Read Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Online

Authors: Alexandra Horowitz

Tags: #General, #Dogs, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology, #Dogs - Psychology, #Pets, #Zoology, #Breeds

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (33 page)

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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These ways of defining the world can all be seen by watching a dog interact with the world. Dogs entranced by a blank spot on the sidewalk, those whose ears perk at "nothing," those transfixed by an invisibility in the bushes—you are watching them experience their sensory parallel universe. With age the dog will "see" more objects familiar to us, will realize that more things can be mouthed, licked, rubbed against, or rolled in. They also grow to understand that different-seeming objects—the man at the deli, and the deli man on the street—are one and the same. But whatever we think we see, whatever we think just happened in a moment, we are pretty much assured that dogs see and think something different.
… It is full of details …
Part of normal human development is the refinement of sensory sensitivity: specifically, learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, space, sound, texture, smell, but we can't function if we perceive everything at once. So our sensory systems, concerned for our survival, organize to heighten attention to those things that are essential to our existence. The rest of the details are trifles to us, smoothed over, or missed altogether.
But the world still holds those details. The dog senses the world at a different granularity. The dog's sensory ability is sufficiently different to allow him to attend to the parts of the visual world we gloss over; to the elements of a scent we cannot detect; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. Neither does he see or hear everything, but what he notices includes what we do not. With less ability to see a wide range of colors, for instance, dogs have a much greater sensitivity to contrasts in brightness. We might observe this in their reluctance to step into a reflective pool of water, in a fear of entering a dark room.* Their sensitivity to motion alerts them to the deflating balloon wafting gently curbside. Without speech, they are more attuned to the prosody in our sentences, to tension in our voice, to the exuberance of an exclamation point and the vehemence of capital letters. They are alert to sudden contrasts in speaking: a yell, a single word, even a protracted silence.
As with us, the dog's sensory system is attuned to novelty. Our attention focuses on a new odor, a novel sound; dogs, with a wider range of things they smell and hear, can seem to be constantly at attention. The wide-eyed look of a dog trotting down the street is that of someone being bombarded with the new. And, unlike most of us, they are not immediately habituated to the sounds of human culture. As a result, a city can be a explosion of small details writ large in the dog's mind: a cacophony of the everyday that we have learned to ignore. We know what a car door slamming sounds like, and unless listening for just that sound, city dwellers tend to not even hear the symphony of slams playing on the street. For a dog, though, it may be a new sound each time it happens—and one that sometimes, even more interestingly, is followed by a person arriving on the scene.
They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks, the complement of what we see. Sometimes these are not invisible things but simply those we would prefer they not pay attention to, like our groins, or the favored squeaking toy we stuff in a pocket, or the forlorn, limping man on the street. We could see those things, too, but we look away. Human habits that we ignore—tapping our fingers, cracking our ankles, coughing politely, shifting our weight—dogs notice. A shuffle in a seat—it may foretell rising! A scootch forward in the chair—surely something is happening! Scratching an itch, shaking your head: the mundane is electric—an unknown signal and a whiff of shampoo. These gestures are not part of a cultural world for dogs as they are for us. Details become more meaningful when they are not swallowed up in the concerns of the everyday.
That very attention that dogs bring to us may cause them to acclimate to these sounds over time, to be inculcated in the human culture. Watch a bookstore dog, who lives out the hours of his day surrounded by people: he has become inured to strangers coming by, standing close while they riffle the pages of a book; to being scratched on the head, to passing smells and ever-present footsteps. Crack your knuckles a dozen times a day and a nearby dog will learn to ignore this habit. By contrast, a dog unaccustomed to human habits is alarmed at every one: the most exciting and frightening thing that could happen to a dog left chained to guard a house is that it actually requires his guarding. Guard dogs may only occasionally see an unknown person walking by, a new smell on the air or new sound, let alone any rampant knuckle-crackers.
We can begin to make up for our human disadvantage in understanding the dog's sensory umwelt by trying to startle our sensory systems. For instance, to escape our bad habits of seeing things roughly in the same colors every day, expose yourself to a room lit by only one color—say a narrow bandwidth of yellow. The colors of objects under such light are washed out: your own hands are drained of their blood-filled vitality; pink dresses turn dully white; face stubble stands out like pepper in a bowl of milk. The familiar is made foreign. But for the yellow glow from above, this is much closer to what it might be like to have a dog's color perception.
… It is in the moment …

Ironically, attention to details may preclude an ability to generalize from the details. Sniffing the trees, the dog does not see the forest. Specificity of place and object is useful when you want to calm your dog on a road trip: you can bring his favored pillow to help calm him. A feared object or person put in a new context can sometimes be reborn as unscary.

