Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (30 page)

On the other hand, a dearth of evidence verifying dogs' time-telling with bones does not mean that dogs do not distinguish past from present from future. When encountering a dog who had once—but only once—been aggressive, a dog will first be wary and gradually, with time, grow more emboldened. And dogs certainly anticipate what is in their near future: with growing excitement on beginning the walk that leads to the dog food store; or anxiety at the car ride that suggests a visit to the veterinarian.

Some thinkers treat the dog as having no past: as enviably ahistorical, happy because they cannot remember. But it is clear that they are happy even despite remembering. We don't yet know if there is an "I" there behind the dog's eyes—a sense of self, of being a dog. Perhaps there need only be a continuous teller for the autobiography to be written. In that case, they are writing it right now in front of you.

When Pump was a young dog, a common scene in our household went like this: I turn my back or go into another room. Milliseconds later, Pumpernickel has her nose at the kitchen trash can, peering in for good bits. If I return and catch her in this vulnerable spot, she immediately pulls her nose out of the can, her ears and tail drop, and she wags excitedly, slinking away. Caught.

When researchers asked a sample of dog owners what kinds of things dogs know or understand about our world, the owners most frequently claimed that dogs know when they have done something wrong: that dogs have knowledge of a kind of category of
things one must never, ever do.
These days that category includes things like tearing into the garbage, devouring footwear, and snatching just-cooked food off the kitchen counter. The punishment in our enlightened age is, one hopes, not terribly severe: a stern word; a frown and a stamped foot. It was not always so: in the Middle Ages and earlier, dogs and other animals were brutally punished for misdeeds, from the "progressive mutilation" of the ears, feet, and on to the tail of a dog in correspondence with the number of people he had bitten, to the capital punishment, after legal trial and conviction, of a dog for homicide;* to earlier, in Rome, the ritual crucifixion of a dog on every anniversary of the evening the Gauls attacked the capital and a dog failed to warn of their approach.

The guilty look of a dog responsible for lesser trespasses is well-known to anyone who has caught a dog in Pump's pose, with her snout deeply plunged in the trash can, or discovered with bits of stuffing in his mouth and surrounded by tufts of what had until recently been the innards of the couch. Ears pulled back and pressed down against the head, tail wagging in quick time and tucked between the legs, and trying to sneak out of the room, the dog gives every appearance of realizing that he's been caught red-pawed.

The empirical question this raises is not whether this guilty look reliably occurs in such settings: it does. Instead, the question is what it is, exactly, about those settings that prompts the look. It may in fact be guilt—or it may be something else: the excitement of sniffing the trash, a reaction to being discovered, or anticipation of the unhappy, loud noises her owner tends to make when encountering trash out of its can.

Can dogs know right from wrong? Do they know that
this particular action
is clearly, maddeningly, wrong? A few years back, a Doberman employed to guard an expensive teddy bear collection (including Elvis Presley's favorite bear) was discovered in the morning with the devastation of hundreds of maimed, mauled, and beheaded teddies around him. His look, captured in news photos, was not of a dog who thought he had done wrong.

It would seem to defy reason if the mechanism behind the guilty or the defiant look were the same as ours. After all, right and wrong are concepts that we humans have by virtue of being raised in a culture that has defined such things. Excepting young children and psychotics, every person winds up knowing right from wrong. We grow up in a world of oughts and oughtn'ts, learning some rules for conduct explicitly and others by a kind of observational osmosis.

But consider how we know that other people know right from wrong when they cannot tell us so. A two-year-old sidles up to a table, gropes toward an expensive vase, and knocks it over, shattering it. Does the child know that it is wrong to break things that belong to other people? This might be an occasion on which, given the probable explosive reaction from any adults in the vicinity, she begins to learn. But at age two, she does not yet understand the concepts: she did not maliciously destroy the vase. Instead, she is an ordinary two-year-old who is clumsily trying to master moving her own body. We get an indication of her intent by watching what she did before and after the vase fell. Did she head directly for the vase and act to push it over? Or was she reaching for the vase and was uncoordinated in doing so? After it fell, did she evince surprise? Or did she look, well, satisfied?

Essentially the same method can be applied to dogs by allowing them to break expensive vases and watching how they react. I designed an experiment to determine if those guilty looks come from being guilty or from one of the something-elses. Though my method is experimental, the setting is ordinary, so as to best capture the animals' natural behavior: in the "wild" of their own homes. To qualify for subjecthood, dogs had to have been exposed to an owner's disallowance—for instance, by the owner pointing at an object to be left alone and loudly stating
No!
—and must know to therefore leave it be.

In the place of expensive vases, I use highly desirable treats—a bit of a biscuit, a cube of cheese—that will not be shattered, but will be expressly forbidden. Given that the claim being tested is that a dog knows that engaging in a behavior that has been disallowed by the owner is wrong, I designed this experiment to provide an opportunity to do that very behavior. In this case, the owner is asked to bring the dog's attention to the treat and then clearly tell the dog not to eat it. The treat is placed in an enticingly available spot. Then the owner leaves the room.

