Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [111]
Having channeled one's excitement into a greeting in this Lorenzian way, one might add other components to the hello. Wolves and dogs do. Their greetings, and the greetings of all social canids, are similar. In the wild, when parents return to the den, the pups mob them, madly lunging at their mouths in the hope of getting them to regurgitate a bit of the kill they have consumed. They lick at their lips, muzzle, and mouth, take a submissive posture, and wag furiously.
As we have seen, what many owners cheerfully describe as "kisses" is face licking, your dog's attempt to prompt you to regurgitate. Your dog will never be unhappy if his kisses in fact prompt you to spit up your lunch. This greeting isn't complete without an excited approach and constant, energetic contact. Ears that were pricked to hear your arrival fall flat against the dog's head, which dips slightly in a submissive gesture. The dog pulls his lips back and drops his eyelids: in humans, markers of a true smile. He wags madly or beats a frantic rhythm with the tip of his tail against the ground. Both wags contain all the excited running-around energy that the dog suppresses in order to stay close to you. He may whine or yelp with pleasure. Adult wolves howl daily: among packs, a chorus of howling may help coordinate their travels and strengthens their attachment. Similarly, if you greet the dog with cries and vocal hellos, your dog may cry back at you. In every move he is breathing and exuding his recognition of you.
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.
We are relieved of acting instinctually in the way few animals are. But there is one other aspect that makes human-dog bonding unique: timing. We act well together.
THE DANCE
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