Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (24 page)

If we revisit some of the problem-solving tests on which wolves performed so much better than dogs, we now see that the dogs' poor performance can there too be explained by their inclination to look to humans. Tested on their ability to, say, get a bit of food in a well-closed container, wolves keep trying and trying, and if the test is not rigged they eventually succeed through trial and error. Dogs, by contrast, tend to go at the container only until it appears that it won't easily be opened. Then they look at any person in the room and begin a variety of attention-getting and solicitation behaviors until the person relents and helps them get into the box.

By standard intelligence tests, the dogs have failed at the puzzle. I believe, by contrast, that they have succeeded magnificently. They have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool. Dogs have learned this—and they see us as fine general-purpose tools, too: useful for protection, acquiring food, providing companionship. We solve the puzzles of closed doors and empty water dishes. In the folk psychology of dogs, we humans are brilliant enough to extract hopelessly tangled leashes from around trees; we can magically transport them to higher or lower heights as needed; we can conjure up an endless bounty of foodstuffs and things to chew. How savvy we are in dogs' eyes! It's a clever strategy to turn to us after all. The question of the cognitive abilities of dogs is thereby transformed: dogs are terrific at using humans to solve problems, but not as good at solving problems when we're not around.

Yesterday Pump learned, courtesy of a pet supermarket's automatic doors, that when you walk toward walls, they open and let you pass through them. Today she unlearned it, in a spectacularly poignant display.

Such is the dog's mastery of what in psychological circles is termed
learning.
There is no doubt that dogs can learn. It is the natural workings of any nervous system to adjust its actions over time in response to experience—and of every animal with a nervous system to thereby learn. Under the heading "learning" comes everything from the associative learning used in animal training, to memorization of a Shakespearean monologue, to finally understanding quantum mechanics.

Dogs' easy mastery of new procedures and concepts presumably stops prior to grasping what a quark is. What they learn is neither academic nor scholastic. Still, most of what we ask that dogs learn can only be described as capricious and arbitrary. Surely any animal recently wild will learn how to get its mouth on food. But typically the things we want dogs to learn—to obey—bear little connection to food. We ask dogs to change posture (to sit, jump up, stand up, lie down, roll over), to act in a very specific way on an object (get my shoes, get off the bed), to start or stop a current action (wait, no, okay), to change mood (cool it, go get him!), to move toward us or move away from us (come, go away, stay). This may not be quantum mechanics, but it is just as bizarre to these distant moose hunters. Nothing in a wild animal's life prepares him to be asked to maintain the state of holding his rump on the ground, unmoving, until released by your cheery
okay!
It is notable that dogs can learn these seemingly arbitrary things at all.

One morning, on awakening lying on my belly, I pulled my arms over my head, stretched my legs into pointed toes, and pulled myself up onto my forearms. Aside me Pump stirred, and matched me move for move: she tensed her front legs, stretched them well out in front of her, then straightened her back legs, too, pulling herself forward into uprightness. Now we greet each other every morning with parallel wakening stretches. Only one of us swings her tail.

Even more interesting than learning commands would be the ability to learn by merely watching others—other dogs or even people. We know dogs can learn from our instruction, but can dogs learn from our example? It would seem to behoove a social animal like the dog to look to others for information about how best to negotiate the world. In many cases, though, the answer to this question is clearly
no:
dogs have plenty of opportunity to see us eating politely at the table—yet they never spontaneously pick up knife and fork and join us. Overhearing us talking is insufficient to get them talking; their only interest in clothes seems to be chewing them, not donning them. Amply exposed to our activities, dogs don't seem to know how to imitate us.

This is not a failing, though it would distinguish them from members of our own species, consummate imitators that we are. As children and into adulthood, we goggle at each other to see what to wear, what to do, how to act, and how to react. Our culture is built on our keenness in observing others act to learn how to behave ourselves. I need only see you opening a tin can with a can opener once before I can do it myself (one hopes). The stakes are higher than they might first seem, for success at imitation not only gets you the contents of the opened can, it is an indication of a complex cognitive ability. True imitation requires that you not merely can see what another is doing, not simply that you see how the means lead to an end, but also that you translate others' actions into your own actions.

In that case, dogs are not true imitators, for even after thousands of demonstrations with the can opener, no dog has shown an interest: the opener's functional tone is mute for them. But this is not a fair comparison, you might complain: dogs simply haven't the thumbs, nor the dexterity they allow, to operate can openers or cutlery. Similarly, they haven't the larynx for speech nor the need for clothing. And your complaint would be fair: the question is really if the dogs can be taught, by demonstration, how to do something new—not whether they are mini-humans.

