Dog Sense

by John Bradshaw

3 Ibid., pp. 13–16.

  4 Including Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), and Jeffrey Masson, a philosopher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and author of Dogs Never Lie About Love (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).

  5 This study was performed by Alexandra Horowitz, a professor of cognitive psychology at Barnard College in New York; see her paper, “Disambiguating the ‘guilty look’: Salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour,” in Behavioural Processes 81 (2009): 447–452.

  6 See Mike Mendl, Julie Brooks, Christine Basse, Oliver Burman, Elizabeth Paul, Emily Blackwell, and Rachel Casey, “Dogs showing separation-related behaviour exhibit a ‘pessimistic’ cognitive bias,” in Current Biology 20 (October 2010: R839–R840).

  7 Not over a hundred, as the urban myth would have it. Nevertheless, linguists agree that the Central Alaskan Yupik language has between a dozen and two dozen such words, depending on the method of counting adopted.

  Chapter 9

  1 The definitive observations were done on two Italian greyhounds called Flip and Gypsy and a toy poodle called ... Retina. (Only a vision scientist would call a dog that.) The dogs were presented with three windows, two illuminated with one color and the third with another, and trained to paw at the odd one out; if they got it right, they were given a tasty food treat. By varying the brightness of one of the colors, the experimenters could tell whether the dogs were really telling them apart by their color: If they were seeing only in black and white, one combination would appear exactly the same shade of grey. The dogs could not always distinguish greenish-blue from grey or orange from red, but they could always tell red from blue. See Jay Neitz, Timothy Geist, and Gerald Jacobs, “Color vision in the dog,” Visual Neuroscience 3 (1989): 119–125.

  2 The hearing range of humans extends up to 23 kilohertz, that of dogs to 45 kilohertz, and cats to 80 or even 100 kilohertz. In dogs, maximum sensitivity is reached between 0.5 and 16 kilohertz.

  3 Of course dogs also have a sense of taste, which, apart from being rather insensitive to salt and more sensitive to compounds called nucleotides that are common in blood—a relic of their predator origins—is much like ours. They discriminate between food flavors using a combination of odor and taste, just as we do.

  4 Peter Hepper (The Queen’s University, Belfast), “The discrimination of human odour by the dog,” Perception 17 (1988): 549–554.

  5 You can see just how stable the boundary layer is by watching the drops of water on the hood of your car as you drive away after a rain shower: Quite a speed has to be reached before they are disturbed by the air rushing past.

  6 Debbie Wells (a dog-behavior expert from The Queen’s University) and Peter Hepper, “Directional tracking in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 84 (2003): 297–305.

  7 Although our vomeronasal organ has disappeared, we still make a few of its receptors (V1Rs)—but they’re now found in the regular olfactory epithelium. It’s unclear what they’re used for, but some scientists implicate them in the perception of human “pheromones” that may affect our reproductive behavior.

  8 Deborah Wells and Peter Hepper, “Prenatal olfactory learning in the domestic dog,” Animal Behaviour 72 (2006): 681–686.

  9 This study was done by my student Amanda Lea, who was able to establish the basics of such dog-dog encounters after a few dozen hours of sitting on park benches pretending to sketch dogs (in case anyone became curious as to what she was doing in the same place day after day). See her paper, “Dyadic interactions between domestic dogs during exercise,” in Anthrozoös 5 (1993): 234–253.

  10 Stephan Natynczuk, then a student at Oxford University, and I spent many a happy hour collecting samples of anal sac contents from beagles and then putting them through a mass spectrometer in order to demonstrate this gradual change scientifically. Every now and again we’d fail to line up the collection pot correctly and end up with a very smelly lab-coat—or worse.

  11 Sunil Pal, “Urine marking by free-ranging dogs (Canis familiaris) in relation to sex, season, place and posture,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 80 (2003): 45–59.

  12 Ádám Miklósi and Krisztina Soproni, “A comparative analysis of animals’ understanding of the human pointing gesture,” Animal Cognition 9 (2006): 81–93.

  13 The UK charity Medical Detection Dogs (http://hypoalertdogs.co.uk) has recently trained an affenpinscher to alert its owner to onsets of hypoglycemia. This flat-faced toy dog may seem an unlikely candidate for such a role, but the successful training outcome shows that the breed’s sense of smell cannot be totally impaired.

  Chapter 10

  1 Federico Calboli, Jeff Sampson, Neale Fretwell, and David Balding, “Population structure and inbreeding from pedigree analysis of purebred dogs,” Genetics 179 (2008): 593–601.

  2 Danika Bannasch (a veterinary geneticist working at the vet school in Davis, California) with Michael Bannasch, Jeanne Ryun, Thomas Famula, and Niels Pedersen, “Y chromosome haplotype analysis in purebred dogs,” Mammalian Genome 16 (2005): 273–280.

  3 During the week of Crufts’ national dog show in 1989, Celia Haddon submitted this comment to the Daily Telegraph newspaper: “The question of what a scientist, tinkering in a laboratory, might be able to do with an ordinary cow, sheep or pig is regularly aired. But one form of genetic engineering is already going on, and has been changing the face of Britain’s most popular domestic animal, the dog, for decades.” See also veterinarian Koharik Arman’s article, “A new direction for kennel club regulations and breed standards,” published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal 48 (2007): 953–965.

