Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (9 page)

We and our dogs come closer to being a benign gang than a pack: a gang of two (or three or four or more). We are a family. We share habits, preferences, homes; we sleep together and rise together; we walk the same routes and stop to greet the same dogs. If we are a gang, we are a merrily navel-gazing gang, worshiping nothing but the maintenance of our gang itself. Our gang works by sharing fundamental premises of behavior. For instance, we agree to rules of conduct in our home. I agree with my family that under no circumstances is urination on the living room rug allowed. This is a tacit agreement, happily. A dog has to be taught this premise for habitation; no dog knows about the value of rugs. In fact, rugs might provide a nice feeling underfoot for some bladder release.

Trainers who espouse the pack metaphor extract the "hierarchy" component and ignore the social context from which it emerges. (They further ignore that we still have a lot to learn about wolf behavior in the wild, given the difficulty of following these animals closely.) A wolfcentric trainer may call the humans the pack leaders responsible for discipline and forcing submission by others. These trainers teach by punishing the dog after discovery of, say, the inevitable peed-upon rug. The punishment can be a yell, forcing the dog down, a sharp word or jerk of the collar. Bringing the dog to the scene of the crime to enact the punishment is common—and is an especially misguided tactic.

This approach is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers—of our reactions. Instead of a punishment happening
to
them, they'll learn best if you let them discover for themselves which behaviors are rewarded and which lead to naught. Your relationship with your dog is defined by what happens in those undesired moments—as when you return home to a puddle of urine on the floor. Punishing the dog for his misbehavior—the deed having been done maybe hours before—with dominance tactics is a quick way to make your relationship about bullying. If your trainer punishes the dog, the problem behavior may temporarily abate, but the only relationship created is one between your trainer and your dog. (Unless the trainer's moving in with you, that won't last long.) The result will be a dog who becomes extra sensitive and possibly fearful, but not one who understands what you mean to impart. Instead, let the dog use his observation skills. Undesired behavior gets no attention, no food: nothing that the dog wants from you. Good behavior gets it all. That's an integral part of how a young child learns how to be a person. And that's how the dog-human gang coheres into a family.

On the other hand, let's not forget that it is only tens of thousands of years of evolution that separate wolves and dogs. We would have to go back millions of years to trace our split from chimpanzees; appropriately, we do not look to chimpanzee behavior to learn how to raise our children.* Wolves and dogs share all but a third of 1 percent of their DNA. We see occasional snatches of wolf in our pets: a glimpse of a growl when you move to extract a beloved ball from your dog's mouth; rough-and-tumble play in which one animal seems more prey than playmate; a glimmer of wildness in the eye of a dog grabbing for a meat bone.

The orderliness of most of our interactions with dogs clashes mightily with their atavistic side. Once in a while it feels as if some renegade ancient gene takes a hold of the domesticated product of its peers. A dog bites his owner, kills the family cat, attacks a neighbor. This unpredictable, wild side of dogs should be acknowledged. The species has been bred for millennia, but it evolved for millions of years before that without us. They were predators. Their jaws are strong, their teeth designed for tearing flesh. They are wired to act before contemplating action. They have an urge to protect—themselves, their families, their turf—and we cannot always predict when they will be prompted to be protective. And they do not automatically heed the shared premises of humans living in civilized society.

As a result, the first time your dog tears from your side, running maniacally off the trail after some invisible thing in the bushes, you panic. With time, you will become familiar with each other: they, with what you expect of them; you, with what they do. It is only
off the trail
to you; to the dog it is a natural continuation of walking, and he will learn about trails in time. You may never see the invisible thing in the bush, but you learn, after a dozen walks, that invisible things are in bushes, and the dog will return to you. Living with a dog is a long process of becoming mutually familiar. Even the dog bite is not a uniform entity. There are bites done out of fear, out of frustration, out of pain, and out of anxiety. An aggressive snap is different than an exploratory mouthing; a play bite is different than a grooming nibble.

Despite their sometime wildness, dogs never revert to wolves. Stray dogs—those who lived with humans but have wandered away or been abandoned—and free-ranging dogs—provisioned with food but living apart from humans—do not take on more wolflike qualities. Strays seem to live a life familiar to city dwellers: parallel to and cooperative with others, but often solitary. They do not self-organize socially into packs with a single breeding pair. They don't build dens for the pups or provide food for them as wolves do. Free-ranging dogs may form a social ordering like other wild canids—but one organized by age more than by fights and strife. Neither hunts cooperatively: they scavenge or hunt small prey by themselves. Domestication changed them.

