Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (8 page)

Though there is an extensive literature of dog breeds, there has never been a scientific comparison of breed behavior differences: a comparison that controls each animal's environment, giving them the same physical objects, the same exposure to dogs and humans, the same everything. It's hard to believe, given that such bold statements are made about what each breed is like. This is not to suggest that the differences are minimal or nonexistent. Dogs of various breeds will doubtless behave differently when, say, they are presented with a nearby, running rabbit. But it would be a mistake to guarantee that a dog, bred or not, will inevitably act a certain way on seeing that rabbit. This is the same mistake that is made when we wind up calling some breeds "aggressive" and legislating against them.*

Even without knowing the specific differences in the Labrador retriever's and the Australian shepherd's reaction to that rabbit, there is one thing that may account for the variability in behavior between breeds. They have different
threshold levels
to notice and react to stimuli. The same rabbit, for instance, causes different amounts of excitement in two different dogs; similarly, the same amount of hormone producing that excitement causes different rates of response, from raising a head in mild interest, to a full-on chase.

There is a genetic explanation behind this. Though we call a dog a retriever or a shepherd, it is not the behavior
retrieving
or
shepherding
that was selected for. Instead, it was the likelihood that the dog would respond just the right amount to various events and scenes. However, there is no one gene we can point to here. No gene develops right into
retrieving
behavior—or into any particular behavior at all. But a set of genes may affect the likelihood that an animal acts in a certain way. In humans, too, a genetic difference between individuals may appear as different propensities to certain behaviors. One might be more or less susceptible to becoming addicted to stimulant drugs, based partly on how much stimulation one's brain needs to produce a pleasurable feeling. Addictive behavior is thereby traceable to genes that design the brain—but there is no gene for
addiction.
The environment is clearly important here, too. Some genes regulate expression of other genes—which expression might depend on features of the environment. If raised in a box, without access to drugs, one never develops a drug problem, regardless of one's propensity to addiction.

In the same way, one breed of dog can be distinguished from others by its propensity to respond to certain events. While all dogs can see birds taking flight in front of them, some are particularly sensitive to the small quick motion of something going aloft. Their threshold to respond to this motion is much lower than for dogs not bred to be hunting companions. By comparison to dogs, our response threshold is higher still. We humans can certainly see the birds taking off, but even when they are directly in front of us, we might not notice them. In hunting dogs, the motion is not only noticed, it is directly connected to another tendency: to pursue prey that moves in just that way. And, of course, one must have birds or birdlike things around for this tendency to lead to bird chasing.

Similarly, a sheepdog who will spend his life herding sheep is one who has a certain set of specific tendencies: to notice and keep track of individuals of a group, to detect the errant motion of a sheep moving away from the herd, and to have a drive to keep the herd together. The end result is a herding dog, but his behavior is made up of piecemeal tendencies that shepherds direct toward controlling their sheep. The dog must also be exposed to sheep early in his life, or these propensities wind up being applied not to sheep, but in a disorganized way to young children, to people jogging in the park, or to the squirrels in your yard.

A dog breed that is called
aggressive,
then, is one that might have a lower threshold to perceive and react to a threatening motion. If the threshold is too low, then even neutral motion—approaching the dog—may be perceived as threatening. But if the dog is not encouraged to follow through on this tendency, it is quite likely that he will never exhibit the aggression that his breed is notorious for.

Knowing the breed of a dog gives us a first-pass entry into understanding something about the dog before we have even met the dog. But it is a mistake to think that knowing a breed guarantees that it will behave as advertised—only that it has certain tendencies. What you get with a mixed-breed dog is a softening of the hard edges seen in breeds. Temperaments are more complex: averaged versions of their bred forebears. In any event, naming a dog's breed is only the beginning of a true understanding of the dog's umwelt, not an endpoint: it doesn't get to what the dog's life is about
to the dog.

It's snowing and dawn is breaking, which means we have about three minutes for me to get dressed and get us into the park to play before the snow is trammeled by other merrymakers. Outside, well bundled, I plow clumsily through the deep snow, and Pump hurtles herself through it with great bounds, leaving the footprints of a giant bunny. I plop down to make a snow angel, and Pump throws herself down beside me and seems to be making a snow-dog angel, twisting to and fro on her back. I look to her with complete joy at our shared play. Then I smell a horrible odor coming from her direction. The realization is quick: Pump's not making a snow-dog angel; she's rolling in the decaying carcass of a small animal.

The inclination to look at dogs as animals rather than creations of our psychology is essentially right. To avoid anthropomorphizing, some turn to what might be called unsympathetic biology: a biology free of subjectivity or such messy considerations as consciousness, preferences, sentiment, or personal experiences. A dog is but an animal, they say, and animals are but biological systems whose behavior and physiology can be explained with simpler, general-purpose terminology. Recently I saw a woman leaving the pet store with her terrier, who himself was newly shod in four tiny shoes—to prevent his bringing the street filth into her house, she explained, as she pulled him skating on rigid limbs down the filthy street. This woman could benefit from more reflection on her dog's animal nature, and less on his resemblance to a stuffed toy. In fact, as we'll see, understanding some of the dogs' complexities—the acuity of their noses, what they can see and cannot see, their loss of fearfulness, and the simple affect of a wag—goes a long way to understanding dogs.

