Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (32 page)

This, appropriately, boggled Nagel's mind. He thought that the bat's vision, and thus the bat's life, are so wildly odd, so imponderable, that it is impossible to know what it is like to be that bat. He assumed that the bat experiences the world, but he believed that that experience is fundamentally subjective: whatever "it is like," it is that way only to that bat.

The trouble with his conclusion has to do with the imaginative leap that we do make every day. Nagel treated an
inter
species difference as something wholly unlike an
intra
species difference. But we are perfectly happy to talk about "what it is like" to be another human being. I do not know the particulars of another person's experience, but I know enough about the feeling of being human myself that I can draw an analogy from my own experience to someone else's. I can imagine what the world is like to him by extrapolating from my own perception and transplanting it with him at its center. The more information I have about that person—physically, his life history, his behavior—the better my drawn analogy will be.

So can we do this with dogs. The more information we have, the better the drawing will be. To this point, we have physical information (about their nervous systems, their sensory systems), historical knowledge (their evolutionary heritage, their developmental path from birth to adults), and a growing corpus of work about their behavior. In sum, we have a sketch of the dog umwelt. The parcel of scientific facts we have collected allows us to take an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog—to see what it is like to be a dog; what the world is like from a dog's point of view.

We have already seen that it is smelly; that it is well peopled with people. On further consideration, we can add: it is close to the ground; it is lickable. It either fits in the mouth or it doesn't. It is in the moment. It is full of details, fleeting, and fast. It is written all over their faces. It is probably nothing like what it is like to be us.

Few dogs are human-height. They are human-knee height. One might even say they are often
underfoot.
We are magnificently obtuse when it comes to imagining even the simple fact of their being less than half our height. Intellectually we know that dogs are not at our height, yet we set up interactions such that the height difference is a constant problem. We put things "out of reach" of dogs, only to be frustrated by their attempts to get them. Even knowing that dogs like greeting us at eye level, we typically do not bend down. Or, bending down just far enough to allow them to reach our faces with a leap, we may get annoyed when they then leap.
Jumping up
is the direct result of desiring to get to something one needs to
jump up
to reach.

Scolded enough for jumping up, dogs happily find there is plenty of interest underfoot. There are, for instance, lots of feet. Smelly feet: the foot is a good source of our signature odors. We tend to sweat pedally when we are mentally taxed: stressed, or concentrating hard. Clumsy feet: sitting, we dangle them, but not with dexterity. They act as single units, with toes only existing as places between which extra odors may be discovered by a roving tongue.

If the foot smells so interesting, of course, then the way we treat them must be awfully frustrating: damned shoes. We cloister our odors. On the other hand, shoes left behind smell just like the person who had been in them, and they have the additional interest of carrying on their soles whatever you squishily stepped in outside. Socks are equally good carriers of our odor, hence the gaping holes that regularly appear in socks left bedside. On examination, each hole has been lovingly poked by the incisors of a dog with a sock in her mouth.

Besides feet, at dog height the world is full of long skirts and trouser legs dancing with every footfall of their wearer. The tight whirling motions the warp of a pant leg presents to a dog's eye must be tantalizing. Between their sensitivity to motion and their investigatory mouths, it is no wonder one can find one's pants being nipped by the dog at the end of your leash.

The world closer to the ground is a more odoriferous one, for smells loiter and fester in the ground, while they distribute and disperse on the air. Sound travels differently along the ground, too: hence birds sing at tree height, while ground dwellers tend to use the earth to communicate mechanically. The vibration of a fan on the floor might perturb a dog nearby; likewise, loud sounds bounce more loudly off the floor into resting dog ears.

The artist Jana Sterbak tried to capture a dog's-eye view by rigging a video camera to a girdle worn by Stanley, her Jack Russell terrier, and recording his perambulations along a frozen river and through Venice, the "city of doges" (pun probably intended). The result is a manic, jumbled rush of sights, the world akilter and the image never calm. At fourteen inches above the ground, Stanley's visual world is a glimpse of his olfactory world: what catches his olfactory interest he pursues in body and sight.

But by suiting up animals with critter-cams we are mostly getting an idea of their
vantage
on the world, not their entire umwelt. With most if not all wild animals, only by taking such a vantage may we have any information about their world, their day: we can't keep up with a diving penguin as a camera strapped to its back can; only an inconspicuous camera could capture the tunnel building of a naked mole rat underground. To watch Stanley from the vantage of his back is to be surprised at the view. There is the temptation, though, to think that by capturing a picture of Stanley's day we have completed the imaginative exercise. It is but the beginning.

She is lying on the ground, head between paws, and notices something potentially interesting or edible a short stretch away on the floor. She pulls her head forward to it, her nose—that beautiful, robust, moist nose—nearly but not quite
in
the particle. I can see her nostrils working to identify it. She gives a wet snort and brings her mouth to aid in the investigation: by turning her head ever-so-slightly on an angle her tongue reaches the floor. She test-licks it with quick swipes, then straightens up and sets to a more serious posture from which to lick, lick, lick the floor—long strokes with the fullness of her tongue.