That same specificity might indicate that dogs do not think abstractly—about that which is not directly in front of them. The influential analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that though a dog can
believe
that you are on the other side of the door, we cannot sensibly talk of his
ruminating
on it: believing that you will be there in two days' time. Well, let's eavesdrop on that dog. He has slowly zigzagged through the house since you left. He has run through all the interesting unchewed surfaces in the room. He has visited the armchair, where food was once left unattended long ago, and the couch, where food was spilled last night. He has napped six times, had three visits to the water bowl, lifted his head twice at faraway barks. Now he hears your shuffling approach of the door, quickly confirms by nose that it is you, and remembers that each time he hears and smells you, you appear visually next.
In sum, he believes that you are there. It is nonsense to suggest otherwise. Wittgenstein's doubt is not that dogs have beliefs. They have preferences, make judgments, distinguish, decide, refrain: they think. Wittgenstein's doubt is that before you arrive, your dog is anticipating your arrival: pondering it. It is doubt that dogs have beliefs about things not happening right now.
To live without the abstract is to be consumed by the local: facing each event and object as singular. It is roughly what it means to live
in the moment
—to live life unburdened by reflection. If it is so, then it would be fair to say that dogs are not reflective. Though they experience the world, they are not also considering their own experiences. While thinking, they are not consulting their own thoughts: thinking about thinking.
Dogs come to learn the cadence of a day. But the nature of a moment—the experience of moments—is different when olfaction is your primary sense. What feels like a moment to us may be a series of moments to an animal with a different sensory world. Even our "moments" are briefer than seconds; they are the duration of a noticeable instant, perhaps the smallest distinguishable time unit, as we normally experience the world. Some suggest that this is measurable: it is an eighteenth of a second, the length of time a visual stimulus has to be presented to us before we consciously acknowledge it. Thus we barely notice a blink of an eye, at a tenth of a second long. By this logic, with a higher flicker-fusion rate, a visual moment is briefer and quicker for dogs. In dog time each moment lasts less long, or, to put it another way, the next moment happens sooner. For dogs, "right now" happens before we know it.
… It is fleeting and fast …

For dogs, perspective, scale, and distance are, after a fashion,
in
olfaction—but olfaction is fleeting: it exists in a different time scale. Scents don't arrive with the same even regularity as (under normal conditions) light does to our eyes. This means that in their scent-vision they are seeing things at a different rate than we.

Smell tells time. The past is represented by smells that have weakened, or deteriorated, or been covered. Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you're headed. By contrast, we visual creatures seem to look mostly in the present. The dogs' olfactory window of what is "present" is larger than our visual one, including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future in it.
In this way, olfaction is also a manipulator of time, for time is changed when represented by a succession of odors. Smells have a lifetime: they move and they expire. For a dog, the world is in flux: it waves and shimmers in front of his nose. And he must keep sniffing—as if we had to repeatedly look at and attend to the world for a constant image to remain on our retinae and in our minds—for the world to be continually apparent to him. This explains so much familiar behavior: your dog's constant sniffing, for one,* and also, perhaps, his seemingly divided attention, which races from sniff to sniff: objects only continue to exist as long as an odor is emitted and he inhales. While we can stand in one place and take in a view of the world, dogs must do much more moving themselves in order to absorb it all. No wonder they seem distracted: their present is constantly moving.
The odor of objects thus holds the data of passing minutes and hours. As they note the hours and days, dogs can note the seasons through smell. We on occasion notice the passing of a season as marked by the smell of blooming flowers, decaying leaves, air about to burst into rain. Mostly, though, we feel or see the seasons: we feel the welcome sun on our winter-paled skin; we glance out the window on a bright spring day and never remark,
What
a
beautiful
new
smell!
Dogs' noses stand in for our sight and skin sense. The air of spring brings odors in every sniff-ful remarkably different from the air of winter: in its moisture or heat; the amount of rotting death or blooming life; in air traveling on breezes or emanating from the earth.
Navigating the world of human time with their expanded window of the present, dogs function a little ahead of us; they are preternaturally sensitive, a shade faster. This accounts for their skill at catching the tossed ball midair and also for some of the ways they seem out of sync with us, some of the ways we can't get them to do what we want. When dogs don't "obey," or have difficulty learning something we want them to, it is often that we are not reading
them
well: we don't see when their behavior has begun.* They are lunging toward the future a step before us.
… It is written all over their faces …

She has a smile. It's one of the panting faces she puts on. Not every panting face is a smile, but every smile is a panting face. A slight fold in her lip—it would be a dimple on a human face—adds to the smile. Her eyes can be saucers (engaged) or half-open slits (contented). And her eyebrows and eyelashes exclaim.

Dogs are ingenuous. Their bodies do not deceive, even if they sometimes cajole or trick us. Instead the dog's body seems to map straight to his internal state. Their joy when you return home or when you approach them is translated directly through their tails. Their concern is plotted by the lift of an eyebrow. Pump's smile is not an actual grin, but that deep lip retraction that gives a glimpse of teeth
is
used in a ritualized way, part of a communication with us.
You can tell a lot about a dog by observing how he carries his head. Mood, interest, and attention are writ in capital letters from the altitude of the head, the lay of the ears, and the radiance of the eyes. Think of a dog prancing around in front of other dogs, tail and head high, with a cherished or stolen toy: given dogs' usual way of negotiating around each other, this is a clear, intentional gesture—of something like pride. Young wolves too may cheekily flaunt food in front of older animals. The leader in interaction with the world, the head is usually aimed in the direction the dog is going. If a dog turns his head to the side, it is just momentary—to determine if there is something worth pursuing yonder. This is unlike us, who might turn our heads in contemplation, to strike a pose, or for effect. The dog is refreshingly free of pretense.
BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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