Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [84]
They endure jostling body on body. Bodies in full contact is a reasonable social distance for dogs. They bite with impunity: every bite is matched, or explained with a play signal—and every bite is restrained. When the hound hits the little dog too hard, sending her scurrying backward, she could for a moment be seen as small, fleeing prey. But the difference between dogs and wolves is that dogs can put aside their predatory instincts. Instead the hound takes back that swipe with an apologetic play slap, a milder version of the bow. It works: she rushes right back into his face.
Finally, when the hound is pulled up and away by his owner, the Chihuahua tosses a bark to her departing playmate. Had we kept watching them, had he turned around, we might have seen her open her mouth or leap a tiny leap—calling out in the hopes of continuing the game with her giant friend.
NON-HUMAN
The study of dogs' cognitive abilities emerged from a context of comparative psychology, which by definition aims to compare animals' abilities with those of humans. The exercise often winds up splitting hairs: they communicate—but not with all the elements of human language; they learn, imitate, and deceive—but not in the way that we do. The more we learn of animals' abilities, the finer we have to split the hair to maintain a dividing line between humans and animals. Still, it is interesting to note that we seem to be the only species spending any time studying other species—or, at least, reading or writing books about them. It is not necessarily to the dogs' discredit that they do not.
What is revealing is how dogs perform on tasks that measure social abilities we thought only human beings had. The results, whether serving to show how alike or unalike dogs are to or from us, have relevance in our relationships with our dogs. When considering what we ask of them and what we should expect from them, understanding their differences from us will serve us well. Science's effort to find distinctions illustrates more than anything else the one true distinction: our drive to affirm our superiority—to make comparisons and judge differences. Dogs, noble minds, do not do this. Thank goodness.
Inside of the Dog
Her personality is unmistakable and omnipresent: in her reluctance to climb the steep steps out of the park—but then forging ahead of me strongly and gamely; in her great spasms of running and scent rolling of younger days; in her delight at my return from a long trip—but not dwelling on it; in her checking back for me on our walks but also always keeping a few paces apart. For a dog who is in fact wholly dependent on me, she is incredibly independent: her personality is forged not just in interaction with me, but in the times wandering outside without me, in exploring her space alone. She has her own pace of life.
Despite the wealth of scientific information about the dog—about how they see, smell, hear, look, learn—there are places science doesn't travel. It perplexes me that some of the questions I have most often been asked about dogs, and that I have about my own dog, are not addressed by research. On matters of personality, personal experience, emotions, and simply what they think about, science is quiet. Still, the accumulation of data about dogs provides a good foothold from which to extrapolate and reach toward answers to those questions.
The questions are typically of two kinds: What does the dog know? and What is it like to be a dog? So first we will ask what dogs know about things of human concern. Then we can further imagine the experiences—the umwelten—of the creatures who have this