Nearly everything is lickable. A spot on the floor, a spot on herself; the hand of a person, the knee of a person, the toes of a person, the face, ears, and eyes of a person; a tree trunk, a bookshelf; the car seat, the sheets; the floor, the walls, the all. Unidentifiables on the ground are especially ripe for tonguing. This is revealing, for licking—bringing molecules into oneself, not merely taking a distant safe stance toward them—is an extremely intimate gesture. Not that dogs mean to be intimate. But to be so directly in contact with the world, intentionally or not, is to define oneself differently with respect to one's environment than humans do: it is to find less of a barrier at the edge of one's own skin or fur from that which surrounds it. No wonder it is not unusual to see a dog duck his head fully into a mud puddle or twist his supine body in exaltation of spirit and the rank earth.

The dog's sense of personal space reflects this intimacy with the environment. All animals have a sense of comfortable social distance, the breaching of which causes clashes and the stretching of which they try to contain. While Americans balk at strangers standing closer than eighteen inches, American dogs' personal space is approximately zero to one inches. Repeating itself on sidewalks across the country this very second is a scene that demonstrates the clash of our senses of personal space: the sight of two dog owners as they stand six feet apart, straining to keep their leashed dogs from touching, while the dogs strain mightily to touch each other. Let them touch! They greet strangers by getting into each other's space, not staying out of it. Let them get into each other's fur, sniff deeply, and mouth each other in greeting. It is not for dogs the safe distance of a handshake.

As we have a limit to the proximity of others we'll endure, we also have a limit to the distance we prefer: a kind of social space. Sitting over five or six feet apart makes for an uncomfortable conversation. Walking on opposite sides of the street, we do not feel we are walking
together.
Dogs' social space is more elastic. Some dogs happily walk in parallel but at great, owner-distressing distances from their owners; others like to trot at your heels. This extends to their sense of fit with us, resting at home. Dogs have their own version of enjoying the pleasantness of a book that fits closely but not too tightly into a box. Pump wanted to sit so that her body was cupped by the embrace of a small upholstered chair. She would fill the space created by my bent legs when lying on my side in bed. Other dogs position themselves with the length of their backs against the length of a sleeping body. The pleasure of this alone is enough for me to invite a dog onto the bed.

Of the innumerable objects we see around us, only a very few are salient to the dog. The array of furniture, books, tchotchkes, and miscellany in your home is reduced to a more simple classificatory scheme. The dog defines the world by the ways that he can
act
on the world. In this scheme, things are grouped by how they are manipulated (chewed, eaten, moved, sat upon, rolled in). A ball, a pen, a teddy bear, and a shoe are equivalent: all are objects that one can get one's mouth around. Likewise, some things—brushes, towels, other dogs—act on them.

The affordances—the typical use, the functional tone—that we see in objects are superseded by dog affordances. A dog is less threatened by a gun than interested in seeing if it fits in his mouth. The range of gestures you make toward your dog is reduced to those that are fearsome, playful, instructive—and those that are meaningless. To a dog, a man raising his hand to hail a cab says the same thing as a man reaching to high-five or one waving goodbye. Rooms have a parallel life in the dog's world, with areas that quietly collect smells (invisible detritus in the crook of the wall and floor), fertile areas from which objects and odors come (closets, windows), and sitting areas where you or your identifying perfume might be found. Outside, they do not so much notice
buildings:
too big; not able to be acted on; not meaningful. But the building's
corner,
as well as lampposts and fireplugs, wears a new identity each encounter, with news of other dog passersby.

For humans it is the form or shape of an item that is usually its most salient feature, leading to our recognition of it. Dogs, by contrast, are generally ambivalent about the shape in which, say, their dog biscuits come (it is
we
who think they should be bone-shaped). Instead, motion, so readily detected by the retinae of dogs, is an intrinsic part of the identity of objects. A running squirrel and an idle squirrel may as well be different squirrels; a skateboarding child and a child holding a skateboard are different children. Moving things are more interesting than still ones—as befits an animal at one time designed to chase moving prey. (Dogs will stalk motionless squirrels and birds, of course, once they have learned that they often spontaneously become squirrels running and birds on the wing.) Rolling quickly on a skateboard, a child is exciting, worth barking at; stop the skateboard, and the motion, and the dog calms.

Given their definition of objects by motion, smell, and mouthability, the most straightforward items—your own hand—may not be straightforward to your dog. A hand patting his head is experienced differently than one pressing continuously on it. Similarly, a glance, even many stolen glances, is different than a stare. A single stimulus—a hand, an eye—can become two things when experienced at different speeds or intensities. Even for humans, a series of still images shuffled fast enough becomes a continuous image: as though changing identity. To the common snail, wary of the world, a slowly tapping stick is risky to walk over; but if the stick is oscillated four times a second, the snail will move into it. Some dogs will endure a pat on the head but not a hand resting there; for others, the reverse is true.