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Do Dogs Think
Owners assume their pet's brain
works like their own. That's a big mistake.
By
Jon Katz
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 7:48 AM PT
Blue, Heather's normally affectionate
and obedient Rottweiler, began tearing up the house shortly
after Heather went back to work as an accountant after several
years at home. The contents of the trash cans were strewn
all over the house. A favorite comforter was destroyed.
Then Blue began peeing all over Heather's expensive new
living room carpet and systematically ripped through cables
and electrical wires.
"I know exactly what's going on,"
Heather told her vet when she called seeking help. "Blue
is angry with me for leaving her alone. She's punishing
me. She always looks guilty when I come home, so she knows
she's been bad. She knows she shouldn't be doing those things."
Heather's assessment was typical of many dog owners' diagnoses
of behavioral problems. And her vet agreed, suggesting "separation
anxiety" and prescribing anti-anxiety medication for
Blue. Heather also hired a trainer, who confirmed the diagnosis.
Blue, they concluded, was resentful at
her owner's absence and was misbehaving to regain the attention
that she'd once monopolized. After all, Blue didn't transgress
like this when Heather went out shopping or took in a movie
with friends. It must be punitive. Heather's mother even
recalled Heather, as a child, throwing tantrums when she
went off to work. Heather and Blue had become so close,
she joked, that they were acting alike.
So Heather shut Blue in the kitchen with
a toddler gate, removing countertop food and garbage. Things
calmed down. Heather began to relax and gave Blue the run
of the house again.
Heather, a friend of a friend, had called me for counsel
as well. But since she, her vet, her trainer, and her mother
had all reached the same conclusion, and since the rampaging
had stopped, I didn't give the situation much thought.
A month later, though, Heather was back
on the phone: Blue had relapsed. She yowled piteously when
confined to the kitchen or basement. Worse, she was showing
signs of aggression with people and other dogs and refusing
to obey even simple commands that were once routine. On
one late-night walk, Blue attacked a terrier walking nearby,
opening wounds that needed stitches.
Blue's problems had grown so serious
that kennels wouldn't board the dog and the vet wouldn't
examine her without a muzzle. Heather was thinking of finding
her another home, turning her over to a rescue group, possibly
even euthanizing her.
"She's out of control," Heather
complained, exhausted, angry, and frightened. She sounded
betrayed—a dog she'd loved and cared for was turning
on her because she went to work. "I caused this by
leaving her," Heather confessed, guiltily. But was
she supposed to quit her job to stay home with her dog?
This time, Heather got my full attention.
I took notes, asked questions, then called a canine behaviorist
at Cornell and explained the problem in as much detail as
I could.
"Everybody says the dog was reacting
to her going back to work," I suggested.
"Everybody is probably wrong,"
was his blunt comeback. "It's 'theory of mind.' This
is what often happens when humans assume that dogs think
the way we do."
His analysis: "Being angry at the
human and behaving punitively—that's not a thought
sequence even remotely possible, given a dog's brain. The
likely scenario is that the dog is simply frightened."
When Heather was home, she was there to explain and enforce
the rules. With her gone, the dog literally didn't know
how to behave. The dog should have been acclimated to a
crate or room and confined more, not less, until she got
used to her new independence.
Lots of dogs get nervous when they don't
know what's expected of them, and when they get anxious,
they can also grow restless. Blue hadn't had to occupy time
alone before. Dogs can get unnerved by this. They bark,
chew, scratch, destroy. Getting yelled at and punished later
doesn't help: The dog probably knows it's doing something
wrong, but it has no idea what. Since there's nobody around
to correct behaviors when the dog is alone, how could the
dog know which behavior is the problem? Which action was
wrong?
He made sense to me. Dogs are not aware
of time, even as a concept, so Blue couldn't know whether
she was being left for five minutes or five hours, or how
that compared to being left for a movie two weeks earlier.
Since she had no conscious notion that Heather's work life
had changed, how could she get angry, let alone plot vengeance?
The dog was alone more and had more time to fill. The damage
was increasing, most likely, because Blue had more time
to get into mischief and more opportunities to react to
stimulus without correction—not because she was responding
to different emotions.
I was familiar with the "theory
of mind" notion the behaviorist was referring to. Psychologist
David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania talks about
it; it's also discussed in Stanley Coren's How Dogs Think.
The phrase refers to a belief each of us has about the way
others think. Simply, it says that since we are aware and
self-conscious, we think others—humans and animals—are,
too. There is, of course, enormous difference of opinion
about whether this is true.
When I used to leave my border collie
Orson alone in the house, uncrated, he learned to open the
refrigerator with his nose, remove certain food items, open
the plastic container, and consume its contents. Then he'd
squirrel away the empty packages. Everyone I told this story
made the same assumptions: Orson was a wily devil taunting
me for leaving him alone. We actually installed a child
lock on the refrigerator door. But what changed his behavior
was that I began to crate him when I went out. He has not
raided the fridge since. Yet he could easily sneak in and
do that while he's uncrated and I'm occupied outdoors or
elsewhere in the house. Is he no longer wily? Or is he simply
less anxious?
There's no convincing evidence I'm aware
of, from any reputable behaviorist or psychologist, that
suggests dogs can replicate human thought processes: use
language, think in narrative and sequential terms, understand
human minds, or share humans' range of emotions.
Yet that remains a powerful, pervasive view of dogs, the
reason Heather's vet, trainer, and mother all agreed on
Blue's motivations. It's almost impossible not to lapse
into theory-of-mind reasoning when it comes to our dogs.
