Dog Sense

by John Bradshaw

  25 As wolf biologist David Mech points out in a recent article in International Wolf, it can take two decades for new scientific ideas to become fully accepted. He goes on to say: “Hopefully it will take fewer than 20 years for the media and public to fully adopt the correct terminology and thus to once and for all end the outmoded view of the wolf pack as an aggressive assortment of wolves consistently competing with each other to take over the pack.” See “Whatever happened to the term ‘alpha wolf’?” International Wolf, Autumn 2008, pp. 4–8; available online at http://www.wolf.org/wolves/news/pdf/winter2008.pdf.

  26 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z6XR3qJ_qY (accessed November 17, 2010).

  Chapter 5

  1 Daniel G. Freedman, John A. King, and Orville Elliot, “Critical period in the social development of dogs,” Science 133 (1961): 1016–1017. The authors worked in Bar Harbor (Maine) at the Jackson Laboratories, the site of many groundbreaking discoveries about dogs.

  2 It later emerged that this idea had initially been proposed, almost a century earlier, by the English biologist Douglas Spalding. However, there is no indication that Lorenz knew this, and the images of Lorenz swimming in his lake, attended by his retinue of faithful goslings, will always be the first that come to mind whenever imprinting is mentioned. Equally evocative are the orphaned Canadian geese in the movie Fly Away Home who were imprinted onto a microlight aircraft.

  3 Peter Hepper, “Long-term retention of kinship recognition established during infancy in the domestic dog,” Behavioural Processes 33 (1994): 3–14.

  4 Although the research to prove the occurrence of such learning has not, as far as I know, been done on wolves themselves, there is an extensive scientific literature on kin recognition mechanisms in other mammals, based on cross-fostering experiments. Something similar happens in our own species—hence the Westermarck effect, whereby unrelated individuals who spend their childhood in the same household find each other sexually unattractive.

  5 Given dogs’ reliance on their sense of smell, it is surprising that no one seems to have taken into account the role of olfaction in their concept of what constitutes a human. Perhaps, unknown to us with our comparatively feeble noses, there are one or two smells that definitively signify “human being.”

  6 See, for example, John L. Fuller, “Experiential deprivation and later behavior,” Science 158 (December 29, 1967): 1645–1652.

  7 Michael W. Fox, “Behavioral effects of rearing dogs with cats during the ‘critical period of socialization,’” Behaviour 35 (1969): 273–280.

  8 Mother cats seem to rely on a straightforward rule of thumb to identify their offspring: “If it’s the size of a kitten and it’s living where I keep my kittens, then it must be one of mine.” Hence the ease with which Michael Fox was able to persuade cats with litters, or “queens,” to accept Chihuahua puppies as if they were their own. Many queens will also accept the introduction of kittens younger than their own—a phenomenon some animal rescue organizations capitalize on to raise orphans.

  9 David Appleby, John Bradshaw, and Rachel Casey, “Relationship between aggressive and avoidance behaviour by dogs and their experience in the first six months of life,” Veterinary Record 150 (2002): 434–438.

  10 This outcome was initially reported as an effect of simple handling by the people looking after the rats; however, it later emerged that the return of the infants, smelling of human, stimulated the mother to take extra care of them. The extra care, rather than the handling itself, was what corrected their development.

  11 See Susan Jarvis et al., “Programming the offspring of the pig by prenatal social stress: Neuroendocrine activity and behaviour,” Hormones and Behavior 49 (2006): 68–80.

  12 David Tuber, Michael Hennessy, Suzanne Sanders, and Julia Miller, “Behavioral and glucocorticoid responses of adult domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to companionship and social separation,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 110 (1996): 103–108.

  13 Subsequent research has shown that dogs’ stress hormone levels are different depending not only on the gender of their owners or carers (lower if they are women) but also on their personalities (lower if the owners are extroverts).

  14 Sharon L. Smith, “Interactions between pet dog and family members: An ethological study,” in New Perspectives on our Lives with Companion Animals, ed. Aaron Katcher and Alan Beck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 29–36.

  Chapter 6

  1 This tradition is usually ascribed to C. Lloyd Morgan, one of the founders of comparative (i.e., animal) psychology. Writing in 1894, he proposed what has become known as Morgan’s canon: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.” (For the word “lower” we would now substitute “simpler.”) Morgan came to realize, however, that this was unnecessarily restrictive and, in 1903, stated: “To this, however, it should be added ... that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes if we already have independent evidence of the occurrence of these higher processes in the animal under observation.” In other words, if we can show that dogs experience a particular emotion, then that emotion can be invoked as a potential explanation for any dog behavior.

