The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

  “Izzie,” she says to get her attention. Then Jess points her finger at the box containing the toy. She signals me to release Izzie, who is already lunging forward to escape my grasp. I let go. Without any hesitation, she makes a beeline for the box with the toy and happily grasps it in her teeth. This is not a task I have trained Izzie to perform, but she completes it with ease.

  While simple in design, this test demonstrates something very powerful about my relationship with Izzie and the human relationship with dogs as a whole. In showing her ability to read Jess’s hand gesture and find the toy, Izzie has demonstrated that she is capable of interpreting social cues across species lines. Many of us take this type of communication with our dogs for granted given how commonplace it is. We see dogs respond to these types of cues every day. However, it’s a task that even our closest relatives, primates, are not capable of without extensive training. Significantly, I’m witnessing as Izzie successfully performs a task that even wolves fail, showing that interpreting human social cues is not innately canine—but it is innate to the domestic dog, just as Dr. Brian Hare had told me.

  But Izzie is no prodigy. If anything, as this test will show, her smarts are somewhat below average—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But she doesn’t need to be a genius to execute this impressive feat. This type of social cue interpretation is something that most domestic dogs are born with and can do without any trouble, even as primates and wolves cannot.

  “These are exactly the same tests that they’ve done with the chimps and the wolves, and none of them do as well as domestic dogs do,” Overall explains.

  “So a regular, old, run-of-the-mill dog, nothing special, not a working dog, like Izzie here—she’ll outperform a chimp?” I ask.

  Overall says yes. “There’s something about thirty thousand years of living together where we’re used to working together, and it may have changed some affiliative neurochemistry,” she says as Izzie drops the toy to score an affectionate head scratch from Jess.

  “So while the causality is not certain—” I begin.

  “Correct,” Overall says.

  “The effect is very obvious.”

  “The effect is very obvious,” she concurs.

  We repeat this test several times with the toy hidden in a different box each time. Each repetition brings the same result: Izzie has no problem reading the social cues of a human to find the toy without needing to search for it.

  But then the test changes. Overall sends Izzie and me back out into the hallway. When we return, the three bankers boxes remain in their original places with their openings facing away from Izzie and me. Overall’s research assistant, Jess, remains in her initial position behind the boxes. As before, I crouch down with Izzie at the red X where we are supposed to wait until I’m signaled to release her. But this time, there is a small blue flag sticking out of one of the boxes. To me, it’s immediately apparent that the flag indicates where the toy is hidden. But what does Izzie think?

  Without a gesture, Jess tells me to release Izzie.

  Izzie wanders over to the boxes, checking all three of them. She sniffs the flag, demonstrating that she can see it, but it doesn’t appear to mean anything to her. After she wanders about, sniffing each box aimlessly, Jess points Izzie to where the toy is, and once again, she goes to it, having now understood a signal from a person. It’s immediately clear that, to Izzie, the flag provided no signal that she could recognize, interpret, or understand.

  “She’s saying, ‘Well, that didn’t go how I thought it would,’” Overall says. “She was waiting for the signal, and she hasn’t put it together. And that’s the difference between a social referent and a nonsocial referent. [The blue flag] is not a social referent.”

  “Do most dogs pick up on that?” I ask, wondering if anyone else’s pet dog managed to understand what the blue flag indicated.

  “Most dogs in this study do. But the military dogs and working dogs without exception do not.”

  “The military dogs did not pick up on that?” I ask, sure that I misheard her answer.

  “The vast majority of them did not because they work with humans… By and large, they were terrible [at this task].”

  “And the pet dogs outperformed the military dogs?” I ask again.

  “Yep. Of course, not her,” Overall says of Izzie. I’m somewhat heartened to hear that she’s at least in good company.

  “So what does this tell you about her?” I ask.

  “She just doesn’t do this,” Overall says, ever the scientist, unwilling to assign blame or to give a single, definitive answer as to the cause for Izzie’s behavior. “But is it stimulation or is it the way they were born? Well, dogs who’ve had all the advantages can do this test… You certainly can teach her. I think as adults they can learn these things… It’s not like what you’re born with is what you’re stuck with. But [early development] certainly is going to affect the response surface that you have available to display. Which is the way I tend to look at it.”

  Overall makes a fair point that is becoming clear: I could certainly be doing more to enrich my dog’s mental development. While her birth in a commercial breeding facility may impose a ceiling on her abilities, my work as an owner is an important component of her continued development. In short, you can and should teach an old dog new tricks. As much as it might seem like Izzie enjoys our walks and couch-potato jam sessions, I admittedly do not do much to enhance her cognitive skills with mental stimulation games like these tests. Given that I’ve worked largely from home over the past year or so, I always assumed that we spend so much more time together than the average owner and dog, and I’m therefore giving her adequate stimulation. But time together is not the same as time spent actively engaging her mind.

  Overall acknowledges that this is a point that is challenging for people to accept.

  “This is not going to go down well in consumer education, that it’s not just starting with the right dog, but you have to engage them,” she says.

  As much as we’d like to blame the conditions of a dog’s birth for its behavior, the willingness of an owner to engage in mental stimulation activities has a major impact on the dog’s psychological well-being. We exit the lab once again and wait for the next test.

