Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (22 page)

This attunement to us feels magical. Dogs are able to anticipate us—and, it seems, to know something essential about us and others. Is this clairvoyance? A sixth sense?

I am reminded of the story of a horse. At the turn of the twentieth century, the actions of the horse Hans, whose ironic sobriquet, "Clever Hans," has come to stand both for what he could not do, and as a warning against overattributions to animals, helped shape the course of animal cognition research for the next hundred years.

Hans, his owner claimed, could count. Shown an arithmetic problem written on a blackboard, Hans tapped out the sum on the earth with his hoof. Though he had been encouraged and reinforced, using straightforward conditioning, for tapping, this was not a rote response to predetermined questions: he was excellent at all sums, with novel problems, and even when the questioner was someone other than his trainer.

Such was the tenor of the time that this discovered, presumed latent cognitive ability of horses created a small furor. Animal trainers and academics alike were stumped as to how Hans was doing it. It almost looked as though there were no other explanation than that he was actually doing arithmetic.

Finally, the trick—an inadvertent trick, unknown even to his owner—was discovered by a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst. When the questioner himself was prevented from knowing the answer to the problem, Hans's math was wildly off. Hans was not counting, and he was not psychic; he was simply reading the behavior of his questioners. They unconsciously tipped him off to the answer through small bodily movements: leaning forward or away from the horse when he'd tapped the correct sum; relaxing their shoulders and muscles of their face; inclining ever so slightly until the answer was reached.

Clever Hans stood, and still stands, as a cautionary tale against assigning to animals abilities that could be explained by simpler mechanisms. But thinking about the dog's use of attention reminds me of Hans's skill. While Hans was not clever in the way advertised, he was remarkably clever at reading the inadvertent signals given by the persons quizzing him. Before an audience of hundreds, only Hans noticed his trainer leaning forward, his body tensing and relaxing, which Hans had figured out meant that he was to stop tapping his hoof. He attended to the very cues that had information: an attention far greater than the human spectators brought to the event.

Hans's preternatural sensitivity may have ensued, paradoxically, from other deficits. Since he presumably didn't have any notion about numbers or arithmetic, he was not distracted by those stimuli. By contrast, our attention to the seemingly salient details would lead us to miss the one clear indication of the answer.

An experimental psychologist I've met who does research with pigeons demonstrates this phenomenon when teaching his undergraduate class. He shows the students a series of slides of bar graphs with blue bars of various lengths set against a white background. The slides fall into one of two categories, he says: those that have some unspecified "x-ness" feature, and those that don't. He points out which slides are members of the x-ness category. He then puts it to the students to use the example slides to figure out what the conditions for x-ness are.

After many minutes of frustrated and failing attempts by the students, he reveals that pigeons trained on a set of members with x-ness can without fail tell of a new graph whether it satisfies this elusive criterion or not. The students shift uncomfortably in their seats. Still, not a person comes up with the answer. Finally, their professor fills them in: those slides that are mostly blue are members of the x-ness category; those that are more white are not.

The students are outraged: they've been outsmarted by pigeons. In running this test with my psychology classes, I find they also decry the task. Though no student has ever come up with the answer, they all later complain that the answer is unfair. They were looking for some complicated relationship between the bars—one consistent with the kinds of relationships between features that bar graphs are meant to represent. But there is none. "X-ness" is simply "more blue." Only pigeons, blissfully unaware of bar graphs, saw them for their colors and perceived the true categories.

What dogs do is a version of what Hans and the pigeons did. Anecdotal tales of this kind of phenomenon abound. One trainer of search-and-rescue dogs put his hands on his hips in exasperation when the dog was following the wrong path. Another rubbed his chin uneasily. In both cases, the dogs learned to use the cues of their trainers as information that they were off the trail. (The trainers had to be trained to tone down their cuing.) As we look for the more complex explanation for an event, or for others' behavior, we may overlook clues that dogs see naturally. It is less extrasensory perception than the well-added sum of their ordinary senses. Dogs use their sensory skills in combination with their attention to us. Without their interest in our attention, they would not perceive the subtle differences in our strides and body postures and stress levels as important bits of information. It allows them to predict us and to reveal us.

The dog observes us, thinks about us,
knows
us. Do they then have some special knowledge about us, born of their attention to us and to our attention? They do.

In a nonverbal way, dogs know who we are, they know what we do, and they know some things about us unknown to ourselves. We're knowable by look, and even more so by our smells. Over and above that, how we act defines who we are. Part of my recognition of Pump is not just of her visage; it is of her walk: her slightly off-kilter, jaunty trot with her droopy ears bouncing in step. For dogs, too, the identity of a person is not just how she smells and looks; it is how she moves. We are recognizable by our behavior.

Even our most ordinary behavior—walking across a room in our characteristic style—is chock full of information that the dog can mine. All dog owners watch their pups' growing sensitivity to the rituals that precede going for what in many dog-peopled households is called a W-A-L-K.*

Dogs quickly learn to recognize shoe donning, of course; we come to expect that grabbing a leash or a jacket will clue them in; a regular walk time explains their prescience; but what if all you did was look up from your work or rise from your seat before your dog was on to you?

