Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (21 page)

In these cases, it seems the only obtuse animals in the room are the humans, who may not see the dog's behavior as potentially showing them anything. That behavior consists of a lot of attention-getters (such as barking), followed, critically, by looking back and forth between the owner and the location of the treat. In other words, pointing with that gaze: showing.

This is visible daily in non-experimental settings. Ball dogs crazy about retrieving generally deliver their slobbered spheres to the front side—the face—of the ball tosser, not to her back. And, if the ball is mistakenly dropped at the unresponding backside of the owner, the dog has an arsenal of attention-getters to employ, followed by relentless gaze alterations—looking at the face of the human holding the ball, and looking back at the ball in quick succession. The restless, attention-starved dog is never satisfied dropping found socks at your back; they are left within your sight, if not right on your lap.

Finally, dogs use the attention of others as information, both to get something they want and, more remarkably, to determine when they can get away with something.

Research has determined this by asking if dogs choose intelligently when given a choice about whom to request food from. If every person is an equally good source of food, one would expect that dogs would approach all persons with that same beguiling expression—half entreaty, half expectation. There are dogs who do so, of course,* and those who reserve their begging for butchers, or owners who stuff their pockets with liver treats. But most dogs make a distinction that is important to us when we desire something: between possible and impossible collaborators. We make requests appropriate to the state of knowledge and capacity of our audience. You do not ask the baker to explain string theory and the physicist for a loaf of seven-grain, sliced.

In experimental settings mining the same four elements of dog, experimenter, food, and knowledge, dogs seem to distinguish between humans who might be helpful to them and humans who will likely not. When a person with a sandwich is either blindfolded or facing away, dogs suppress the urge to stay as close as possible to the sandwich. Instead, if there is a non-blindfolded person nearby, they go beg to him instead. Let this be a lesson that begging at the table is probably encouraged by your eye contact toward the dog—even just long enough to tell him
no begging!
Alternately, set up one person as the responsive, looking beggee and all the dog's attention will go to him. (Children are good for this role.)

Dogs also approach the blindfolded persons warily—as befits the situation, if one isn't let in on the fact of being a subject in an experiment. These experiments using unresponsive, oddly outfitted characters are typical of psychological tests. At some level, they are useful in order to avoid the possibility that the subject has had experience with the setting they are about to encounter. In other words, the tests aim to get at what the dogs intuitively understand about the knowledge states of the human, not what the dog might have learned about what to do when you see someone who is blindfolded. Still, the dog is confronted with what must be a strange couple of hours.

Variations of the begging trials were first run with chimpanzees. In that context, the attentional state of the human was taken to indicate something about her knowledge. Someone who sees food baited in one of two hidden bins is "knowledgeable"; someone who stands idly by in the same room, but has a bucket over her head, is not. Did the chimps then beg to the knowledgeable person or to the one who is guessing at the location of the food (by chance guessing correctly once in a while)? Over time, chimps learn to beg to the knowledgeable informant—but only when the guesser has been out of the room, or has her back turned when the bin is baited. When the guesser simply has her eyes blocked—with a bucket, paper bag, or blindfold—the chimps begged to her, too.

Dogs have gone through trials with odd humans wearing buckets, blindfolds, or holding books in front of their eyes, blocking their vision. They outperform chimps: dogs preferentially beg to the looking—to those whose eyes they can see. This is just how we act, preferring to talk, cajole, invite, or solicit those whose eyes are visible. Eyes equal attention equals knowledge.

Best, dogs use this knowledge for manipulative ends. Researchers have found that dogs not only understand when we are attentive, but are sensitive to what they can get away with at different levels of their owners' attention. In one experiment, after being instructed to
lie down
(and dutifully so doing), dogs were observed in three trials. In the first condition, an owner stood and stared at her dog. The result? The dog stayed lying down: perfectly obedient. In the second condition, the owner proceeded to sit down and watch television: here the dog paused, but shortly disobeyed and got up. And in the third condition, the owner didn't just ignore the dog but left the room entirely, leaving the dog alone with his owner's command still echoing in his ears.

Apparently the echo was not long-lasting, for in these trials the dogs were quickest and likeliest to disobey the same command so well heeded when the owner was around. What is surprising is not that the dogs disobeyed when the owner left. It is, instead, that dogs do what two-year-olds, chimps, monkeys, and no other animals seem to do: simply notice exactly how attentive someone is, and vary their own behavior accordingly. The dogs methodically used the level of their owners' attention to determine under what circumstances they were free to break the owners' rules—just as they used the information from other dogs to get attention back toward them in play.