Even when wolves have been socialized—raised from birth among humans instead of other wolves—they do not turn into dogs. They strike a middle ground in behavior. Socialized wolves are more interested in and attentive to humans than wild-born wolves. They follow human communicative gestures better than wild wolves. But they are not dogs in wolves' clothing. Dogs raised with a human caretaker prefer her company over that of other humans; wolves are less discriminating. Dogs far outpace hand-raised wolves in interpreting human cues. To see a wolf on a leash, sitting and lying down on request, one could be convinced there is little difference between the socialized wolf and dog. To see that wolf in the presence of a rabbit is to see how much difference there still is: the human is forgotten while the rabbit is relentlessly pursued. A dog near that same rabbit may patiently wait, gazing at his owner, to be permitted to run. Human companionship has become dogs' motivational meat.

As you choose a new dog from among a litter or a loud shelter of baying mutts and bring him home, you begin to "make a dog" again, recapitulating the history of domestication of the species. With each interaction, with each day, you define—at once circumscribing and expanding—his world. In the first few weeks with you, the pup's world is, if not entirely a tabula rasa, awfully close to the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that a newborn baby experiences. No dog knows, on first turning his eyes on the person who peeks at him in his shelter cage, what the person expects of him. Many people's expectations, at least in this country, are fairly similar: be friendly, loyal, pettable; find me charming and lovable—but know that I am in charge; do not pee in the house; do not jump on guests; do not chew my dress shoes; do not get into the trash. Somehow, word hasn't gotten to the dogs. Each dog has to be taught this set of parameters for his life with people. The dog learns, through you, the kinds of things that are important to you—and that you want to be important to him. We are all domesticated, too: inculcated with our culture's mores, with how to be human, with how to behave with others. This is facilitated by language, but spoken language is not necessary to achieve it. Instead we need to be alert to what the dog is perceiving and to make our perceptions clear to him.

The first-century Roman encyclopedist Pliny's prodigious
Natural
History
includes a confident statement of fact about the birth of bears. The cubs, he wrote, "are a white and shapeless lump of flesh, little larger than mice, without eyes or hair and only the claws projecting. This lump the mother bears slowly lick into shape." The bear is born, he was suggesting, as nothing but pure undifferentiated matter, and, like a true empiricist, the mother bear
makes
her pup a bear by licking it. When we brought Pump into our home, I felt I was doing just this: I was licking her into shape. (And not just because there was a lot of licking between us—after all, it was exclusively she who was licking.) It was our way of interacting together that made her who she was, that makes dogs that most people want to live with: interested in our goings and comings, attentive to us, not overly intrusive, playful just at the right times. She interpreted the world through acting on it, by seeing others act, by being shown, and by acting with me on the world—promoted into being a good member of the family. And the more time we spent together, the more she became who she was, and the more we were intertwined.

First sniff of the day: Pump wanders into the living room in the morning while I am dishing out her food. She's looking sleepy but her nose is wide awake, stretching every which way as though it's doing morning exercises. She reaches her nose toward the food without committing her body, and sniffs. A look at me. Another sniff. A judgment has been levied. She backs from the bowl and forgives me by nosing my outstretched hand, her whiskers tickling while her moist nose examines my palm. We go outside and her nose is gymnastic, almost prehensile, happily taking in smells that gust by …

We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment. The room I'm in right now is a phantasmagoric mix of colors and surfaces and densities, of small movements and shadows and lights. Oh, and if I really call my attention to it I can smell the coffee on the table next to me, and maybe the fresh scent of the book cracked open—but only if I dig my nose into its pages.

Not only are we not always smelling, but when we do notice a smell it is usually because it is a good smell, or a bad one: it's rarely just a source of information. We find most odors either alluring or repulsive; few have the neutral character that visual perceptions do. We savor or avoid them. My current world seems relatively odorless. But it is most decidedly not free of smell. Our own weak olfactory sense has, no doubt, limited our curiosity about what the world smells like. A growing coalition of scientists is working to change that, and what they have found about olfactory animals, dogs included, is enough to make us envy those nose-creatures. As we
see
the world, the dog
smells
it. The dog's universe is a stratum of complex odors. The world of scents is at least as rich as the world of sight.

Dogs don't act on the world by handling objects or by eyeballing them, as people might, or by pointing and asking others to act on the object (as the timid might); instead they bravely stride right up to a new, unknown object, stretch their magnificent snouts within millimeters of it, and take a nice deep sniff. That dog nose, in most breeds, is anything but subtle. The snout holding the nose projects forth to examine a new person seconds before the dog himself arrives on the scene. And the sniffer is not just an ornament atop the muzzle; it is the leading, moist headliner. What its prominence suggests, and what all science confirms, is that the dog is a creature of the nose.