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By Root 773 0

If we consider the dog's environment, it is apparent that they simply do not need to use time in this way, as they, unlike scrub-jays, are provided with a regular supply of food. In addition, discriminating food by its expiration date, or saving food for later when you're hungry now, may be a difficult task for an animal descended from opportunistic feeders, who eat as much as they can when food is available, then endure long stretches of fasting when food is not. Some suggest, reasonably, that dogs' bone-burying behavior is tied to an ancestral urge to stash some food aside for the lean times.* Evidence that a dog can distinguish the freshest bone from the one that has rotted—or leaves some aside just to enjoy it later—would bear this out. It is more likely that most of the time dogs are not thinking about time when they are thinking about food. A bone is a bone is a bone, buried or in the mouth.

On the other hand, a dearth of evidence verifying dogs' time-telling with bones does not mean that dogs do not distinguish past from present from future. When encountering a dog who had once—but only once—been aggressive, a dog will first be wary and gradually, with time, grow more emboldened. And dogs certainly anticipate what is in their near future: with growing excitement on beginning the walk that leads to the dog food store; or anxiety at the car ride that suggests a visit to the veterinarian.

Some thinkers treat the dog as having no past: as enviably ahistorical, happy because they cannot remember. But it is clear that they are happy even despite remembering. We don't yet know if there is an "I" there behind the dog's eyes—a sense of self, of being a dog. Perhaps there need only be a continuous teller for the autobiography to be written. In that case, they are writing it right now in front of you.

Good dog (About right and wrong)

When Pump was a young dog, a common scene in our household went like this: I turn my back or go into another room. Milliseconds later, Pumpernickel has her nose at the kitchen trash can, peering in for good bits. If I return and catch her in this vulnerable spot, she immediately pulls her nose out of the can, her ears and tail drop, and she wags excitedly, slinking away. Caught.

When researchers asked a sample of dog owners what kinds of things dogs know or understand about our world, the owners most frequently claimed that dogs know when they have done something wrong: that dogs have knowledge of a kind of category of things one must never, ever do. These days that category includes things like tearing into the garbage, devouring footwear, and snatching just-cooked food off the kitchen counter. The punishment in our enlightened age is, one hopes, not terribly severe: a stern word; a frown and a stamped foot. It was not always so: in the Middle Ages and earlier, dogs and other animals were brutally punished for misdeeds, from the "progressive mutilation" of the ears, feet, and on to the tail of a dog in correspondence with the number of people he had bitten, to the capital punishment, after legal trial and conviction, of a dog for homicide;* to earlier, in Rome, the ritual crucifixion of a dog on every anniversary of the evening the Gauls attacked the capital and a dog failed to warn of their approach.

The guilty look of a dog responsible for lesser trespasses is well-known to anyone who has caught a dog in Pump's pose, with her snout deeply plunged in the trash can, or discovered with bits of stuffing in his mouth and surrounded by tufts of what had until recently been the innards of the couch. Ears pulled back and pressed down against the head, tail wagging in quick time and tucked between the legs, and trying to sneak out of the room, the dog gives every appearance of realizing that he's been caught red-pawed.

The empirical question this raises is not whether this guilty look reliably occurs in such settings: it does. Instead, the question is what it is, exactly, about those settings that prompts the look. It may in fact be guilt—or it may be something else: the excitement