Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [143]
Since the publication of Rico's successes, in 2004, other dogs (also border collies, for the most part) have been reported with vocabularies from eighty to over three hundred words: all names for various toys. You might have one of these prodigious vocabularians in your house.
Except when it is animated: a discarded plastic bag being tumbled down a city sidewalk by a breeze can provoke growls, caution, and occasional attacks by alarmed dogs. Dogs can be animistic, just as humans are in infancy: trying to make sense of the world by attributing a familiar quality (of life) to unknown objects. My plastic-bag-growling dog is in good company: Darwin described his own dog treating an open parasol moving in the breeze as a living thing, barking at and stalking it. And Jane Goodall has observed chimpanzees making threatening gestures toward thunderclouds. I've been known to fulminate thundercloud-ward myself.
Surprisingly, dogs mind each other's posture more than their height: dogs do not read simply being taller as being dominant or confident. As we'll see later, it's not quite right to say, as is often said of a bravely forward small dog, he thinks he's a big dog: Actually, he does not—he knows it is posture that matters.
The conversion to entirely digital television broadcasts will eliminate the flicker-fusion problem, making TV-viewing more viable (but no more olfactorily interesting) for dogs—who are no doubt ambivalent.
Ethologist Konrad Lorenz beautifully demonstrated this tendency of young waterfowl in the 1930s by positioning himself as that first adult creature seen by a gaggle of greylag goslings. They followed him readily, and Lorenz wound up raising the brood as his own.
Developmental psychologists rely on the fact that though infants cannot report what they are thinking, they reliably look longer at things that interest them. By using this one feature of infant behavior, psychologists gather data about what the infant can see, distinguish, and understand and what he prefers.
Well, for the most part: Kanzi the bonobo and Alex the African gray parrot are among those who have been asked and have answered: Alex was able to create and utter novel, coherent, three-word sentences based on a vocabulary built from eavesdropping on researchers; Kanzi has a multihundred-word vocabulary of lexigrams (symbolic pictures) that he can point at to communicate. And a single dog, Sofia, has been trained to use a simple eight-key keyboard concurrent with events she had already learned, like going for a walk, going into a crate, and getting food or a toy. She learned to press the appropriate key to make a request. As a communication, this behavior is closer to asking for dinner by bringing an owner an empty food bowl than it is to a full-fledged language. More abstract utterances have not been reported (nor abstract keyboards designed).
One could make an argument that this behavior was reinforced because of the survival value of looking at humans. As with infants, an adult face will hold much information, not the least of which could be where the next meal is coming from. The early-twentieth-century ethologist Niko Tinbergen similarly found that baby gulls have a strong attraction to the red-dotted beaks of adult gulls (and to any stick with a red dot placed on it by an ethologist, too).
Dogs show an additional tendency, one that people do, too, when looking at faces: to look leftward first (that is, to the right side of the face). Even young children show this "gaze bias": looking first, and longer, to the right side of an examined face. By closely observing dogs observing faces, researchers have found that dogs share this bias—when looking at human faces. When looking at other dogs, they show no gaze bias at all. Why this might be is still a matter of conjecture: perhaps we express emotions differently on each hemi-face; and perhaps dogs emote more symmetrically (lopsided ears aside). Dogs have learned to look at humans the way humans look at humans.
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