The dogs' attention-reading is highly contextual, however. When the same experiment was run using food, that great motivator to perform at their best, the threshold to disobedience was lowered: dogs disobeyed more quickly, and at lower levels of owner distraction. When the owner's attention was harder to gauge—when she was talking with someone else, or sitting quietly with closed eyes—the dogs' behavior was mixed. Some sat patiently, but, seemingly gathering steam, were prepared to spring up at once as soon as the owner left the room. Other dogs took even longer to disobey when the owners left the room than when they were in it but otherwise engaged. This illogic might be explained by a developmental fact, one that would vary dog to dog. Some owners establish a routine of a sequence of commands:
sit! stay!
(long torturous pause),
okay!
In that routine, one might have to wait an awfully long time before being given the okay to go at the food. Dogs put up with this game of ours with admirable self-possession. But if the owner starts chatting with someone else in the room—busying himself with someone else's attention—why, the game is off.

Lest you think that you can use this knowledge to trick your dog into behaving himself while you are at work by simply pretending to be home with him—over speakerphone or video—one experiment brings very disappointing news. When a life-sized video image (in visible digital) of the owner was displayed before dogs, they disobeyed at levels befitting being home alone with no supervision. While they could use their video-owners' pointing hints to help find food, they didn't bother to follow many of their verbal commands. Dogs are dutiful, but more selectively dutiful when the owner is reduced to a videotape. You cannot hope to reduce your dog's lonely wailing by telling him to stop over the answering machine—but you might be able to tell him where he can find that treat you left out for him. When you next visit the zoo, check in on the monkey cages. Maybe there are capuchin monkeys, quick-moving, tail-flaunting animals who leap easily and shriek piercingly. Or colobus, slow-moving leaf-eaters whose black-and-white coats often hide a small colobus clinging inside. Watch the male snow monkeys as they follow around the red-bottomed females. There is much to recognize here in our distant evolutionary cousins. We see their interests, their fears, their lusts. And most will notice and respond to you—most likely by moving farther away, or turning their heads to avoid your gaze. What is surprising is that dogs, so much less humanlike than these primates, are so much better at realizing what is behind our gaze, how to use it to get information or to their advantage. Dogs can see us as our primate cousins cannot.

—GERTRUDE STEIN The dog's gaze is an examination, a regard: a gaze at another animate creature. He sees us, which might imply that he thinks about us—and we like to be considered. Naturally we wonder, in that moment of shared gaze, Is the dog thinking about us the way we are thinking about the dog? What does he know about us?

We are known by our dogs—probably far better than we know them. They are the consummate eavesdroppers and peeping Toms: let into the privacy of our rooms, they quietly spy on our every move. They know about our comings and goings. They come to know our habits: how long we spend in the bathroom, how long we spend in front of the television. They know whom we sleep with; what we eat; what we eat too much of; whom we sleep too much with. They watch us like no other animal watches us. We share our homes with uncounted numbers of mice, millipedes, and mites: none bothers to look our way. We open our door and see pigeons, squirrels, and assorted flying bugs; they barely notice us. Dogs, by contrast, watch us from across the room, from the window, and out of the corner of their eyes. Their watching is enabled by a subtle but powerful ability that begins with simple vision. Sight is used to pay visual attention, and visual attention is used to see what
we
attend to. In some ways this is similar to us, but in other ways it surpasses human capacity.

The blind and the deaf sometimes keep dogs to see or hear the world for them. For some disabled persons, a dog may enable movement through a world they cannot navigate alone. Just as for the physically impaired dogs can act as eyes, ears, and feet, so also do they act as readers of human behavior for some autistic individuals. Persons with any kind of autism spectrum disorder are united by their shared inability to understand the expressions, emotions, and perspectives of other people. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes, for an autistic person who keeps dogs, the dogs may seem to be human-mind-readers. While an autistic person cannot parse a brow furrowed with concern, or interpret the rising tone indicating someone's fright or worry, the dog is sensitive to the mind-set behind them.

Dogs are anthropologists among us. They are students of behavior, observing us in the way that the science of anthropology teaches its practitioners to look at humans. As adults, we walk among other humans largely without examining them closely, socially trained to keep to ourselves. Even with those we know best, we might stop attending to the minute changes in their expressions, their moods, their outlooks. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that as children we are little scientists, forming theories about the world and testing them by acting. If so, we are scientists who hone our skills only to later neglect them. We mature by learning how people behave, but eventually we pay less attention to how others are behaving at every instant. We outgrow the habit of looking. A curious child stares with fascination at the stranger limping down the street: he will be taught this is not polite. A child might be enraptured by a swirl of fallen leaves on the pavement; by adulthood, he will overlook it. The child wonders at our crying, monitors our smiles, looks where we look; with age we are all still able to do all this, but we fall out of the habit.

Dogs don't stop looking—at the gimpy walk, at a rush of leaves tumbling down the sidewalk, at our faces. The urban dog may be bereft of natural sights, but he is rich in the odd: the drunken man swerving through the crowd, the shouting sidewalk preacher, the lame and destitute. All get long stares from the dogs who pass them. What makes dogs good anthropologists is that they are so attuned to humans: they notice what is typical, and what is different. And, just as crucially, they don't become inured to us, as we do—nor do they grow up to be us.