Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [49]
If it is not territorial, what is the message in the mark? The first hint is that puppies don't urine mark: the communication must have to do with adult concerns. From the position of the anal glands and the compounds in the urine, we know that they are at least saying something about who they are: their odor is their identity. This is a fine message, but it is probably fairly unintentional. I may communicate something about who I am by merely walking into a room and being seen, but the very fact of my person is not a continuous, intentional communication about my identity (except when I was a kid and dressed to be seen).
What does look intentional in this communication is that dogs don't bother to say it if there's no one else around. Dogs who are kept penned by themselves spend very little time marking. The males rarely lift a leg to urinate, and neither sex bothers to deposit just a small amount. Dogs kept in similar-sized enclosures with other dogs mark much more frequently, and they mark regularly, every day. The Indian feral dogs marked to audiences—and audiences of the opposite sex. This makes sense if the message conveyed is about sex: seeking it oneself, or declaring oneself fit to be seeked. They did the most raised-leg displays (even without urinating) when other dogs were present. A leg held high only gets someone else's attention if someone else is already there to attend to it.
It also makes sense if the mark is communication for communication's sake: a comment, an opinion, a strongly held belief. There is no scientific evidence that it is so, but it is consistent with communication done only to an audience. Researchers have found that dogs raised in isolation make many fewer communicative noises than those raised with other dogs. When finally around others, though, they begin producing vocalizations at the same rate that the socialized dogs do. In other words, they speak when there is someone to speak to.
Just as they mark with intention, so too do dogs read intention in our markings: in our gestures. As we will see in the next chapters, they interpret the body language of humans with the attention they bring to reading each other. As a young child toddles toward a treasured toy, a dog can see where she is going and get there first. A turn of the head in thought garners little attention, but a turn of the head that looks at the door—there is intention in that turn. And dogs know it. They realize that there is a difference between gazing toward the door and turning to look at the clock on the wall; they can distinguish a finger pointing toward hidden food, and a point done while lifting one's arm to check a watch. We speak loudly with our bodies.
A confession: a dog has dictated this entire chapter to me. She sat by my chair, head on my foot, and patiently waited while I struggled to translate her words to the page. It is from her that the insights of the book come, from her that evocations spring, from her that the scenes and images and umwelt emerge.
Alas, it is not quite so. But to see the remarkable number of volumes purportedly written by dogs one must imagine that this is what we all want: the story straight out of the dog's mouth—but in our native tongue, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a peculiar kind of autobiography began to appear in bookshops: it was the "memoir" of your cat, your old dog, or the animal gone missing in that winter storm. This form, narrated by talking animals, could be considered the first prose attempt to get at the point of view of the dog. When I read one of these—and there are many to choose from, among even such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf—a strange discontent washes over me. It's a sham: there is no perspective of the dog in them. Instead, it is a dog with the human's