  Again, the door opens. But this time, there are no boxes to explore. Now, I am instructed to sit on a chair in the middle of the empty testing area. Izzie is given a few rubber toys stuffed with treats. She chooses the one bulging with hot dog slices—an excellent choice. Overall plays an audio file. It starts off with the sound of a thunderstorm. Izzie stops eating for a moment and freezes. The audio transitions to a vibration sound, and she resumes eating. Then the track advances to play the sounds of a mortar attack. Again, she freezes and looks around. In my mind, this is a huge success. After all, everyone who has ever met Izzie has endured one of her noise-induced panic attacks—they’re practically a calling card. The fact that she’s simply freezing and looking around the room without a yap? I’m impressed with her performance.

  After the track finishes playing, I proudly tell Overall that I think Izzie did very well on this test. She doesn’t hesitate to inform me that Izzie actually did abysmally: the fact that she stopped eating a high-value treat when she heard a sound that frightened her demonstrated that she was undergoing an uncontrollable parasympathetic response. What I had thought was a typical dog barking at certain noises is, in fact, a dog who likely suffers from anxiety or at least a serious phobia that is creating psychological stress for her.

  Overall’s test continues for several hours. Izzie must extract a tennis ball from a puzzle box. She succeeds. She must circumnavigate a Plexiglas panel to access a food treat she can smell but not immediately extract. She succeeds again with some effort. But at the conclusion of the day’s testing, Overall reveals that Izzie’s middling performance on any individual part of the exam accounts for only one small component of her final assessment. Instead, there’s a larger pattern to Izzi
e’s behavior that Overall has been tracking throughout the test with concern.

  “She’s at a disadvantage from experiencing joy,” Overall says matter-of-factly.

  Stunned and horrified, I look at Izzie, who is now blissfully nose-deep in a rubber toy stuffed full of Philadelphia cream cheese.

  “She had a good time, but we have dogs who have true joy,” she continues.

  “So less than her performance on the individual steps of this test, it’s how happy the test allows her to become that tells you something?” I ask.

  “I think so,” she says. “This dog has the capacity [to experience] joy… I think that she thought, ‘This wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and this was pretty good.’ But you see some of these dogs, and at each step, they are just getting more joyful and more joyful and they’re thinking This is great! She didn’t. She was happy she did it, but she wasn’t thrilled, and I think that’s what [puppy mill breeding] takes away from these dogs is real joy.”

  I want to throw my arms around Izzie’s neck, pick her up, and shower her in kisses and treats. I want to show Overall that this dog feels joy. I’ve seen her bounding up the Colorado Rockies, lording over cliffs, and terrorizing squirrels. I’ve watched her zoom up and down our block in the snow with a manic thrill in her eyes. I’ve curled up in bed with her and watched countless movies as she’s slept with her head on my belly, peacefully and shamelessly snoring. How can Overall tell me that none of these experiences bring her joy?

  “The world is a complex place,” Overall says. “All I can do is try my best to sculpt out the complexity and leave it there for [people] to consider. Even if they end up saying, ‘Well, he’s just not a very outgoing dog because awful things happened to him.’ But now, they have a greater depth of understanding of what that meant.”

  “Do you think that life in a commercial breeding operation diminishes the ability to have that joy?” I ask.

  “I think it sucks the joy right out of you. I think it sucks the joy out of being a mom, and it sucks the joy out of being a puppy.”

  “Is some of that genetic?”

  “A lot of it could be genetic, and those are the dogs we do see that are anxious or depressed.”

  Overall goes on to describe her own dog, Linus, who she was called in to rescue at just five weeks. She says that when she took him home, he was cognitively a “vegetable.” Through years of her expert enrichment efforts, she was able to make him somewhat functional; however, he lacks the flexibility to willingly participate in a wide variety of environments. He even flunked this test, unable to cope with the anxiety of going through it. His distress was so apparent, she vowed never to repeat the test on Linus.

  “He can have great joy. And he’s happy 99 percent of the time. When people come to visit, he’s the dog they love… But if they met him outside of our property, they would never see that joy. So how do we capture that in a test?” she asks with a shrug. “What we can tell you is that the dogs who have joy in all parts of these tests are very plastic, flexible dogs. So maybe that’s what we want in a working dog.”

  “Well, don’t we also want that in our companion animals?” I ask.

  “Do we? Because then they need for you to do things with them.”

  She describes a set of working dogs trained in Sweden. The puppies who turned out to be the most effective working dogs were the ones that proved to be the most destructive in their owners’ homes. These were the dogs who, unlike Izzie, would have tackled the bankers boxes in Overall’s first test, tearing them apart to find all the hidden toys.

  “They’ll start early training, and these dogs will blossom,” she says. “They are supersmart. But they need [training], and if they don’t get that, they are figuring out how the Venetian blinds work—which I think is charming. Most people wouldn’t.”

  “But wouldn’t you argue that you want a pet like that?” I ask. “I mean, we love these animals. We spend billions of dollars on them over the course of the year—”

  “Dollars isn’t time,” she says.

