Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (36 page)

If greeting and contact were all, we might expect a rash of monkeys bonded with wolves, of rabbits cohabitating with prairie dogs. They all require contact in infancy. And even ants greet homecomers to the nest. I suppose that, predatory issues aside (a big aside), the potential is there. A gorilla named Koko, taught to use sign language to communicate and raised in a human home, had his own pet kitten.

On a long walk Pump stays near me, but not too. If I call her to me, she comes charging forth full-steam and stops just past me. She likes to be one step off. And yet when we walk together on a lean path and she is ahead of me, she
checks
—regularly looking back to see where I am. She only needs to turn her head partway round to see me, lifting it from its regular downward cast, surveying the ground. If I ever lag, she turns all the way round, ears up and attentive: waiting for me. Oh, I love to come to this beckoning stance of hers: I might gallop a bit as I near her, and this cues her to play-bow, or to pivot on her rear legs and assume her trot leading us on our walk.

He has begun, on this second day, to come to a snap: just picked it up right away. We snap him back and forth between us.

Dogs, though they do not hunt cooperatively, are cooperative. Watch the parade of leashed dog-person twosomes along a city street. Despite small diversions, they are dancing in masterful synchrony, traveling
together.
Working dogs are trained to heighten their sensitivity to the dance. Blind people and their guide dogs take turns initiating movement, completing each other.

It helps that dogs live at our speed. A house mouse, its heart beating four hundred times a minute at rest, is always in a hurry; a tick can wait for a month, a year, or eighteen years in suspended animation for that odor of butyric acid to come along; dogs function much more at our pace. Though we outlive them, their lives stretch across a generation. And they
act
at a pace sufficiently close to ours—if slightly quicker—to enable us to discern their movements, imagine their intent. They act in response to our actions, with alacrity. They dance with us.

A puppy initially balks at a leash, pulls at it unyieldingly, or simply fails to grasp that he is tethered to it—and thus to you—as he pulls toward that very interesting newspaper wafting down the sidewalk. In very little time, though, puppies learn to be highly cooperative walking partners, walking at roughly the same rate and often in step with their owners. They
match
their owners, almost mimicking us. In turn, we unconsciously mimic our mimickers. In ethology, this is called "allelomimetic behavior" and is implicated in the development and maintenance of good social relationships among animals. More than that, though, the puppy has learned about the sequence of behaviors that you repeat, that make up a walk—and anticipates them. Before long, he knows the series of steps to get the walk started, the corners you turn on your route to the park, the place where the leash is snapped off or the ball is brought out. He anticipates the long-walk turnaround point; the short-walk turnaround point; and knows how to evade the latter. Some dogs even seem to know exactly how far the parameters of a leash extend from our hands, and they dart about within those parameters, grabbing a stick or sniffing a passing dog without our breaking stride.

Once we take them off their leashes, the dance continues. My conception of the perfect walk, occasionally achieved, has my dog off-leash running not alongside me but in great circles around me, with our average forward progress over the miles more or less the same. Ideally, we encounter a dozen other dogs. There is little as therapeutic as watching two dogs at play together in a boisterous full-bodied brawl: it extends our pleasure at turn-taking games to high-speed, exuberant result. The rules of play—signaling, timing—are similar to our conversational rules. And so we can enter into a dialogue of play with our dogs.

I start it. I inch to where she's lying and I put my hand on her paw. She pulls it away—and puts her paw on my hand. I place my hand over her paw again; more quickly now, she mimics me. We trade slaps like this until it is too much: I laugh, breaking the spell, and she stretches forward over her paws, mouth open nearly in smile, to lick my face. There's a special intimacy of having her put her hand—its weight, the scratchiness of her pads, the feeling of each claw—on mine. Mostly it's the simple fact of the use of this appendage to communicate with me—it is not seen as a hand independent of its arm until she treats it as one, parallel to mine.

The elements that make play enjoyable are hard to pinpoint, just as a great joke always seems to be funnier than its deconstruction. Try getting a robot to play with you: they always seem to lack a certain …
playfulness.
A few years ago Sony developed a mechanical pet, "Aibo," designed to look like a dog—it is four-legged, has a tail, characteristic head form, et cetera—and to act something like a dog—it wags, barks, and performs simple trained-dog routines. What the Aibo does not do is play like a dog, and the designers wanted it to be more playfully interactive with people. With this in mind I studied dogs and humans playing together: wrestling, chasing, tossing and retrieving balls and sticks and ropes. I watched, videotaped, and then transcribed all the behaviors that each of the participants did. Then I looked for the elements that were consistent across the successful bouts of this interspecies play.

What I hoped to find were clear routines and games that could be modeled in a doggish toy such as Aibo. What I found was both simpler and more powerful. In every bout, the player's actions were importantly
contingent
on—based on and related to—the other's actions. This established a rhythm to the play.

