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By Root 737 0

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.

Such contingency is easily seen in even very early human social interaction. At two months, infants coordinate simple movements with their mothers, such as mirroring facial expressions. In play, coordinated responses to actions, such as a ball leaving a thrower's hand, happened in as little as five frames of the videotape (approximately one-sixth of a second). Mirrored responses—lunging after being lunged at, for example—are rife during play. The timing is crucial: dogs