Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [97]
And in these cases, they were also essential for the survival of the person whose life was at risk. So are the dogs truly heroes? They are. But did they know what they were doing? There is no evidence that they did. And they don't know they're acting heroically. Dogs certainly have the potential, with training, to be rescuers. Even the untrained dog may come to your aid—but without knowing exactly what to do. Their success is due instead to what they do know: that something has happened to you, which makes them anxious. If they express that anxiety in a way that attracts other people—people with an understanding of emergencies—to the scene, or allows you leverage out of a hole in the ice, great.
This conclusion is affirmed by one clever experiment performed by psychologists interested in whether dogs show appropriate behavior when there is an emergency. In this test, owners conspired with the researchers to feign emergencies in the presence of their dogs, in order to see how their dogs responded. In one scenario, owners were trained to fake a heart attack, complete with gasping, a clutch of the chest, and a dramatic collapse. In the second scenario, owners yelped as a bookcase (made of particleboard) descended on them and seemed to pin them to the ground. In both cases, the owners' dogs were present, and the dogs had been introduced to a bystander nearby—perhaps a good person to inform if there has been an emergency.
In these contrived setups, the dogs acted with interest and devotion, but not as though there were an emergency. Dogs frequently approached their owners, and sometimes pawed or nuzzled these seeming victims, now silent and unresponsive (in the heart attack case) or crying out for help (in the bookcase scenario). Other dogs, though, took the opportunity to roam around in the vicinity, wandering and sniffing the grass or the floor of the room. In only a very few cases did a dog vocalize—which might serve to get someone's attention—or approach the bystander who might be able to help. The only dog who touched the bystander was a toy poodle. The poodle leaped into the bystander's lap and settled down for a nap.
In other words, not a single dog did anything that remotely helped their owners out of their predicaments. The conclusion one has to take from this is that dogs simply do not naturally recognize or react to an emergency situation—one that could lead to danger or death.
A killjoy conclusion? Hardly. If dogs lack the concepts emergency and death this is not to their discredit. One might as well ask a dog if he understands bicycles and mousetraps and then censure him for responding with a puzzled tilt of the head. A human child is also naïve to these concepts: an infant has to be screamed at as he zeros in on an open electrical outlet; a two-year-old who saw someone hurt would likely do little but cry. They will be taught to understand emergency situations—and then the concept of death. So too are some dogs trained, for instance, to alert a deaf companion to the sound of an emergency device, such as a smoke alarm. The teaching of children is explicit, with some procedural elements—If you hear this alarm, get Mommy; the dogs' training is entirely reinforced procedure.
What the dogs seem to know is when an unusual situation occurs. They are masters of identifying the usual in the world you share with them. You often act in reliable ways: in your own home, you move from room to room, spending long pauses in armchairs and in front of refrigerators; you talk to them; you talk to other people; you eat, sleep, disappear for long stretches into the bathroom; and so on. The environment is fairly reliable, too: it is neither too hot nor too cold; there is no person in the house apart from the ones who have come in the front door; water is not pooling in the living room; smoke is not drifting in the hallway. From that knowledge of the usual world comes some acknowledgment of the unusual