A simple game of fetch, for instance, is a dance of call and response. We enjoy the game because of the dog's reactive readiness to respond to our actions. Cats, by contrast, are simply not enjoyable fetch playmates: they may in fact fetch you an object, but in their own time. Dogs participate in a kind of communion with their owners around the ball, with each responding at a conversational pace: in seconds, not hours. The dogs are acting like very cooperative humans. Another game is simply doing an activity in parallel: running together. In play between dogs parallelism is common. Two dogs may mimic each other's gaping mouths yawing back and forth. Often one dog will observe and then match the other's preoccupation: hole digging, stick chewing, ball trumpeting. As wolves hunt together collaboratively, this ability to act with others, matching their behavior, might come from their ancestry. To have your play-slap matched by a dog's is to feel suddenly in communication with another species.

We experience the dog's responsiveness as expressive of a mutual understanding: we're on this walk
together;
we're playing
together.
Researchers who have looked at the temporal pattern of interactions with our dogs find that it is similar to the timing patterns among mixed-sex strangers flirting, and to the timing among soccer players as they move down the field that feels like great teamwork. There are hidden sequences of paired behaviors that repeat in interaction: a dog looking at the owner's face before picking up a stick, a person pointing and a dog following the point to what it's directed. The sequences are repeated, and they are reliable, so we begin to get the feeling, over time, that there is a shared covenant of interaction between us. None of the sequences is itself profound, but none is random, and together they have a cumulative result.

Walk down Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan around lunchtime on a weekday and you experience the frustration and pleasure of being a member of the human species. The sidewalks are mobbed, jammed with tourists wandering and gawking; office workers rushing to grab lunch or dallying before returning; enterprising street vendors rushing from enforcement officers. It is a formidable sight, one you may not relish joining. On most days, though, you can take any pace you'd like, and just as easily wend your way through the crowds. It has been speculated that people walking en masse don't crash into each other because we are instantly and easily predictable. It only takes a glance to calculate when the oncoming person will reach you. You unconsciously veer subtly right to avoid him; he has done the same with you. It is not unlike (but not quite as completely successful as) the school of fish that abruptly, with one mind, turns tail and goes back from where it came. We are social, and social animals coordinate their actions. What dogs do is cross the species line and coordinate with us. Pick up the leash of any dog in your neighborhood and suddenly you are walking together, like old friends.

The significance of these three elements is corroborated by the kinds of feelings generated when they disappear: of mild betrayal, of momentary severance of the bond. There's a feeling of disconnect when a dog one reaches for ducks her head away, preventing contact. The frustration is immediate when a dog stops cooperating in taking turns in a game: refusing to bring the ball back, not seeing the toss or pursuing a seen toss. A betrayal is felt when the simple communication
come!
isn't followed by a dog
coming.
And it would be heartbreaking to approach your dog and to fail to prompt a tail to wag, ears to flatten to the head, or a stomach to be bared for scratching. Dogs whom we perceive as stubborn or disobedient are those dogs who flout these elements. But these elements are natural for both them and for us; a disobedient dog more likely simply does not realize what rules he is being asked to obey.

Our bond with dogs is strengthened by contact, by synchrony, and by marking reunions with a greeting ceremony. So too are we strengthened by the bond. Simply petting a dog can reduce an overactive sympathetic nervous system within minutes: a racing heart, high blood pressure, the sweats. Levels of endorphins (hormones that make us feel good) and oxytocin and prolactin (those hormones involved in social attachment) go up when we're with dogs. Cortisol (stress hormone) levels go down. There is good reason to believe that living with a dog provides the social support which correlates with reduced risk for various diseases, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes to pneumonia, and better rates of recovery from those diseases we do get. In many cases, the dog receives nearly the same effect. Human company can lower a dog's cortisol level; petting can calm a racing heart. For both of us, this is a kind of placebo, which is not to say that it isn't real, but that a change is induced in us without a known agent of the change. Bonding with a pet can do the work that long-term use of prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioral therapy do. Of course, it can go wrong, too: separation anxiety is the consequence of a dog feeling so very attached that he cannot stand a moment of detachment.

What are the other results of the bond? We've seen how much they know about us—our smell, our health, our emotions—due not just to their sensory acuity but also to their simple familiarity with us. They come to know how we normally act, smell, and look over the course of our days, and then they are able to notice, many times in ways we cannot, when there is a deviation. The bond effect works because dogs are, at their best, acting as extremely good social interactants. They are responsive, and, crucially, they pay attention to us.

And this connection to us runs deep. A simple experiment consisting of dogs and yawning humans indicates that our link is instinctual—on the level of reflex. Dogs catch our yawns. Just as happens between humans, dog subjects who saw someone yawning themselves began uncontrollably yawning in the next few minutes. Chimpanzees are the only other species we know of for whom yawning is contagious. Spend a few minutes yawning at your own dog (trying not to glare, giggle, or give in to his inevitable complaints) and you can see for yourself this deep-seated connection between human and dog.