If done suddenly, or if you cross the room with a purposeful stride, an attentive dog has all the information he needs. Habitual watcher of your behavior, he sees your intent even when you think you are giving nothing away. As we've seen, dogs are very sensitive to gaze and thus to changes in our gaze. The difference between a head lifted up or angled down, away from them or toward them, is large for an animal so sensitive to eye contact. Even small movements of the hands or adjustments of the body attract notice. Spend three hours looking at a computer screen, hands tethered to the keyboard, then look up and stretch your arms overhead—this is a metamorphosis! The redirection of your attention is clear—and a hopeful dog can easily interpret it as a prelude to a walk. An acute human observer would notice this, too, but we rarely let others oversee us so closely in our daily affairs. (Nor do we find it terribly interesting to so oversee.)

Their facility at anticipation of our actions is part anatomy and part psychology. Their anatomy—all those rod photoreceptors—allows them a millisecond head start on noticing motion. They react before we see that there is something to react to. The critical psychologies are of anticipation—predicting the future from the past—and of association. Familiarity with your typical movements is necessary in order to so anticipate you: a new puppy might not be tricked by a feigned tennis-ball toss, but with age he will be. Even without familiarity, dogs are skilled at making associations between events—between the arrival of one's mother and the delivery of food; between a shift in your focus and the promise of a walk.

Dogs pick up the theme of our quotidian habits, and thus are especially sensitive to variations in them. Just as we often take the same route to our cars, to work, to the subway, we take our dogs on similar walks. Over time, they learn the route themselves, and can anticipate that we turn left past the hedgerow and make a sharp right at the corner with the fireplug. If we introduce a new detour on our way home, even an unnecessary one—circling around the block an additional go—dogs adjust to the new route after just a few outings. And they even begin heading in the direction of the detour before their owner makes any movements in that direction. This makes them fine, cooperative walking companions—better than many humans I perambulate the city with, whom I constantly knock into as I lead them on a preferred route.

The complement of dogs' anticipatory prowess is their purported character-reading ability. Plenty of people let their dogs choose their potential romantic partners. Others declare their dog a good judge of character, able to spot a duplicitous person, a bad sort, on first meeting. They may seem to recognize someone who is not to be trusted.* What this ability might come down to is their close looking at our looking. If you feel hesitant about an approaching stranger, you reveal it, however unintentionally. Dogs are, as we have seen, sensitive to the olfactory changes that come with stress; they can also notice tensing muscles and the auditory change of quick breathing or gasping. (These physiological changes are among those measured by lie detectors: one might imagine that a trained dog could substitute both for the machine and its technician.) But they will let their visual ability trump these notes when assessing a new person or trying to solve a problem. We all have characteristic behaviors we display when angry, nervous, or excited. "Untrustworthy" people often glance furtively in conversation. Dogs notice this gaze. An aggressive stranger may make bold eye contact, move unnaturally slowly or quickly, or veer oddly from a straight path before doing any actual aggression. Dogs notice the behavior; they react viscerally to the meeting of eyes.

One winter we took a trip north, to a place of assertive winter and genuine cold, and were treated to a large snowstorm. We pulled out sleds, found a great big hill, and proceeded to plow an erratic track down it. Pump was suddenly overcome, and ferociously pursued us on each ride downhill, biting, grabbing, and growling at our faces. When it was my fast-moving, snow-covered face being attacked, I couldn't stop her for all my laughing. She was playing, but it was a play I have not seen before: tinged with real aggression. When I managed to rise and shake off the covering of snow I'd gathered on the way down, she calmed at once.

My dog may have a particular interest in sledders, but her behavior is similar to many other dogs' chasing behaviors. Dogs often chase bicyclists, skateboarders, RollerBladers, cars, or runners. The general-purpose answer given for why they do this is usually that they have an instinct to chase prey. This answer is not entirely wrong, but it is mightily incomplete. It is not quite that dogs think of these objects or persons as "prey," per se. Your motion reveals another dimension to you:
you
roll! quickly!
It is an attribute that alters you in the dog's eyes, which are especially responsive to a certain kind of motion. Mounting and riding a bicycle, you have not turned to prey—as indicated by the fact that your dog greets you, not eats you, on dismount. Their responsive sensitivity probably evolved as a prey-detection tactic, but it will be applied variously. It lends to the dog's experience an additional way to interpret objects and animals in the environment. That way is by the quality of their motion.

There are shared components of sledding, bicycling, or running: a person is moving in a certain way—smoothly and quickly. Walkers are moving, but not quickly: they are not chased. Pump did not recognize me sledding because ordinarily, much as I would like to think otherwise, I am not particularly smooth nor quick in my motions. There is an excess of vertical movement in my walk; I weave to and fro; I gesture a lot—all frivolous in making forward progress.

To stop a dog pursuing a bicycle with a predatory glint in his eye, one can simply interrupt the illusion: stop the bike. The chasing impulse triggered by the visual cells that detected the motion will itself let up. (The hormones involved in the arousal of barking and chasing such a smooth and quick mover may still be coursing through his system, though, for a few minutes.)