  2 In his book The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow and Empathy—and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), American ethologist Marc Bekoff, himself an ardent proponent of the reality of animal emotions, describes his perplexity at the seemingly self-contradictory behavior of a colleague, who he refers to simply as Bill (presumably to spare him embarrassment). Apparently they had met up immediately before Marc was due to give a lecture on animal cognition, and for five full minutes Bill had regaled him with stories about his dog Reno: how much Reno loves to play, how anxiously he misses his master when Bill’s not there, how jealous he becomes when Bill is talking to his daughter, and so on. However, in the discussion session after the lecture, Bill accused Marc of being too anthropomorphic in his explanations of animal behavior. In response, Marc reminded Bill of the conversation they’d had about Reno only an hour or so previously. Bill, somewhat embarrassed, retorted that while he’d discussed Reno’s behavior in terms of emotions, he had no idea of what Reno was actually feeling and doubted that any of the words he’d used to describe his dog’s emotions were an accurate picture of what had actually been going on inside the dog’s head at the time.

  3 Stephen Mithen, professor of archaeology at Reading University, has gone so far as to argue that anthropomorphism can be traced back a hundred thousand years to the merging between the part of our brain that dealt with social behavior and the part used to identify and classify animals, giving us the ability to “think like animals do”; see his book The Prehistory of the Mind (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996).

  4 According to James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-class expert on human-animal interactions: “[A]nthropomorphism is the primary force cementing these [pet-owner] relationships.” This quote comes from his chapter “People in Disguise: Anthropomorphism and the Human-Pet Relationship,” which appears in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 131.

  5 Zana Bahlig-Pieren and Dennis Turner, “Anthropomorphic interpretations and ethological descriptions of dog and cat behavior by lay people,” Anthrozoös 12 (1999): 205–210. This is one of only a few studies of owners’ abilities to understand their dogs’ body-language, which is surprising given how important this skill must be in ensuring that dogs’ emotional needs are met.

  6 This model was proposed—for humans—by, among others, Ross Buck, professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut and author of the classic text Human Motivati
on and Emotion, published by Wiley (New York) in 1976.

  7 While owners well-attuned to their cats can probably detect anxiety from the cats’ body-language, joy is harder to detect. For example, purring does not indicate joy, although it’s often assumed to—cats will purr even when in extreme pain. It appears to be an all-purpose care- and comfort-soliciting signal, meaning anything from “Is it OK that I’ve curled up next to you?” to “Please help, I’m in distress here.”

  8 Patricia McConnell gives a graphic account of such a response, exhibited by her Great Pyrenees bitch Tulip, in her wonderful book For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), pp. 115–116.

  9 On the other hand, allowing coyotes to find and feed on sheep carcasses laced with an emetic (lithium chloride), though it certainly put them off eating sheep meat, did not stop the coyotes from hunting and killing them. (Indeed, hunting and eating are separately motivated in many carnivores.) Sheep mortality was therefore unaffected, and other means had to be sought for limiting coyote damage to free-ranging livestock.

  10 This study was performed by the late Professor Johannes Odendaal, a pioneer of research on human-animal interaction who worked with Professor Roy Meintjes at the Pretoria vet school in South Africa. Their paper, titled “Neurophysiological correlates of affiliative behavior between humans and dogs,” was published in The Veterinary Journal 165 (2003): 296–301.

  11 This research owes much to the efforts of my colleagues Emily Blackwell, Justine McPherson, and Rachel Casey.

  12 See the paper by John Bradshaw, Justine McPherson, Rachel Casey, and Isabella Larter, “Aetiology of separation-related behaviour in domestic dogs,” published in The Veterinary Record 151 (2002): 43–46.

  13 This unpublished study, which I conducted in 2004 along with Emily Blackwell at the University of Bristol, was commissioned by the Blue Cross rehoming charity. The twenty dog owners participating in the study all initially reported that their dog showed no signs of separation-related behavior, but three of the dogs were found to show some form of separation-related behavior when filmed during half an hour of isolation from human company. Of these dogs, two showed signs of mild anxiety (“mild” as a function of the total duration of the behavior) whereas one dog showed signs of more severe anxiety.

  14 See the paper by John Bradshaw, Emily-Jayne Blackwell, Nicola Rooney, and Rachel Casey, “Prevalence of separation-related behaviour in dogs in southern England,” published in the Proceedings of the 8th ESVCE Meeting on Veterinary Behavioural Medicine (Granada, Spain, 2002) and edited by Joel Dehasse and E. Biosca Marce.

  15 The latter figures are based on a limited number of similar interviews conducted by a student of mine in upstate New York in 2001.

  16 Yet, paradoxically, some dogs who behave like this when their owner is at home seem not to be distressed when they’re left on their own.

  17 Andrew Luescher and Ilana Reisner, “Canine aggression toward familiar people: A new look at an old problem,” The Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice 38 (2008): 1115–1116.

  18 Some veterinary behaviorists label the repetitive behavior that biologists call “stereotypic” as “obsessive-compulsive,” by analogy with human behavior. Others, however, argue that such syndromes require conscious thought and that this terminology should therefore not be applied to dogs.

  Chapter 7

  1 Over the centuries, by trial and error, humans have already tapped into these abilities—but without necessarily realizing what they are or why they evolved in the first place.

  2 See, for example, the book by guide-dog user and trainer Bruce Johnston, Harnessing Thought: Guide Dog—A Thinking Animal with a Skilful Mind (Harpenden, UK: Lennard Publishing, 1995).

  3 Notably Dr. Brian Hare, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. See his article written with Michael Tomasello—“Human-like social skills in dogs?”—in Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 439–444.

