There are people watchers and there are dog watchers. I am decidedly a dog watcher. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, if a dog should wander into my field of vision, I will always take a few moments to admire what we frequently call “man’s best friend.” I am, of course, fascinated with the incredible variety of shape, size, color, and personality that we find in the dog. No other species on the planet can boast as broad a spectrum of attributes and still remain the same animal. Great Danes, Yorkshire Terriers, Dachshunds, and German Shepherds are all the same animal. I find that pretty amazing.
But it is rare in my experience to see a dog without their human around. So there is often more to see when I look at dogs. I find it fascinating to observe the dynamics between a dog and their person or persons. Some dogs will be on leash, walking calmly by their person while others are running madly through the fields at the local park taking little notice of their humans save to stay in some relative proximity so they won’t get left behind. There are the plodding older dogs, the barky young dogs, the nervous dogs staying close to their person, and the determined pullers who drag their person down the path with excitement. And all of these dogs tell me something about themselves and the person they are with.
You see what you want to see
While dogs can’t talk with us, there is a wealth of information about how a dog is feeling available to the observer if you only take the time to look. In her book “For The Love Of A Dog”, animal behaviourist Patricia McConnell spends an entire chapter describing the various ways dogs display their emotions through body language. The way a dog moves, they way it holds its body, the position and movement of its head and tail – all tell something about the dog’s emotional state. If you are close enough to see their face, there is even more information to see. The way a dog holds its mouth, the shape and movement of its eyes, its breathing patterns. There are several great books and videos out there that can tell you what a dog is likely feeling when they display specific physical signs. There is enough actual research that we are fairly well versed in the dog’s body language.
Dogs don’t lie. Oh, they may have some rudimentary idea of how to misdirect us or use a bluff to perhaps steal a snack from the table, but the wiring in their brains doesn’t to allow them to outright lie in the human sense. That would require long term memory, the ability to reflect on past events, and even to extrapolate what future consequences might come from their deception. Fortunately for us, the dog is a pretty honest creature. But we have found ways to make them much more complicated than perhaps they are. We layer our own motives on them and misinterpret our dogs all the time.
If you take the time to learn about canine body language and the nature of dogs, you can read an awful lot about a dog just by looking at it for a few moments. I offer you this word of caution, once you know what you are looking at in a dog, you cannot “unsee” it. I learned about reading stress in my dogs’ body language so I could do a better job of managing them in difficult situations. But once I knew what stress looked like, many of those dogs I would enjoy watching at the park suddenly looked different to me. I could not “unsee” the signs of stress in some of them as they walked with their human.
Dogs have feelings too
There is some debate about the kinds of emotions that dogs can feel. We know that they can experience joy and fear and even some of the more subtle emotions. We also know that some emotions that require more complex brain function are not the same in dogs as they are in humans – love, envy, altruism, etc. Our dogs do feel a spectrum of emotions, both positive and negative, and that these likely come from their experience of their world. As their owners and caretakers, much of our dog’s world involves us in one way or another. So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that dogs have feelings about us too.
Our relationships with our dogs are, in a very real way, written all over them. As they pass me on a walk, I can see from a dog’s body language if he is enjoying his time out with his human or if he is cautiously controlling his actions to avoid something unpleasant. Some dogs even seem to have given up any initiative to explore and just wait patiently for their human to give them permission to sniff a bit of grass. There are the nervous dogs with ears flat back and tail tucked, whose eyes dart around scanning for any sign of danger. There is the wheezing, panting dog who is straining at the leash, mostly oblivious of their human who they are dragging behind them in their exuberance. All of them have something to say about how they are feeling at that moment in time.
Action and reaction
Dogs excel at knowing their humans. They spend their lives studying our every mood and movement. A dog’s ability to respond to their human companions is uncanny. At times it rises to a level that looks like the paranormal as if they can read our minds. The result of all of that study comes out in their bodies as well. My relationship and my history with my dog is visible to anyone who watches me interact with her. Whether I like it or not, her reactions to me will broadcast to anyone watching exactly who and what she thinks I am.