On the other hand, in a number of ways, calling a dog
just
an
animal,
and explaining all dog behavior as emerging from wolf behavior, is incomplete and misleading. The key to dogs' success living with us in our homes is the very fact that dogs are not wolves.

For instance, it is high time we revamp the false notion that our dogs view us as their "pack." The "pack" language—with its talk of the "alpha" dog, dominance, and submission—is one of the most pervasive metaphors for the family of humans and dogs. It originates where dogs originated: dogs emerged from wolflike ancestors, and wolves form packs. Thus, it is claimed, dogs form packs. The seeming naturalness of this move is belied by some of the attributes we
don't
transfer from wolves to dogs: wolves are hunters, but we don't let our dogs hunt for their own food.* And though we may feel secure with a dog at the threshold of a nursery, we would never let a wolf alone in a room with our sleeping newborn baby, seven pounds of vulnerable meat.

Still, to many, the analogy to a dominance-pack organization is terribly appealing—especially with us as dominant and the dog submissive. Once applied, the popular conception of a pack works itself into all sorts of interactions with our dogs: we eat first, the dog second; we command, the dog obeys; we walk the dog, the dog doesn't walk us. Unsure how to deal with an animal in our midst, the "pack" notion gives us a structure.

Unfortunately, it not only limits the kind of understanding and interaction we can have with our dogs, it also relies on a faulty premise. The "pack" evoked in this way bears little resemblance to actual wolf packs. The traditional model of the pack was that of a linear hierarchy, with a ruling alpha pair and various "beta" and even "gamma" or "omega" wolves below them, but contemporary wolf biologists find this model far too simplistic. It was formed from observations of
captive
wolves. With limited space and resources in small, enclosed pens, unrelated wolves self-organize, and a hierarchy of power results. The same might happen in any social species confined with little room.

In the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are
families,
not groups of peers vying for the top spot. A typical pack includes a breeding pair and one or many generations of their offspring. The pack unit organizes social behavior and hunting behavior. Only one pair mates, while other adult or adolescent pack members participate in raising the pups. Different individuals hunt and share food; at times, many members together hunt large prey which may be too large to tackle individually. Unrelated animals do occasionally join together to form packs with multiple breeding partners, but this is an exception, probably an accommodation to environmental pressures. Some wolves never join a pack.

The one breeding pair—parents to all or most of the other pack members—guides the group's course and behaviors, but to call them "alphas" implies a vying for the top that is not quite accurate. They are not alpha dominants any more than a human parent is the alpha in the family. Similarly, the subordinate status of a young wolf has more to do with his age than with a strictly enforced hierarchy. Behaviors seen as "dominant" or "submissive" are used not in a scramble for power, they are used to maintain social unity. Rather than being a pecking order, rank is a mark of age. It is regularly on display in the animals' expressive postures in greeting and in interaction. Approaching an older wolf with a low wagging tail and a body close to the ground, a younger wolf is acknowledging the older's biological priority. Young pups are naturally at a subordinate level; in mixed-family packs pups may inherit some of the status of their parents. While rank may be reinforced by charged and sometimes dangerous encounters between pack members, this is rarer than aggression against an intruder. Pups learn their place by interacting with and observing their packmates more than by being put in their place.

The reality of wolf pack behavior contrasts starkly with dog behavior in other ways. Domestic dogs do not generally hunt. Most are not born into the family unit in which they will live: with humans the predominant members. Pet dogs' attempts to mate are (happily) unrelated to their adopted humans'—supposedly the alpha pair's—mating schedules. Even feral dogs—those who may never have lived in a human family—usually do not form traditional social packs, although they may travel in parallel.

Neither are we the dog's pack. Our lives are so much more stable than that of a wolf pack: the size and membership of a wolf pack is always in flux, changing with the seasons, with the rates of offspring, with young adult wolves growing up and leaving in their first years, with the availability of prey. Typically, dogs adopted by humans live out their lives with us; no one is pushed out of the house in spring or joins us just for the big winter moose hunt. What domestic dogs do seem to have inherited from wolves is the sociality of a pack: an interest in being around others. Indeed, dogs are social opportunists. They are attuned to the actions of others, and humans turned out to be very good animals to attune to.

To evoke the outdated, simplistic model of packs glosses over real differences between dog and wolf behavior and misses some of the most interesting features of packs in wolves. We do better to explain dogs' taking commands from us, deferring to us, and indulging us by the fact that we are their source of food than by reasoning that we are alpha. We can certainly make dogs totally submissive to us, but that is neither biologically necessary nor particularly enriching for either of us. The pack analogy does nothing but replace our anthropomorphisms with a kind of "beastomorphism," whose crazy philosophy seems to be something like "dogs aren't humans, so we must see them as precisely unhuman in every way."