Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [74]
PUPPY SEE, PUPPY DO
One morning, on awakening lying on my belly, I pulled my arms over my head, stretched my legs into pointed toes, and pulled myself up onto my forearms. Aside me Pump stirred, and matched me move for move: she tensed her front legs, stretched them well out in front of her, then straightened her back legs, too, pulling herself forward into uprightness. Now we greet each other every morning with parallel wakening stretches. Only one of us swings her tail.
Even more interesting than learning commands would be the ability to learn by merely watching others—other dogs or even people. We know dogs can learn from our instruction, but can dogs learn from our example? It would seem to behoove a social animal like the dog to look to others for information about how best to negotiate the world. In many cases, though, the answer to this question is clearly no: dogs have plenty of opportunity to see us eating politely at the table—yet they never spontaneously pick up knife and fork and join us. Overhearing us talking is insufficient to get them talking; their only interest in clothes seems to be chewing them, not donning them. Amply exposed to our activities, dogs don't seem to know how to imitate us.
This is not a failing, though it would distinguish them from members of our own species, consummate imitators that we are. As children and into adulthood, we goggle at each other to see what to wear, what to do, how to act, and how to react. Our culture is built on our keenness in observing others act to learn how to behave ourselves. I need only see you opening a tin can with a can opener once before I can do it myself (one hopes). The stakes are higher than they might first seem, for success at imitation not only gets you the contents of the opened can, it is an indication of a complex cognitive ability. True imitation requires that you not merely can see what another is doing, not simply that you see how the means lead to an end, but also that you translate others' actions into your own actions.
In that case, dogs are not true imitators, for even after thousands of demonstrations with the can opener, no dog has shown an interest: the opener's functional tone is mute for them. But this is not a fair comparison, you might complain: dogs simply haven't the thumbs, nor the dexterity they allow, to operate can openers or cutlery. Similarly, they haven't the larynx for speech nor the need for clothing. And your complaint would be fair: the question is really if the dogs can be taught, by demonstration, how to do something new—not whether they are mini-humans.
Watch dogs interact for ten minutes and you will see what looks like imitation: one dog flaunts a gloriously large stick; the other finds a stick of his own and flaunts it back. If one dog finds a spot for digging, others will soon join him at the growing hole; one dog's discovery that he can swim leads another dog to self-baptize, suddenly finding himself swimming, too. By watching others, dogs learn the special pleasures of mud puddles and of bushwhacking through brush. Pump uttered nary a peep until one of her regular dog companions began barking at squirrels. All at once, Pump too was a squirrel-barker.
The question, then, is whether these are cases of true imitation, or of something else. The something else that it might be is opaquely called stimulus enhancement. A minor incident involving birds and home-delivered milk in mid-twentieth-century Britain demonstrates this phenomenon best. At the time, doorstep milk delivery was commonplace in Britain, and homogenization was not. Thus dawn found foil-capped bottles