Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [66]
Dogs are anthropologists among us. They are students of behavior, observing us in the way that the science of anthropology teaches its practitioners to look at humans. As adults, we walk among other humans largely without examining them closely, socially trained to keep to ourselves. Even with those we know best, we might stop attending to the minute changes in their expressions, their moods, their outlooks. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that as children we are little scientists, forming theories about the world and testing them by acting. If so, we are scientists who hone our skills only to later neglect them. We mature by learning how people behave, but eventually we pay less attention to how others are behaving at every instant. We outgrow the habit of looking. A curious child stares with fascination at the stranger limping down the street: he will be taught this is not polite. A child might be enraptured by a swirl of fallen leaves on the pavement; by adulthood, he will overlook it. The child wonders at our crying, monitors our smiles, looks where we look; with age we are all still able to do all this, but we fall out of the habit.
Dogs don't stop looking—at the gimpy walk, at a rush of leaves tumbling down the sidewalk, at our faces. The urban dog may be bereft of natural sights, but he is rich in the odd: the drunken man swerving through the crowd, the shouting sidewalk preacher, the lame and destitute. All get long stares from the dogs who pass them. What makes dogs good anthropologists is that they are so attuned to humans: they notice what is typical, and what is different. And, just as crucially, they don't become inured to us, as we do—nor do they grow up to be us.
DOGS' PSYCHIC POWERS DECONSTRUCTED
This attunement to us feels magical. Dogs are able to anticipate us—and, it seems, to know something essential about us and others. Is this clairvoyance? A sixth sense?
I am reminded of the story of a horse. At the turn of the twentieth century, the actions of the horse Hans, whose ironic sobriquet, "Clever Hans," has come to stand both for what he could not do, and as a warning against overattributions to animals, helped shape the course of animal cognition research for the next hundred years.
Hans, his owner claimed, could count. Shown an arithmetic problem written on a blackboard, Hans tapped out the sum on the earth with his hoof. Though he had been encouraged and reinforced, using straightforward conditioning, for tapping, this was not a rote response to predetermined questions: he was excellent at all sums, with novel problems, and even when the questioner was someone other than his trainer.
Such was the tenor of the time that this discovered, presumed latent cognitive ability of horses created a small furor. Animal trainers and academics alike were stumped as to how Hans was doing it. It almost looked as though there were no other explanation than that he was actually doing arithmetic.
Finally, the trick—an inadvertent trick, unknown even to his owner—was discovered by a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst. When the questioner himself was prevented from knowing the answer to the problem, Hans's math was wildly off. Hans was not counting, and he was not psychic; he was simply reading the behavior of his questioners. They unconsciously tipped him off to the answer through small bodily movements: leaning forward or away from the horse when he'd tapped the correct sum; relaxing their shoulders and muscles of their face; inclining ever so slightly until the answer was reached.
Clever