Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [73]
If we revisit some of the problem-solving tests on which wolves performed so much better than dogs, we now see that the dogs' poor performance can there too be explained by their inclination to look to humans. Tested on their ability to, say, get a bit of food in a well-closed container, wolves keep trying and trying, and if the test is not rigged they eventually succeed through trial and error. Dogs, by contrast, tend to go at the container only until it appears that it won't easily be opened. Then they look at any person in the room and begin a variety of attention-getting and solicitation behaviors until the person relents and helps them get into the box.
By standard intelligence tests, the dogs have failed at the puzzle. I believe, by contrast, that they have succeeded magnificently. They have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool. Dogs have learned this—and they see us as fine general-purpose tools, too: useful for protection, acquiring food, providing companionship. We solve the puzzles of closed doors and empty water dishes. In the folk psychology of dogs, we humans are brilliant enough to extract hopelessly tangled leashes from around trees; we can magically transport them to higher or lower heights as needed; we can conjure up an endless bounty of foodstuffs and things to chew. How savvy we are in dogs' eyes! It's a clever strategy to turn to us after all. The question of the cognitive abilities of dogs is thereby transformed: dogs are terrific at using humans to solve problems, but not as good at solving problems when we're not around.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
Yesterday Pump learned, courtesy of a pet supermarket's automatic doors, that when you walk toward walls, they open and let you pass through them. Today she unlearned it, in a spectacularly poignant display.
Once a problem is solved—a hidden treat is unearthed, an unjustly closed door is opened—with or without a person's help, the dog is quickly able to apply that same means to solve it again and again. He has identified a state of affairs, fashioned a response, and realized the connection between that problem and that solution. This is both his triumph and, at times, our misfortune. One success at jumping right onto the kitchen counter to get to the origin of that pleasing cheese odor will be followed by much jumping-on-counters. If you provide a sitting dog with a biscuit for sitting politely, expect to be inundated by polite sits. With this in mind it is easy to understand the admonishment that in training a dog you must reward only those behaviors you desire the dog to repeat endlessly.
Such is the dog's mastery of what in psychological circles is termed learning. There is no doubt that dogs can learn. It is the natural workings of any nervous system to adjust its actions over time in response to experience—and of every animal with a nervous system to thereby learn. Under the heading "learning" comes everything from the associative learning used in animal training, to memorization of a Shakespearean monologue, to finally understanding quantum mechanics.
Dogs' easy mastery of new procedures and concepts presumably stops prior to grasping what a quark is. What they learn is neither academic nor scholastic. Still, most of what we ask that dogs learn can only be described as capricious and arbitrary. Surely any animal recently wild will learn how to get its mouth on food. But typically the things we want dogs to learn—to obey—bear little connection to food. We ask dogs to change posture (to sit, jump up, stand up, lie down, roll over), to act in a very specific way on an object (get my shoes, get off the bed), to start or stop a current action (wait,