Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [96]
But so does the lowly paramecium, beating a hasty retreat from predators and toxic substances. Avoidance behavior is instinctual, seen in some form in nearly all organisms. Instincts, from the knee jerk to an eye blink, do not require that the animal understands what it is doing. And we are not ready to grant the paramecium an understanding of death. But that reflex is not trivial: a more sophisticated understanding could be bootstrapped onto it.
And here are two ways dogs differ from the paramecium: First, they are not only avoidant of injury, they act differently once injured. They are aware of when they are damaged. Hurt or dying, dogs often make great efforts to move away from their families, canine or human, to settle down and perhaps die someplace safe.
Second, they are attentive to the dangers that others put themselves in. One need not wait long for a story of a heroic dog to pop up in the local news. A child lost in the mountains is kept alive by the warmth of dogs who stayed with him; a man who falls through the ice of a frozen lake is saved by the dog who came to him at the ice's edge; a dog's barking attracts a boy's parents before he can reach into the hole of a poisonous snake. Heroic dogs tales abound. My friend and colleague Marc Bekoff, a biologist who has studied animals for forty years, writes of a blind Labrador retriever named Norman who was roused to action by the screams of the family's children, caught in the current of a raging river: "Joey had managed to reach the shore, but his sister was struggling, making no headway, and in great distress. Norman jumped straight in and swam after Lisa. When he reached her, she grabbed his tail, and together they headed for safety."
The end result of all the dogs' actions is clear: someone was able to avert death for another day. Given that the dogs needed to overcome their own instinct of self-preservation to preserve another self, the usual interpretation is that the dogs are heroic, not inadvertent, actors. An understanding of the dire straits faced by the various humans might seem the only explanation.
But the trouble with anecdotes is that one does not have the full story of what happened, since the teller, with his own umwelt and particular perception, is necessarily restricted in what he sees. One could reasonably ask whether Norman did not as much intend to save Lisa as, say, follow her brother's instruction to swim out to her; or maybe Lisa herself was able to swim to shore on seeing her faithful companion near; or maybe the current shifted and carried her to shore. There is no videotape to rewind and examine to carefully consider what happened here—or in any of the rescues described. Nor do we know the long-term behavior of the dogs. It is one thing if a dog suddenly barks in order to alert others that a boy is imperiled; it is another if that dog is barking all the time, day and night. An understanding of the dogs' life histories is also important to correctly interpret what happened.
Finally, what of all the cases when a dog didn't save the drowning child or the lost hiker. The newspaper headlines never crow, LOST WOMAN DIES AFTER DOG FAILS TO FIND AND DRAG HER TO SAFETY! If the heroic dogs are taken to represent the species, so should the non-heroes be given consideration. There are certainly more unreported non-heroic acts than there is reported heroism.
Both the skeptical and the heroic talk can be displaced by a more powerful explanation, wrought by looking more closely at the dogs' behavior. Scrutiny of these dog stories reveals a recurring element: the dog came toward his owner, or stayed close to the person in distress. The warmth of a dog saves a lost, cold child; a man in a frozen lake can grab on to his dog waiting on the ice. In some cases the dog also created a ruckus: barking, running around, calling attention to himself—and to, say, the venomous snake.
These elements—proximity to the owner, and attention-getting