite their marvelous range and extent of communication, it is the very fact that they do not use language that makes me especially treasure dogs. Their silence can be one of their most endearing traits. Not muteness: absence of linguistic noise. There is no awkwardness in a shared silent moment with a dog: a gaze from the dog on the other side of the room; lying sleepily alongside each other. It is when language stops that we connect most fully.

It takes all of six seconds for Pump to go from masterful to maladroit. In the first five she flawlessly navigates the brambles and bushes and thick-trunked trees that web the opening of the forest into field to catch a fast-moving tennis ball. It thonks off a tree and she's there to nearly vacuum it into her mouth. An apparition of a dog tears in out of nowhere, a racing blur of white fur and bark. Pump notes him and hurtles away, evading this stealer of tennis balls. In that sixth second, she stops, suddenly adrift. She's lost track of me. I watch her search: erect body, head high. I'm within sight; I smile at her. She looks at and past me, not seeing me. Instead, she spots the large, limping, heavy-coated man who came through with the white tear. She takes off after him. I must run to retrieve her. The moment before Pump was all-seeing; now she's a fool.

There is an intrinsic ranking of the modes by which we humans sense the world—and vision is winner by a long shot. Eyes arouse great interest in human psychologists; they betoken much more than one might imagine just from their physical form. However pretty a nose one might have, however close the forehead is to the brain, neither our noses nor foreheads nor cheeks nor ears are granted such importance.

We are visual animals. There's barely a challenge for second, either: audition is part of nearly every experience we have. Olfaction and touch might duke it out for third, and taste runs a distant fifth. Not that each of these isn't important to us on any particular occasion. The loveliness of presentation of, say, a tiered wedding cake would be undercut if vinegar replaced the anticipated taste of unmitigated sweetness. Or if any odor besides that of baked goods emanated from the cake—or if the first bite was not soft and yielding, but crunchy or slimy. Still, on most occasions we first direct our gaze to a new scene or object. If we notice something unusual or unexpected on the sleeve of our jacket, we turn to examine it with our eyes. Vision would have to really fail to provide any information before we decide to learn about it by inhaling it closely or taking a bold lick.