Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (31 page)

With age she would rather stand than walk, lie than stand—and so she lies next to me outside with her head between her legs, nose still alert to the smells on the breeze.

With age she has become more stubborn, insisting on hoisting herself up stairs without help.

With age the difference is amplified between her day mood—reluctant to walk, extra-sniffy—and her evening mood—pulling me out the door, a spring in her step, willing to forsake smells for a jaunty tour around the block.

With age I have been given a gift: the details of Pump's existence have become even more alive. I started seeing the geography of smells she checks up on in the neighborhood; I feel how long are the periods she waits for me; I hear the way she speaks volumes by simply standing; I see her efforts to cooperate when I goad her to trot across the street.

Every dog that you name and bring home will also die. This inescapable, dreadful fact is part of our lot for introducing dogs into our lives. What is less certain is whether our dogs themselves have any inkling of their own mortality. I inspect Pump for any sign that she notices the age of her sniffmates on the sidewalks; notes the disappearance of the old droopy-eared fella with the cloudy eyes from down the block; observes her own slowed and stiff gait, graying fur, and lethargic mood.

It is our grasp of the fragility of our own existence that makes us wary of risky undertakings, cautious for ourselves and those we love. Our mortal knowledge may not be visible in all of our moves, but it shines through in some: we shrink back from the balcony's edge, from the animal with unknown intent; we buckle up for safety; we look both ways before crossing; we don't jump in the tiger cage; we refrain from the third serving of fried ice cream; we even entertain not swimming after eating. If dogs know about death, it might show in how they act.

I would prefer that dogs not know. On the one hand, when I have been confronted with a dying dog, I wanted to be able to explain to her her situation—as though an explanation would be a comfort. On the other, despite many owners' habit of giving explanations to their dogs for every command or event (
come ON,
I overhear regularly in the park,
we've got to go home so Mommy can get to work …
), dogs do not seem comforted by explanations. A life untrammeled by knowledge of its end is an enviable life.

There are a few indications that we should not envy them much. One comes from their own balcony aversion: for the most part dogs reflexively withdraw from true danger, be it a high ledge, a rushing river, or an animal with a predatory gleam in its eye. They act to avoid death.

But so does the lowly paramecium, beating a hasty retreat from predators and toxic substances. Avoidance behavior is instinctual, seen in some form in nearly all organisms. Instincts, from the knee jerk to an eye blink, do not require that the animal understands what it is doing. And we are not ready to grant the paramecium an understanding of death. But that reflex is not trivial: a more sophisticated understanding could be bootstrapped onto it.

And here are two ways dogs differ from the paramecium: First, they are not only avoidant of injury, they act differently once injured. They are aware of when they are damaged. Hurt or dying, dogs often make great efforts to move away from their families, canine or human, to settle down and perhaps die someplace safe.

Second, they are attentive to the dangers that others put themselves in. One need not wait long for a story of a heroic dog to pop up in the local news. A child lost in the mountains is kept alive by the warmth of dogs who stayed with him; a man who falls through the ice of a frozen lake is saved by the dog who came to him at the ice's edge; a dog's barking attracts a boy's parents before he can reach into the hole of a poisonous snake. Heroic dogs tales abound. My friend and colleague Marc Bekoff, a biologist who has studied animals for forty years, writes of a blind Labrador retriever named Norman who was roused to action by the screams of the family's children, caught in the current of a raging river: "Joey had managed to reach the shore, but his sister was struggling, making no headway, and in great distress. Norman jumped straight in and swam after Lisa. When he reached her, she grabbed his tail, and together they headed for safety."

The end result of all the dogs' actions is clear: someone was able to avert death for another day. Given that the dogs needed to overcome their own instinct of self-preservation to preserve another self, the usual interpretation is that the dogs are heroic, not inadvertent, actors. An understanding of the dire straits faced by the various humans might seem the only explanation.

But the trouble with anecdotes is that one does not have the full story of what happened, since the teller, with his own umwelt and particular perception, is necessarily restricted in what he sees. One could reasonably ask whether Norman did not as much intend to save Lisa as, say, follow her brother's instruction to swim out to her; or maybe Lisa herself was able to swim to shore on seeing her faithful companion near; or maybe the current shifted and carried her to shore. There is no videotape to rewind and examine to carefully consider what happened here—or in any of the rescues described. Nor do we know the long-term behavior of the dogs. It is one thing if a dog suddenly barks in order to alert others that a boy is imperiled; it is another if that dog is barking all the time, day and night. An understanding of the dogs' life histories is also important to correctly interpret what happened.

Finally, what of all the cases when a dog
didn't
save the drowning child or the lost hiker. The newspaper headlines never crow, LOST WOMAN DIES AFTER DOG FAILS TO FIND AND DRAG HER TO SAFETY! If the heroic dogs are taken to represent the species, so should the non-heroes be given consideration. There are certainly more unreported non-heroic acts than there is reported heroism.

Both the skeptical and the heroic talk can be displaced by a more powerful explanation, wrought by looking more closely at the dogs' behavior. Scrutiny of these dog stories reveals a recurring element: the dog
came toward
his owner, or
stayed close
to the person in distress. The warmth of a dog saves a lost, cold child; a man in a frozen lake can grab on to his dog waiting on the ice. In some cases the dog also created a ruckus: barking, running around, calling attention to himself—and to, say, the venomous snake.