  4 Summaries are available in several expert reports, including those commissioned by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (http://www.rspca.org/pedigreedogs), the Associate Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare (http://www.apgaw.org/reports.asp), and the UK Kennel Club in partnership with the rehoming charity Dogs Trust (http://dogbreedinginquiry.com/).

  5 As reported by the RSPCA: “Syringomyelia. The formation of cavities in the nervous tissue of the spinal cord. In dogs, this is often but not always accompanied by ‘referred’ pain (perceived at a site adjacent to or some distance from the site of the cavity) or irritation. The dog is clearly in discomfort and tries to scratch at or near the shoulder or face, in the position from which they perceive the pain to originate.”

  6 Gene pools have been successfully opened by various guide-dogs associations through their Labrador/golden retriever crosses.

  7 Published as “Paedomorphosis affects agonistic visual signals of domestic dogs,” Animal Behaviour 53 (1997): 297–304.

  8 Steven Leaver and Tom Reimchen (at the University of Victoria in British Columbia), “Behavioural responses of Canis familiaris to different tail lengths of a remotely-controlled life-size dog replica,” Behaviour 145 (2008): 377–390.

  9 Ray and Lorna Coppinger explain this theory in their book Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  10 See http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/services/public/breeds/Default.aspx (accessed on December 6, 2010).

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 This study was published as a book; see John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

  14 As noted, apart from the basenjis (who were much more reactive and inquisitive than the other four breeds), the personalities of all the other breeds overlapped considerably. For example, although a “typical cocker spaniel” personality could be identified in this study (“Very dependent upon people, and rather unreactive and low in general intelligence”), nine of the seventeen purebred shelties, ten of the twenty-five beagles, three of the sixteen terriers—and even two of the sixteen basenj is—also had personalities of this type.

  15 The dog’s breed is often recorded by hospital staff from eye-witness account
s, or by law-enforcement officers. Rarely is an expert in identifying dogs involved in such reports.

  16 This table is taken from Stephen Collier’s paper “Breed-specific legislation and the pit bull terrier: Are the laws justified?” in Journal of Veterinary Behavior 1 (2006): 17–22.

  Chapter 11

  1 The following is part of a statement issued by the UK’s Centre of Applied Pet Ethology: “It’s clearly time to question why such people are out there abusing dogs and exploiting their owners. Why would any trainer/whisperer/ behaviourist or anyone want to use any painful treatments when, presumably, they are only working with dogs and owners in the first place because they like them? Perhaps they don’t look at dogs and their emotions in the same way as the rest of us. Or maybe they are so hooked on what they think works by using punishment in training that they are reluctant to look around to see everyone else has moved on long ago to using kinder and more effective methods. Or, perhaps, sadly, there are even more insidious reasons as to why they want to keep using such methods beyond simple ignorance or a reluctance to move into the modern age of training. Clearly, people who use these methods don’t actually understand how dogs learn or care how they feel. Ignorance is no excuse in this age of massively available information in so many media. These people are simply being ‘Cruel to be Cruel.’” See http://www.capbt.org/index.html (accessed September 21, 2010).

  2 For example, UK trainer Charlie Clarricoates is quoted in Your Dog magazine (December 2009, pp. 44–46) as saying: “We are seeing dogs now who are spoiled rotten, and never have any discipline, mainly because owners are force-fed incorrect impractical information.... This moralistic attitude that you can only train dogs by loving them and being kind is ridiculous. There are some dogs you can’t do this with because it doesn’t work, even if you have a year with them.”

  3 US veterinarian and behavior specialist Dr Sophia Yin summarizes her stance on punishment as follows: “Punishment isn’t always inappropriate. It’s just incredibly overused—and in most cases it’s performed incorrectly.... My goal is to use whichever techniques will work best with the least likelihood of side effects in the pet. If that best technique involves a punishment such as ... a pinch collar ‘pop’ or reprimand, or booby trap of some sort, or even an electronic collar, then I will use it. But it rarely does. Consequently I use punishment 100 to 1,000 times less than a traditional trainer and relevant rewards 1,000 times more.” See http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance (accessed September 20, 2010).

  4 See, for example, Bruce Johnston, Harnessing Thought (Harpenden, UK: Lennard Publishing, 1995).

  5 See, for example, Pauleen Bennett and Vanessa Rohlf, “Owner-companion dog interactions: Relationships between demographic variables, potentially problematic behaviours, training engagement and shared activities,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 102 (2007): 65–84.

