What Is It Like To Be a Dog?

 

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know 

Recommended. 

In the last fifteen years the field of animal cognition has exploded.  Where a few researchers -- Roger Fouts (Next of Kin) or Irene Pepperberg (Alex and Me), for instance -- had labored for decades in relative obscurity, producing amazing results that were little known, even in academic circles -- suddenly it seems to have become hip to study animal minds and to have a strong position on the question.  The debate rages about whether, and to what degree, animals are conscious, whether they are thinking feeling beings, or just the automatons that Descartes believed them to be.  There's a lot of fascinating thought and work on this topic and B&Bs plans to cover as much of it as we can. 

For the moment, though, it is worth noting that earlier generations of scientists and researchers were often very clear about where they stood on this question.  One of Charles Darwin's lesser known works, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, takes a very clear stance on the side of awareness and feeling.  Darwin writes, "He who admits, on general grounds, that the structure and habits of all animals have been gradually evolved will look at the whole subject of Expression in a new and interesting light."  Human intelligence, consciousness and emotions, Darwin maintains, are products of evolution just like our eyes or our thumbs.  We have to expect to find analogous developments in other creatures.

The German biologist Jacob von Uexküll (1864 - 1944), was a pioneering researcher in animal behavior and a founder of what has come to be called Biosemiotics, literally, the study of the signs of life.  In a fascinating paper called  "A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds," (Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957) he explains a concept he calls "the umwelt (OOM-velt), the "self world" of individual creatures.  Alexandra Horowitz, who teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University, has taken von Uexküll's idea and applied it to dogs in a wonderful book called "Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell and Know". 

She explains the idea like this.  "What he (von Uexküll) proposed was revolutionary:  anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt ... their subjective or 'self-world'.  Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal .... If we want to understand the life of any animal, we need to know what things are meaningful to it.  The first way to discover this is to determine what the animal can perceive:  what it can see, hear, smell or otherwise sense.  Only objects that are perceived can have meaning to the animal ... Second, how does the animal act on the world?  ... These two components -- perception and action -- largely define and circumscribe the world of every living thing."  Von Uexküll describes the umwelt as a "soap bubble" with the creature in question at its center.  Really looking at what the animal can perceive and how it acts upon the world allows us to imaginatively step into its soap bubble.

During her time in graduate school, Horowitz says, she spent many hours with her dog at local parks, and since she was training to be an ethologist ("a scientist of animal behavior"), she began to observe the dogs in the park as scientist in the field would study wild animals.  "Where once I saw and smiled at the play between Pumpernickel and the local bull terrier, I now saw a complex dance requiring mutual cooperation, split-second communications, and assessment of each other's abilities and desires. The slightest turn of the head or the point of a nose now seemed directed, meaningful.  I saw dogs whose owners did not understand a single things their dogs were doing; I saw dogs too clever for their playmates; I saw people misreading canine requests as confusion and delight as aggression.  I began bringing a video camera with us and taping our outings at the parks ... when I began watching the videos in extremely slow motion playback, I saw behaviors I had never seen in years of living with dogs ...."

Out of these studies came Inside of a Dog.  With the benefit of her studies, her observations, and a wide knowledge of research, Horowitz engages our empathic imagination to take us inside the dog's soap bubble and see (and smell and hear) the world from their point of view.  The result is a book that will fascinate and instruct anyone who lives with and works with dogs.  Whole chapters are devoted to smell (a faculty of dogs that often seems beyond our ken as relatively deprived primates), sight, and sound, as well as the evolution of dogs and the ways in which dogs are, and are not, like their wolf ancestors. 

The book is full or surprising insights, even for those of us who spend inordinate amounts of times living with and learning about dogs.  For instance, in discussing the effects of domestication she notes that puppies, as opposed to wolf pups, open their eyes earlier and show their first fear responses later, and adaptation that allows a longer window of time for the puppies to bond with their human caretakers.  A tiny change, but one that might have been crucial in turning wolves into dogs.

This is a book to be read, savored, and gone back to for more in depth reading on the topics which most interest you. 

  

 

For the Love of the dog

The Loved Dog

Recommended

The popularity of Caesar Milan's television show and books is a phenomenon about which I have mixed emotions.  I really believe that Milan is a sincere lover of dogs and their owners, and I recognize that his work and his methods really do save the lives of many difficult dogs who otherwise might end up dying in shelters.  He gave me a renewed appreciation for the importance of just walking your dog as often as possible, letting the dog get used to you setting the course and making the decisions.  I know this technique works wonders because I have used it myself, and I've passed Milan's insightful advice on this subject on to a number of owner's who were training their own dogs.