  4 Sylvain Fiset, Claude Beaulieu, and France Landry, “Duration of dogs’ (Canis familiaris) working memory in search for disappearing objects,” Animal Cognition 6 (2003): 1–10.

  5 Nicole Chapuis and Christian Varlet, “Short cuts by dogs in natural surroundings,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Section B) 39 (1987): 49–64.

  6 This technique was adapted for use with dogs by my former colleague at Bristol University, Dr. Elly Hiby; the experiments described come from her PhD thesis, “The Welfare of Kennelled Domestic Dogs” (2005). In other experiments, we have shown that short-term stress actually makes dogs keener to learn, probably because it heightens their perception of the world around them, though they also make more mistakes than relaxed dogs do. See, for example, Emily-Jayne Blackwell, Alina Bodnariu, Jane Tyson, John Bradshaw, and Rachel Casey, “Rapid shaping of behaviour associated with high urinary cortisol in domestic dogs,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 124 (2010): 113–120.

  7 Specifically, they claimed that Rico actually knew the words for each object and could learn new words for new objects, recognizing them simply because they were new; see Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer, “Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for ‘Fast Mapping,’” Science 304 (June 11, 2004): 1682–1683. Subsequent studies have cast doubt on this claim (i.e., Rico’s data is also explainable by a combination of simple habituation and an ability to identify objects as unfamiliar by their smell), but this dog’s memory was remarkable nevertheless.

  8 Britta Osthaus, Stephen Lea, and Alan Slater, “Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris ) fail to show understanding of means-end connections in a string-pulling task,” Animal Cognition 8 (2005): 37–47.

  9 Rebecca West and Robert Young, “Do domestic dogs show any evidence of being able to count?” Animal Cognition 5 (2002): 183–186.

  10 Claudi Tennie and Josep Call et al. (from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig), “Dogs, Canis familiaris, fail to copy intransitive actions in third-party contextual imitation tasks,” Animal Behaviour 77 (2009): 1491–1499.

  11 Friederike Range, Zsófia Viranyi, and Ludwig Huber, “Selective imitation in domestic dogs,” Current Biology 17 (2007): 868–872.

  12 When fourteen-month-old children watched an adult demonstrator turn on a light by leaning forward and touching the switch with her forehead while her hands were occupied (with both hands she was holding a blanket wrapped around herself), they did not imitate the head action but instead used their hands. However, when the adult performed the demonstration without any obvious reason to do so, the children did copy the demonstrator by using their foreheads. See György Gergely, Harold Bekkering, and Ildikó Király, “Rational imitation in preverbal infants,” Nature 415 (February 14, 2002): 755.

  13 József Topál, György Gergely, Ágnes Erdöhegyi, Gergely Csibra, and Ádám Miklósi, “Differential sensitivity to human communication in dogs, wolves, and human infants,” Science 325 (September 4, 2009): 1269–1272.

  14 Both of these were performed by Dr. Florence Gaunet, a cognitive ethologist working at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. See “How do guide dogs of blind owners and pet dogs of sighted owners (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for food?” Animal Cognition 11 (2008): 475–483, and “How do guide dogs and pet dogs (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for their toy and for playing?” Animal Cognition 13 (2010): 311–323.

  15 Josep Call, Juliane Bräuer, Juliane Kaminski, and Michael Tomasello, “Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 117 (2003): 257–263.

  16 See Juliane Bräuer, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Visual perspective taking in dogs (Canis familiaris) in the presence of barriers,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 88 (2004): 299–317.

  17 Mark Petter, Evanya Musolino,William Roberts, and Mark Cole, “Can dogs (Canis familiaris) detect human deception?” Behavioural Processes 82 (2009): 109–118.

&n
bsp; 18 Nicola Rooney, John Bradshaw, and Ian Robinson, “A comparison of dog-dog and dog-human play behaviour,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 66 (2000): 235–248; Nicola Rooney and John Bradshaw, “An experimental study of the effects of play upon the dog-human relationship,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 75 (2002): 161–176.

  19 Alexandra Horowitz, “Attention to attention in domestic dog (Canis familiaris ) dyadic play,” Animal Cognition 12 (2009): 107–118.

  20 The results of this study were reported by Sarah Marshall and her colleagues at the 2nd Canine Science Forum held in Vienna in July 2010.

  21 Nicola Rooney and John Bradshaw, “Social cognition in the domestic dog: Behaviour of spectators towards participants in interspecific games,” Animal Behaviour 72 (2006): 343–352.

  Chapter 8

  1 For more details on this approach, see the seminal article by eminent animal psychologist and neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, “Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans,” Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005): 30–80.

  2 Performed by Paul Morris, Christine Doe, and Emma Godsell, psychologists from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, and published in Cognition & Emotion 22 (2008): 3–20. They asked 337 dog owners, all of whom had owned their dogs for an average of more than six years, to tell them how confident they were that their dogs experienced each of sixteen different emotions (there were actually seventeen, but one, disgust, was difficult to interpret because the term itself can be used in two different ways). Forty of these owners participated in the follow-up study on signs of jealousy.