These elements—proximity to the owner, and attention-getting behavior—are by now familiar to us as characteristic of dogs, and go into their being such fine companions for humans.

And in these cases, they were also essential for the survival of the person whose life was at risk. So are the dogs truly heroes? They are. But did they know what they were doing? There is no evidence that they did. And they don't know they're acting heroically. Dogs certainly have the potential, with training, to be rescuers. Even the untrained dog may come to your aid—but without knowing exactly what to do. Their success is due instead to what they
do
know: that something has happened to you, which makes them anxious. If they express that anxiety in a way that attracts other people—people with an understanding of emergencies—to the scene, or allows you leverage out of a hole in the ice, great.

This conclusion is affirmed by one clever experiment performed by psychologists interested in whether dogs show appropriate behavior when there is an emergency. In this test, owners conspired with the researchers to feign emergencies in the presence of their dogs, in order to see how their dogs responded. In one scenario, owners were trained to fake a heart attack, complete with gasping, a clutch of the chest, and a dramatic collapse. In the second scenario, owners yelped as a bookcase (made of particleboard) descended on them and seemed to pin them to the ground. In both cases, the owners' dogs were present, and the dogs had been introduced to a bystander nearby—perhaps a good person to inform if there has been an emergency.

In these contrived setups, the dogs acted with interest and devotion, but not as though there were an emergency. Dogs frequently approached their owners, and sometimes pawed or nuzzled these seeming victims, now silent and unresponsive (in the heart attack case) or crying out for help (in the bookcase scenario). Other dogs, though, took the opportunity to roam around in the vicinity, wandering and sniffing the grass or the floor of the room. In only a very few cases did a dog vocalize—which might serve to get someone's attention—or approach the bystander who might be able to help. The only dog who touched the bystander was a toy poodle. The poodle leaped into the bystander's lap and settled down for a nap.

In other words, not a single dog did anything that remotely helped their owners out of their predicaments. The conclusion one has to take from this is that dogs simply do not naturally recognize or react to an emergency situation—one that could lead to danger or death.

A killjoy conclusion? Hardly. If dogs lack the concepts
emergency
and
death
this is not to their discredit. One might as well ask a dog if he understands
bicycles
and
mousetraps
and then censure him for responding with a puzzled tilt of the head. A human child is also naïve to these concepts: an infant has to be screamed at as he zeros in on an open electrical outlet; a two-year-old who saw someone hurt would likely do little but cry. They will be
taught
to understand emergency situations—and then the concept of death. So too are some dogs trained, for instance, to alert a deaf companion to the sound of an emergency device, such as a smoke alarm. The teaching of children is explicit, with some procedural elements—
If
you
hear
this
alarm,
get
Mommy;
the dogs' training is entirely reinforced procedure.

What the dogs seem to know is when an
unusual
situation occurs. They are masters of identifying the usual in the world you share with them. You often act in reliable ways: in your own home, you move from room to room, spending long pauses in armchairs and in front of refrigerators; you talk to them; you talk to other people; you eat, sleep, disappear for long stretches into the bathroom; and so on. The environment is fairly reliable, too: it is neither too hot nor too cold; there is no person in the house apart from the ones who have come in the front door; water is not pooling in the living room; smoke is not drifting in the hallway. From that knowledge of the usual world comes some acknowledgment of the unusual fact of someone's odd behavior when injured, or of the dogs' own inability to act as they customarily can.

More than once Pumpernickel got herself in dire straits (once, trapped on a catwalk heading off a building edge; another time, her leash stuck in the elevator doors as the car began to move). I was amazed at how unfazed she appeared—especially as contrasted with my own alarm. It was never she who got herself out of the fix. I believe that I was more worried about her well-being than she was about mine. Still, much of my well-being hinged on her—not on her knowing how to fix dilemmas, great or small, in my life, but rather on her unremitting cheer and constant companionship.

In our attempt to get inside of a dog, we gather small facts about their sensory capacities and build large inferences upon them. One inference is to the experience of the dog: what it actually
feels like
to be a dog; what his experience of the world is. This assumes, of course, that the world is
like
anything to a dog. Perhaps surprisingly, in philosophical and scientific circles there is a bit of debate about this.

Thirty-five years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel began a long-running conversation in science and philosophy about the subjective experience of animals when he asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" He chose for his thought experiment an animal whose almost unimaginable way of seeing had only recently been discovered: echolocation, the process of emitting high-frequency shouts and then listening for the sound being reflected back. How long the sound takes to bounce back, and how it is changed, gives the bat a map of where all the objects are in the local environment. To get a rough sense of what this might be like, imagine lying in a dark room at night and wondering if someone is standing at your doorway. Sure, you could resolve the question by turning on the light. Or, bat-like, you could hurdle a tennis ball at the doorway and see if (a) the ball comes back toward you or flies out of the room, and (b) if a grunt is heard at about the time the ball arrives at the threshold. If you're very good, you might also use (c) how far the ball bounces back, to determine if the person is very tubby (in which case the ball loses most of its speed in his belly) or has washboard abs (which will reflect the ball nicely). Bats use (a) and (c), and in lieu of tennis balls they use sound. And they do it constantly and rapidly, as quickly as we open our eyes and take in the visual scene in front of us.