Having said that, however, I must admit that I've never been really comfortable with Milan's methods.  He seems to me to be too invested in the dominance model of dog training, which often seem to have more to do with macho primate politics than they do with the real psychology or social structure of canines.  I believe it was Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human) who first called my attention to the new work being done on wolf pack social dynamics.  It seems that the old model of a dominant couple keeping the rest of the pack in line -- think "Call of the Wild", where Buck has to fight his way to the top of the pack -- is really based mostly on studies of artificially assembled packs of wolves in captivity.  The social structure which formed under these conditions was not necessarily natural, it just represented their best adaptation to being forced to live in artificial groups under unnatural conditions.  It turns out that wolf packs are more like families.  The "dominant" couple are in fact patriarch and matriarch, and most of the rest of the pack are their descendents.  The reasons that no one else in the pack mate has more to do with interbreeding instincts than with dominance.  Those that go on to mate find their partners outside the pack, and possibly even form their own packs.  In addition,  researchers at the University of Bristol not too long ago published a paper that calls into question the usefulness of the idea of "dominance" in describing canine groups (Bradshaw, J.W.S., Blackwell, E.J. and Casey, R.A. Dominance in domestic dogs – useful construct or bad habit? (2009) Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research 4, 135-144).   This entire model of relating to dogs is one that needs to be looked at very closely and very critically.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to Caesar Milan, even among "celebrity" dog trainers.  Tamar Geller (http://www.tamargeller.com/)  has worked on television, counseled celebrity pets, and done many of the same  high profile activates as  Caesar Milan, but her take on the relationship between dogs and humans is very different.  According to her bio, she first became interested in dogs when she was an Intelligence Officer with the Israeli Army Special Forces, and was able to observe the training of dogs for that service.  Later, she was able to study wolves in the wild, and began to doubt the whole dominance based model of wolf society.

Geller prefers to call herself a "life coach" instead of trainer, and she prefers the term "well mannered" to obedient.  But her method is not one of indulgence or over permissiveness.  Instead, she advocates fun game based training that incorporates the dog's natural interests and likes.  She believes that stress free training is far more effective in creating true communication and bonding than traditional obedience type training.

The Loved Dog (Simon Spotlight Entertainment 2007) was followed more recently by 30 Days to a Well Mannered Dog and by videos including The Loved Dog with Tamar Geller.  All of these are worth pursuing if you have an interested in dog training (even just with your companions at home)  -- especially if you find yourself uncomfortable with trying to be the "alpha" dog.
 
 

Related Viewing

 Temple Grandin

Directed by Mick Jackson and starring Claire Danes, Julia Ormand, David Strathairn and Catherine O'Hara

Highly Recommended

I plan to do a much more in depth look at the influential and fascinating work of Temple Grandin in the near future, but if by chance you have not seen the Emmy Award winning tv movie starring Claire Danes, it is a must see for all animal lovers, as well as for those interested in autism and education.  Claire Danes does a phenomenal job of as Grandin (who I have had the pleasure of meeting, briefly, in person and have seen speak on two occasions).  The film is also amazingly effective in  portraying the mind of a "visual thinker" who comes to understand that the way she sees the world is very different from most of the people around her, but that it offers her a chance to make a profound contribution to the world.  This film manages to be intensely emotional (I'm not ashamed to say I had tears in my eyes almost all the way through it) without once becoming maudlin or schmaltzy.  If you haven't seen it run out and get it.  It is truly not to be missed.

Questioning Point of View

The "third person limited" viewpoint has become so standard in American fiction that a lot of young writers seem to think that it is required.  Of course, some genres favor the first person -- but the first person narrator  and the close third person viewpoint are very similar in many ways.  They are both, it seems to me, part of the shrinking of fiction to a form that has more in common with memoir than it does with the ambitious fictional projects of 18th and 19th century writers.  I understand why memoir became such an important genre in the twentieth century -- the opportunity and need to tell personal stories that had never been told publicly before -- to show viewpoints on the world that had been excluded and repressed.  There's a reason why the most vibrant memoir writing tends to arise out of groups that are marginalized or oppressed and deal with parts of life that ordinarily are not seen.

But when the memoir -- an intensely personal and tightly focused form -- becomes the predominant model for fiction -- when fiction becomes mostly confessional and autobiographical -- then I don't think literature, culture, and even our politics benefit.  (There is a connection, worth exploring, between the rise of memoirs and memoir-modeled fiction and the splintering of the electorate into thousands of small special interests groups, each with a sense of grievance and entitlement.)