Watch dogs interact for ten minutes and you will see what looks like imitation: one dog flaunts a gloriously large stick; the other finds a stick of his own and flaunts it back. If one dog finds a spot for digging, others will soon join him at the growing hole; one dog's discovery that he can swim leads another dog to self-baptize, suddenly finding himself swimming, too. By watching others, dogs learn the special pleasures of mud puddles and of bushwhacking through brush. Pump uttered nary a peep until one of her regular dog companions began barking at squirrels. All at once, Pump too was a squirrel-barker.

The question, then, is whether these are cases of true imitation, or of something else. The something else that it might be is opaquely called
stimulus enhancement.
A minor incident involving birds and home-delivered milk in mid-twentieth-century Britain demonstrates this phenomenon best. At the time, doorstep milk delivery was commonplace in Britain, and homogenization was not. Thus dawn found foil-capped bottles of separated milk idling unattended on front porches, the cream nearest to the top of the bottles. Up at dawn with the delivery men is much of Britain's bird population, for dawn is a propitious time to sing. One bird, the small blue tit, made a discovery: the foil on the bottles was susceptible to being pecked through, revealing a rich creamy drink just below. A few reports of vandalized milk bottles were lodged, soon a spate more, then a plague of them. Hundreds of birds had learned the milk-bottle trick. Cross with their skimmed milk, the Britons were not long in finding the culprits. For us, the question is not who but how: How did this discovery spread among the blue tits? Given the rapidity with which it spread, it seemed likely that some birds observed others getting the cream, and imitated them doing so. Clever, pudgy little birds.

By providing a captive population of chickadees with a similar setup, one group of experimenters observed the phenomenon recur step-by-step. Their studies suggest a more likely explanation than imitation. Instead of carefully observing and assimilating all that the first, cream-pilfering bird was doing, other birds simply saw that he was atop the bottle. This may have attracted them to the bottles. Once landed on the bottle tops, by doing a natural behavior—pecking—they discovered the foil's puncturability themselves. In other words, they were drawn to a
stimulus,
the bottle, by the first bird's presence. Its presence enhanced the likelihood that they too would become cream stealers, but it did not demonstrate how to do so.

This may seem nitpicky, but there is an important difference at work here. In a case of stimulus enhancement, I see that you are acting in some unspecified way on the door, after which it opens. If I amble over to the door and kick it, hit it, and otherwise maul it, I might get it to open, too. In a case of imitation, I watch exactly what you are doing with the door and reproduce just those actions—the seizing and turning of the knob, the application of pressure after turning, and so on—that lead to the desired outcome. I can do that because I can imagine that what you are doing is somehow related to your goal, your desideratum: to leave the room through the door. The blue tits, on the other hand, need not have been thinking about what the milk bottle tits wanted—and probably were not.

Dog researchers wanted to test whether the stick-flaunting dogs are acting more like a blue tit or more like a human being. The first experiment was designed to determine if dogs would imitate humans in a situation in which the people were acting to attain some desired object. The researchers were asking, in essence, whether dogs can understand that a person's actions function as a demonstration that can be followed if the dog is otherwise unsure how to get that desired object himself.

They set up a simple experiment in which a toy or a bit of food was placed in the crook of a V-shaped fence. The dog was seated on the outside of the point of the V, and was given a chance to try to retrieve the food. He couldn't go straight through or over the fence, but both routes around the fence—around the left stem or the right stem—were equally long, so equally good. When given no demonstration of how to get around the fence, the dogs chose randomly, preferring neither side, and eventually making their way to the inside of the V. But when given a chance to watch a person walking around the
left
side of the fence toward the reward—a person actively talking to the dog along the way—the observing dogs changed their behavior outright: they also chose the left side.

It looks as though these dogs were imitating. And what they learned by imitating stuck: when a shortcut through the fence was later introduced, they maintained the route they had learned by watching, ignoring the shortcut. The researchers ran a handful of other trials to be clear what exactly it was that the dogs were doing. They were not simply navigating by smell: laying down a scent trail on the left arm of the fence did not induce dogs to follow it.*

Instead it had something to do with understanding others' actions. Simply watching someone quietly walk around the fence was insufficient to get the dogs to follow the person's route: the person had to be calling the dog's name, grabbing attention, yammering away. Watching another
dog
who had been trained to retrieve the reward by the left-hand route also prompted observing dogs to go left.

This result showed that dogs can see others' behavior as a demonstration of how to get to a goal. But we know from experience with our dogs that not every relevant behavior we do is seen as a "demonstration." Pump may watch me navigate around strewn chairs, books, and clothes piles as I head to the kitchen, but she will herself charge right through piles to take the quickest route. Other tests are necessary to determine if dogs are truly putting themselves in our shoes, and not just prone to
follow that human,
wherever we go.