Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [146]
For a horse, releasing pressure on the body is sufficiently pleasurable as to be able to be used as a reinforcement in training. Perhaps it would be the same with dogs who startle at the feeling of a hand pressed firmly on their head.
As Temple Grandin has similarly noted with cows and pigs, causing the meat industry to alter the paths the animals walk into the slaughterhouse. For the industry, her work is useful in promoting less stressed, and thus better-tasting meat. For the animals, they are presumably spared from some added anxiety as they travel—one hopes unknowingly—toward their deaths.
To pull a dog from ardent sniffing is the same for him as being yanked away from a scene just as soon as you turn your eyes to it.
Clicker training tries to address this dissonance of our different "moments" and our different senses of what the dog is "doing" at any moment. Trainers use a small device that allows them to make a sharp, distinct click! when the dog has done a desired behavior and can expect an imminent reward. The click helps make a human moment salient to a dog; left to his own devices, the dog parcels up his life differently.
This might seem a good time for a young dog to meet his new owner. There is surprisingly little good science about the timing of this introduction. The forces determining when people adopt dogs are more often than not influenced by everything but the best age for a puppy to meet a person. Many states have laws prohibiting sale of puppies prior to 8 weeks, to protect against selling physically immature animals. Breeders have their own interests in mind in selling their charges. But social recognition requires experience. From two weeks to four months dogs are particularly open to learning about others (of any species). No dog should be taken away from his mother before he is weaned (which can be from six to ten weeks), but dogs should be exposed to humans as well as to littermates.
We are generally enthralled by creatures that look like us in at least some way. Notably, not every and not all animals are effused over, taken in, or anthropomorphized: monkeys and dogs regularly are, but eels and manta rays rarely are. "That barnacle just loves hanging out with me and my boat" is a sentence never uttered. The difference between the monkey and the barnacle is part evolutionary, part familiarity. An infant monkey curling a hand around a mother's finger easily evokes the same poignant scene between human mothers and infants. By contrast, however much a young eel may be yearning for contact as it slides toward its mother, its lack of limbs gets in the way of our calling the scene "touching"—or even intentional.
Edward O. Wilson, the naturalist and sociobiologist who studied ant populations in amazing detail, proposed that we have an inborn, species-typical tendency to affiliate with other animals: what has been called the "biophilia hypothesis." The notion is attractive and also much debated. It is, notably, difficult to disprove such a hypothesis. Regardless, I consider it the scientist's way of saying what Woody Allen did.
In studies with puppies, researchers found that those distressed at separation from their mothers and littermates vocalized somewhat less if given a towel or soft toy (a stuffed blue lamb). If there is knowledge to be gained here it is that a soft familiar object can be a salve (hence, in children, the power of teddy bears); in fact, such an object may reduce some of the unease dogs may manifest at being left at home alone.
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Neither are these methods benign, in some cases: there is the famous case of the zebra finches, captured and harmlessly leg-banded for identification as the researchers observed their mating tactics. Lo and behold, the only feature that they found was predictive of a male's success at breeding was the color of his leg band. Female zebra finches apparently swoon for a red band on a fella (males prefer black-banded females).
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