After all, most of us have no other way in which to grasp
another creature's behavior. How can one even begin to imagine
what's going on inside a dog's head?
Most of the time, I don't know why my
dogs do what they do. They seem aware that I have a way
of doing things. They've learned that we don't walk in the
street, that I don't distribute food from my plate, that
there will be a bone or treat after dinner. But they are
creatures of habit and instinct, especially when it comes
to food, work, and attention. I often think of them as stuff-pots
wedded to ritual, resistant and nervous about change.
I don't believe that dogs act out of
spite or that they can plot retribution, though countless
dog owners swear otherwise. To punish or deceive requires
the perpetrator to understand that his victim or object
has a particular point of view and to consciously work to
manipulate or thwart it. That requires mental processes
dogs don't have.
The more I've moved away from interpreting
my dogs' behavior as nearly human, the easier it is to train
them, and the less guilt and anxiety I feel.
To attribute complex thoughts and plots
to their actions unravels the training process. Training
and living with a dog requires a different theory: that
these are primal, predatory animals driven by instinct.
Rather than seeking animal clues to her dog's behavior,
Heather imagined herself as the dog. She reasoned that if
she, Heather, were suddenly left alone for long periods,
abandoned by someone she loved and used to spend a lot of
time with, she would feel angry and hurt and might try to
get even, not only to punish her companion but to try to
persuade him or her to return.
That's attributing a lot of intellectual
activity to an animal that can recognize a few dozen words
but has none of its own, that reads human emotions but doesn't
experience the same ones. Since the Cornell behaviorist
made sense to me, I conveyed his analysis: The dog didn't
know how to behave with Heather gone. Crating Blue would
reduce her anxiety and give her less chance to act up. I
persuaded Heather—by now distraught—to buy a
large crate. For weeks, she fed the dog in the crate, leaving
the door open. Between meals, she left treats and bones
inside.
The first time Heather closed the crate
door, Blue threw herself against the metal, whining and
howling. The same thing happened the second, third, fifth,
and dozenth times. But Heather, cautioned that training
and retraining often takes weeks and months, persisted.
Sometimes she left the treat-filled crate open; other times
she closed it.
After several weeks, Blue began to go
into the crate willingly and remained there quietly for
short, then lengthening periods. Heather walked Blue two
or three times daily; when she was gone for more than three
or four hours, she hired a dog walker to take her out an
additional time and throw a ball. But whenever Heather left
the house, she put Blue in the crate and left a nearby radio
tuned to a talk network.
This time, Heather got it right, treating
Blue as a dog, not a rebellious teenager. Blue improved
dramatically, and the improvement continues. Her aggression
diminished, then seemed to vanish, although Heather no longer
lets her near dogs or children unleashed. It seemed the
dog had comprehensible rules to follow, and felt safer.
Blue was liberated from the confusion,
anxiety, and responsibility of figuring out what to do with
her unsupervised and sudden freedom. Once again there was
little tension between the two of them. Heather's house
wasn't getting chewed up, and homecomings weren't tense
and angry experiences. Yet here was a case, I thought, where
seeing canine behavior in human terms nearly cost an animal
its life.
Sometimes it does. Harry, a social worker
in Los Angeles, wrote me that he had a great rescue dog
named Rocket and was happy enough with the experience to
adopt a second. Rocket attacked the new dog while Harry
was feeding them, then bit a neighborhood kid. "He
never forgave me for getting the new dog," Harry explained.
"He was so angry with me. I couldn't trust him not
to take out his rage on others, so I had him put to sleep."
We will never know, of course, what Rocket
could or could not forgive. Rocket probably didn't attack
the new dog out of anger at Harry. He was more likely protecting
his food or pack position. The creature in the household
with the most to lose from a new arrival, he probably simply
fought for what he had. Then, once aroused, he was more
dangerous. As trainers know, dogs under pressure have two
options: fight or flight. Rocket decided to fight and paid
for it with his life. Had his owner known more about dogs'
true nature, he might have introduced the new dog more gradually,
or not at all. And there might be one less bitten child.
But this is all a guess. We will never know.
When I face such training problems—and
I do, we all do—I try to adopt a Sherlock Holmesian
strategy, using logic and determination. We have all sorts
of tools at our disposal that dogs don't have. We control
every aspect of their lives, from food to shelter to play,
so we ought to be able to figure out what's driving the
dog and come up with an individually tailored approach that
works—and if it doesn't, come up with another one.
Why will Clementine come instantly if
she's looking at me, but not if she's sniffing deer droppings?
Is it because she's being stubborn or, as many people tell
me, going through "adolescence"? Or because, when
following her keen predatory instincts, she simply doesn't
hear me? Should my response be to tug at her leash or yell?
Maybe I should be sure we've established eye contact before
I give her a command, or better yet, offer a liver treat
as an alternative to whatever's distracting her. But how
do I establish eye contact when her nose is buried? Can
I cluck or bark? Use a whistle or hoot like an owl?
I've found that coughing, of all things,
fascinates her, catches her attention, and makes her head
swivel, after which she responds. If you walk with us, you
will hear me clearing my throat repeatedly. What can I say?
It works. She looks at me, comes to me, gets rewarded.
The reality is, we don't know that much about what dogs
think, because they can't tell us. Behaviorists tend to
believe that dogs "think" in their own way—in
sensory images involving their finely honed instincts. They're
not capable of deviousness or spite. They love routine:
Nothing seems to make them more comfortable than doing the
same thing at the same time in the familiar way, day after
day: We snack here, we poop there, we play over here. I
am astonished at how little it takes to please them, how
simple their lives can be if we don't complicate them.