  6 According to Jean Donaldson, director of the San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers: “Dog training is a divided profession. We are not like plumbers, orthodontists or termite exterminators who, if you put six in a room, will pretty much agree on how to do their jobs. Dog training camps are more like Republicans and Democrats, all agreeing that the job needs to be done but wildly differing on how to do it.” She goes on to say that “dog training is currently an unregulated profession: there are no laws governing practices.... Provided it’s in the name of training, someone with no formal education or certification can strangle your dog quite literally to death and conceivably get off scot-free.” See http://www.urbandawgs.com/divided_profession.html (accessed September 24, 2010). Likewise, the UK’s Companion Animal Welfare Council concluded recently that “there is no nationally accepted benchmark for qualification and skill in training or behaviour modification.... With no minimum standard there can be no assurance of quality.” See The Regulation of Companion Animal Services in Relation to Training and Behaviour Modification of Dogs (Cambridge, UK: Companion Animal Welfare Council, July 2008), p. 5; available online at http://www.cawc.org.uk/080603.pdf.

  7 Gillian Diesel, David Brodbelt, and Dirk Pfeiffer, “Characteristics of relinquished dogs and their owners at 14 rehoming centers in the United Kingdom,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 13 (2005): 15–30.

  8 The bush dog is a rare social canid found in South America. Its stumpy tail, round head, and furry feet would probably, if married to a suitable temperament, be rather appealing.

  9 This list of desired traits is derived from research by Australians Paul McGreevy and Pauleen Bennett; see their “Challenges and paradoxes in the companion-animal niche” in Animal Welfare 19(S) (2010): 11–16. Bennett and her colleagues at Monash University in Australia presented further refinements of the ideas behind this list at the 2nd Canine Science Forum held in Vienna in July 2010.

  Further Reading

  Most of the source material for this book comprises papers in academic journals, which are often difficult (and expensive!) to access for those without a university affiliation. Although I’ve included references to the most important of these in the endnotes, I can also recommend the following books, most of which were written by knowledgeable academics but with a more general audience in mind.

  Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), provides detailed up-to-date information on wolf biology from a host of experts. Older books on wolves are less useful because they contain misconceptions about the organization of wolf packs.

  Ádám Miklósi’s Dog Behavior, Evolution and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) is currently the standard textbook on dog behavior. It contains a great deal of detailed information on domestication, canine cognition, and ways in which dogs perceive people, although his conclusions are not identical to mine.

  Apart from Ray and Lorna Coppinger’s Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), there are few readily accessible accounts of social behavior in dogs that draw on up-to-date science.

  Carrots and Sticks: Principles of Animal Training (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), by Professors Paul McGreevy and Bob Boakes from the University of Sydney, Australia, is a fascinating book in two halves: The first half explains learning theory in accessible language, and the second contains fifty case histories of animals (twelve of them dogs) trained for specific purposes, ranging from film work to bomb detection. Each case history is illustrated with color photographs indicating how the animals were trained.

  Karen Prior, Gwen Bailey, and Pamela Reid are among the dog-training experts whose many books are worth looking out for.

  Paul McGreevy’s A Modern Dog’s Life: How to Do the Best for Your Dog (New York: The Experiment, 2010) is full of indispensable advice for dog owners.

  For more information on the effects of early life events in humans and animals, I recommend Design for a Life: How Behaviour Develops by Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin (New York: Vintage, 2001). If you’re looking for practical advice on choosing and raising a puppy, I suggest Ian Dunbar’s Before and After Getting Your Puppy: The Positive Approach to Raising a Happy, Healthy, and Well-Behaved Dog (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004) or Gwen Bailey’s The Perfect Puppy: How to Raise a Well-Behaved Dog (New York: Readers Digest, 2009).

  Patricia McConnell’s For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007) is an excellent and accessible account of current understanding of canine emotions. Alexandra Horowitz provides an enlightened integration of recent research into dogs’ sensory and cognitive abilities in Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). Sophie Collins’ Tail Talk: Understanding the Secret Language of Dogs (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007) is a good pictorial guide to canine body-language. David McFarland’s Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), though more about robots than about dogs, provides a discussion of sever
al highly complex philosophies of self-awareness and consciousness.

  The sensory worlds of animals is a rather neglected topic. For a general introduction to the ways in which animals’ sensory worlds affect their behavior, an excellent source is the late Professor Chris Barnard’s textbook Animal Behavior: Mechanism, Development, Function and Evolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003). In addition, Tristram Wyatt’s Pheromones and Animal Behaviour: Communication by Smell and Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) provides a thorough coverage of odor communication across the whole of the animal kingdom.

  The pioneering work on breed differences in behavior, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller’s Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, has been reprinted (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Information that is even more up to date can be found in Kenth Svartberg’s chapter on personality in Per Jensen’s multi-author textbook The Behavioural Biology of Dogs (Wallingford, UK: CAB International, 2007).

  Index

  Abandonment

  Active submission

  Affiliation display(fig.)

  African basenji(fig.)

  African wild dog(fig.)

  Africanis

  Aggression

  and anger

  and biting

  and breeding

  and conflict resolution

  and fear

  and laws, breed-specific

  and punishment

  and selective breeding (table)

  territorial

  and training method

  Aguara dog

  Air movement, and odors (fig.)

  Allergens

  Alpha model

  Alpha-wolf roll-over disciplinary technique

  American cocker spaniel

  American Humane Association

  American timber wolf. See also Wolf

  Anatolian Karabash

  Ancestry