  “Don’t we want them to feel joy?”

  “That’s the time part,” she says. “But most anxiety problems are not caused by understimulation. They’re caused by things that go wrong in the dog’s head that then may be worsened by the environment. It’s a biological process going on. That’s not what we are talking about when we talk about joy in the richness of life.”

  I explain to Overall that many people end up purchasing a puppy from a pet store or online instead of adopting an adult dog because they feel that a puppy is a blank slate. They worry that a rescue dog comes with emotional and psychological baggage acquired over the years of its life. Puppies, however, seem free of that concern. They’re young and, therefore, are worth the investment of a purchase, because they will be easier to train and mold to a family’s lifestyle even if they do come from an ugly birthplace. I ask if her research confirms this assumption or upends it. She points to Izzie.

  “Well, you’re seeing it with every single thing she does: Where’s that umph?”

  I ask what that means—what would Izzie look like if she had been bred responsibly?

  “You would see a dog that is more willing to try stuff,” she says. “Learning to fail successfully is the single biggest skill we could give any social animal.”

  “And that can be disrupted in the first eight weeks of life even?”

  “Absolutely,” she says. “They freeze. They stop doing stuff. They get no feedback, and when you get no reinforcement, you stop offering behavior. And she offers very few behaviors in cognitive situations.”

  “So the notion that if you get a puppy from a [pet shop], it’s not damaged—”

  “That is probably completely wrong,” she says. “Are there really clean slates? The best clean slate is a good breeder who does early enrichment and allows a dog to develop its potential to the extent possible, you know, and build in flexibility. And if you’re not going to do that, then that’s a problem.”

  After our interview with Overall, Izzie and I drive back into Philadelphia to meet up with my husband, Dan. The moment we walk in the door, he’s pelting us with questions, dying to know how our girl Izzie did on the test. I take out my recorder that I used for the interview and play back the part of the tape where Overall told me that Izzie’s breeding and puppyhood have diminished her capacity to feel joy. Dan is horrified.

  “Joy? This dog feels joy. Look at her,” he says. Izzie rolls onto her back, her eyes darting back and forth from him to me suggestively, hinting that a belly rub should be on its way. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Maybe we don’t know what we’re talking about,” I say, certain that if anyone knows what they’re talking about in this situation, it’s Overall. “It’s not that simple. It’s not that black and white. She can experience joy in the situations where she is comfortable and in the environments she’s come to know. She has the capacity to feel joy. But she lacks the flexibility to feel it in every situation. It just closes up the world to her a bit. But that doesn’t mean she’s a lost cause. We can still keep enriching her. And we should.”

  Dan bundles up Izzie’s dangling limbs into his embrace.

  “You feel joy, don’t you?” he asks her, rocking her back and forth like an ungainly baby. She answers by taking a swipe at his nose with her tongue.

  I understand his reaction, and I know that his denial and outrage might be similar to what most other dog owners would feel had they not seen the test with their own eyes and read the research that’s out there as I have. It’s hard to accept that something you love unconditionally might be broken. It’s painful to have someone pull back the curtain and objectively demonstrate that you’ve been oblivious to the ways in which a member of your family is hurting. And it’s even worse to know that our ability to overlook that pain puts money directly into the pockets of the people who perpetuate these conditions.

  “I think she feels joy right now,” I say,
trying to reassure him. And as we hold her close, I’m almost sure she does.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  From Man’s Best Friend to Fur Baby

  “If this doesn’t work out, can we get a second dog?”

  It’s not the first time I’ve asked Dan this question. He puts the car in park outside of the fertility clinic. The bitter-cold wind lashes the windows as the snow swirls around us.

  “Sometimes I think you’re rooting for the dog,” he says.

  “Win-win?” I try.

  He turns off the car.

  Inside the building, we separate. Dan is taken down to the clinic’s man cave to provide a new sample. I’m whisked away to a room that looks like it was designed by a space-age Torquemada, where a radiologist double-checks that I’ve pregamed with plenty of ibuprofen for this test.

  “Just put your feet in my supercomfy stirrups,” she says, gesturing to her table with large, black leather holders for my feet and legs. “Everyone loves ’em because they’re so much comfier than the plastic ones.”

  “They look a little lethal injection-y,” I say. She takes offense. “I just mean that they really look ready for action.”

  I hop up and try to breathe calmly as she inserts a catheter into my cervix and shoots dye through my uterus and fallopian tubes. They darken like a storm on the monitor. She says that’s a good thing, that they look like they’re flowing well. After the test, I scurry to the bathroom, holding a towel between my legs as the dye and some watery blood rush out of me.

  My husband is in the plush waiting room, commiserating with a pink-haired woman about our respective insurance policies. He jumps up when he sees me and leads me back out into the gray morning. Tonight, it’ll be Christmas.

  “So?”

  “One small bit of luck: at least the tubes are clear.”

  He hugs me. It’s the first time we’ve left the doctor with good news. The past few visits have all been doom and gloom: Consider an egg donor; find another clinic because you’re not even eligible for IVF here; it’s rare to see such diminished ovarian reserve at such a young age. This time, I can tell he’s relieved.