Remaining in the room are the dog, the treat, and a quietly observing video camera. Here's the dog's chance to do the wrong thing. What the dogs do is only the beginning of the data for our experiment. In most cases we assume that if given the opportunity, the dog's first move is to get the treat. We wait until he does. Then the owner returns. Here is the crucial data: How does the dog behave?

Every psychological and biological experiment is designed to control one or more variables, while leaving the rest of the world unchanged. A variable can be anything: ingestion of a drug, exposure to a sound, presentation with a set of words. The idea is simply that if this variable is important, the subject's behavior will be changed when exposed to it. In my experiment, there are two variables: whether the dog eats the treat (the one owners are most interested in) and whether the owner knows whether the dog has eaten it (the one I guessed the dogs are most interested in). Over a handful of trials, I alternate these variables one at a time. First the opportunity to eat the treat is varied: either removing the treat after the owner leaves, providing the dog the treat, or letting the dog stew over it (and eventually disobey). What we tell the owner of the dog's behavior is also varied: in one trial the dog eats the treat, and the owner is informed on return to the room; in another, the dog is surreptitiously given the treat by the videographer, and the owner is misled into thinking that the dog has obeyed the command not to eat.

All the dogs survive the experiment looking well fed and a little bewildered. In many of the trials, the dogs could be models for the guilty look: they lower their gaze, press their ears back, slump their body, and shyly avert their head. Numerous tails beat a rapid rhythm low between their legs. Some raise a paw in appeasement or flick their tongue out nervously. But these guilt-related behaviors did not occur more often in the trials when the dogs had disobeyed than in those when they had obeyed. Instead there were more guilty looks in the trials when the owner scolded the dog, whether the dog had disobeyed or not. Being scolded despite resisting the disallowed treat led to an extra-guilty look.

This indicates that the dog has associated the owner, not the act, with an imminent reprimand. What's happening here? The dog is anticipating punishment around certain objects or when seeing the subtle cues from the owner that indicate he may be angry. As we know, dogs readily learn to notice associations between events. If the appearance of food follows the opening of the large cold box in the kitchen, why, the dog will be alert to the opening of that box. These associations can be forged with events of their making as well as those they observe. Much of what is learned is based, deep down, on making associations: whining is followed by attention, so the dog learns to whine for attention; scratching at the trash can causes it to tip and spill its contents, so the dog learns to scratch to get what's inside. And making certain kinds of messes is sometimes followed much later by the presence of the owner, which is itself quickly followed by the reddening of the owner's face, loud verbiage coming out of the owner, and punishment by that reddened loud owner. The key here is that the mere appearance of the owner around what looks like evidence of destruction can be enough to convince the dog that punishment is imminent. The owner's arrival is much more closely linked to punishment than the garbage emptying the dog engaged in hours earlier. And if that's the case, most dogs will assume a submissive posture on seeing their owners—the classic guilty look.

In this case, a claim about the dog's knowledge of his misdeed is importantly off the mark. The dog may not think of the behavior as
bad.
The guilty look is very similar to the look of fear and to submissive behaviors. It is no surprise, then, to find so many dog owners who are frustrated with attempts to punish a dog for bad behavior. What the dog clearly knows is to anticipate punishment when the owner appears wearing a look of displeasure. What the dog does not know is that he is guilty. He just knows to look out for you.

A lack of guilt does not mean dogs do nothing wrong. They not only do plenty of human-defined wrong things, they sometimes seem to flaunt these things: a half-chewed shoe is paraded in front of a busy owner; you are greeted by a dog merrily exhausted from rolling in defecation. The teddy-bear guard dog looked nothing if not proud when photographed surrounded by the teddy-bear remains. Dogs do seem to play with the fact of our knowing and not knowing something—to get attention (which it generally does) and perhaps just for the sake of playing with knowledge. This is not unlike a child testing the limits of his understanding of the physical world by sitting on his high chair, dropping a cup to the floor … and again … and again: he is seeing what happens. Dogs do this with different states of attention, knowledge, or alertness of their owners. In this way they come to learn more about what we know, which they can then use to their advantage.

In particular, dogs are quite capable of concealing behavior, acting to deflect attention from their true motives. Given what we know about their understanding of mind, it is entirely within their reach to deceive. And given that it is a rudimentary understanding, their deception is not always very good. This too is childlike, as in the two-year-old child who puts his hands over his eyes to "hide" from a parent: partway to hiding, but not quite getting the essence of "hidden." Dogs show both imaginative insights and inadequacies. They do not work to hide the spoils of an overturned trash can or a messy roll in the grass. But they do act in ways to conceal their true intent. To stretch forward idly next to a dog playing with a treasured toy—only to get close enough to snatch it. To shriek overly dramatically when bitten in play, thereby ending a momentary disadvantage as the playmate stops in shock. These behaviors may begin fortuitously, with accidental actions that turn out to yield happy consequences. Once noticed, they will be produced again and again. It only remains now for an experimenter to provide an opportunity for dogs to intentionally deceive one another—unless they are too clever to let their scheming be revealed.