John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, expresses a lot of skepticism about the third person limited viewpoint.  Gardner writes,  "In any long fiction, Henry James remarked, the use of first person becomes barbaric.  James goes too far, but his point is worth considering.  First person locks us into one person's mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters' minds, and so forth.  What is sometimes called the 'third person limited point of view' or 'third person subjective' has some of the same drawbacks for a long piece of fiction."  He goes on to say, "We may go on for years without noticing that the third-person-limited point of view is essentially sappy ... [and]forces the writer into phony suspense."  Gardner illustrates with a story about a man named Alex, who is taking a class when his mistress, who is the wife of the local chief of police, comes in to watch.  "Alex is distressed.  He does not want their affair known ..." but he also doesn't want to offend his mistress.  "If we start off this story in the omniscient point of view, as Chekhov would, we can get the important facts in right away and get on to what's interesting ... "  He uses very funny examples to show how limiting ourselves to Alex's point of view and thoughts create a sense of false suspense, because of the information withheld from the readers, that it only takes a slight exaggeration to make ridiculous.  How many times do we see this in genre fiction?  If I read one more thriller where the writer puts us periodically into the head of the villain and "cleverly" conceals from us the fact that he's responsible for all the mischief in the story ... well there's not really anything I can do about it, but you get my point. 

All different kinds of viewpoints have their place in fiction, but third person limited -- often 'serially third person', jumping form character to character at scene changes and chapter breaks -- has become so standard that, as I said, some young writers don't realize it's not required -- they think staying in the head and mind of one character is an ironclad rule that can't be broken.

Part of the original impulse for the revolt against omniscience in fiction -- which certainly has its own problems and abuses -- was the changing philosophical outlook of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Omniscient viewpoint in older fiction often took it for granted that omniscience was possible -- that is, that there was an overarching "reality" that was bigger than any of the character's points of view -- and that reality could be known and shown to the reader.  The omniscient narrator had a lot in common with the omniscient Deity and with the clockwork Universe of Newtonian physics -- both world views that accepted the idea of an objective reality that was larger than, and truer than, any individual perception of it.

What began happening in the late nineteenth century -- what led us to Henry James, Virginia Wolfe, James Joyce, Kafka and straight into the avalanche of modern fiction -- was that the old world views came under fire on all fronts.  Science began knocking down the edifices of religion (it had been doing that for a long time -- from Copernicus to Galileo to Darwin ) but around the turn of the century it became a full scale assault -- culminating in Nietzsche declaring that God was dead.   The depth psychology of Freud and Jung, suddenly made the subjective, interior workings of the mind fascinating (although Harold Bloom (The Western Cannon; Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human)  has maintained that there isn't much in Freud's understanding of human nature that we couldn't have learned from Shakespeare), and Albert Einstein and other scientists showed us that objective reality was not such an easy concept to grasp -- as Einstein said, there is no privileged frame of reference.  His Theory of Relativity (like Darwin's theories before) was picked up and applied, often in silly ways, to all kinds of philosophical and social situations. 

So the philosophical position buried in the third person limited point of view (and in first person, more obviously) goes something like this:  the only real truth is what is experienced by an individual.  The only things that are important, or interesting, are those that are filtered through a specific (human) consciousness.  We can never know any truth outside of that.   

The only thing that saves this position form absolute solipsism (and a certain segment of modern fiction fell off this cliff into Post Modernism and other --isms) is the somewhat illogical clinging to the idea that there are multiple conscious centers, one for each human person at least.  I'll let you think out the logical problems in this position on your own.

As a writer who is interested in the place of the non-human in literature -- let's say animals to keep it simple -- I think it is time to look for something new.  We begin this process by pushing out way out of the self -- reaching for a fiction that is bigger, broader and more imaginative.  We have been told that the problem of representation is critical -- that men can't write about women, that straight writers can't write about gay characters, that Americans can't write about Asians -- and even with all the important post-colonial issue involved -- I think that's just a failure of the empathic imagination.  In regards to animals, the philosophical statement of this position is put forth most effectively by Thomas Nagel in his essay "What is it like to Be a Bat?" 

I intend to come back to Dr. Nagel and his ideas, and the ideas of some of his critics, in the near future.  For now, I encourage you to check it out and think about how his ideas might throw light on point of view in fiction. 

Maybe the question to begin with, though, is this:  Do we believe that there is a reality out there bigger than us?  That there is Truth, no matter how hard it may be to get to and how imperfect our attempts to model it or describe it?  Is the world larger and richer than human perception? 

I think it is.