Her actions have a lot to say too. My dog’s initiative and engagement with her environment, other people, and other dogs can say a great deal about her feelings. Is she allowed to think for herself? Does she trust me to keep her safe? Does she want to work with me or would she rather be left alone to do her thing? Everything my dog does while we are out and about can be another indicator of how she feels about her life with me.
Now hear this…
So what is my dog saying about me? When people see her out in front of me at the end of a six foot leash, do they think she is being dominant? Or do they understand by her relaxed mouth and attentiveness to me that she is just eager to explore and that I encourage her to do that on her walks. When I ask her to come in and sit by my side, do they see a dog who is obedient to her master or one who is eager to work for her partner and human companion? As I said earlier in this article, a good deal of what people see in dogs comes from their own perceptions and their own understanding of dogs. But anyone who understands dogs and their body language would know exactly the kind of relationship my dog and I have. It’s all right there. She is broadcasting it all over her face, all over her body, and with every swish of her tail.
Do you know what your dog says about you? Do you watch other dogs to see what they have to say? The Rottweiler with plodding along with his head down has a story to tell. The toy poodle that barks and jumps at people passing by does too. And the smiling Labrador retriever towing their owner down the street has a different story to tell. But they are all reflections of their humans. They are products of their environments. They are, in many respects, the kinds of dogs we make them.
It is my hope that dog owners care as much about what their dogs might have to say about them as they do about getting compliance from their dog. I am always disappointed to see some dog owner showing off their “very obedient” dog who dutifully and carefully performs exactly what they are asked by the owner. But there is no smile, no light in the eyes. Only resignation and acceptance of their lot in life. It makes me sad.
I hope your dog has great things to say about you when you go out. I’m very proud of my dogs and I’m pleased that they tell the world how happy they are too.
Until next time, have fun with your dog.
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Photo credits –
Heel – Christopher Swerin 2012 From Flickr
An Outing- brianac37 2012 From Flickr
Field Dogs- mgstyer 2010 From Flickr
Recent Eric Brad CPDT-KA Articles:
- The Dog That Changed My Life
- Keeping Your Dog Informed
- Teaching Your Dog to Not-Behave
- The Simple Complexity of Dog Training
- What The Dog Wants
Eric, let me say I loved the this article. I enjoyed the depth about the reading of body language in our dogs. If only other with dogs would come to understand how important this is, their relationships would be so much better. I to belong to PPG and Angelica is a very good friend of mine.
I must say poor Kevin is obviously very intelligent, however, I almost felt sad for him. Having a dog in my view is nothing short of amazing. And to learn how to read that dog is even more amazing.
Great job.
But it seems you’re saying the “black box” is not inscrutable if for one thing for the purposes of deception dogs can distinguish between survival and pedestrian needs. And secondly, to be capable of deception, dogs would have to be able to compare one point in time relative to one in the future, as well as their personal point of view relative to the individual they intend to deceive. And if dogs are capable of a deceptive act that runs into the future, then they must also be able to rewind backwards a proportionate span of time so as to reflect on the recent past. And if they are capable of even a short term deception, then they must be able to assess whether or not they were successful in deceiving the other being as a separate matter from whether or not they were successful in obtaining what was desired. And now this would mean that dogs can be motivated by psychological objectives that are wholly detached from a material reinforcement as not every act of deception can possibly be successful. Otherwise the dog that barks off to the horizon but doesn’t get back to the bone in time would never try again. Indeed we see that some people when they fail at deception, instead of giving it up simply go on to get better at it, most especially if they perceive it to have some bearing on their very survival. The act of deception would have to carry its own reward independent of any material benefit. And therefore if capable of the most rudimentary act of deception, dogs would be able to rate and catalogue other beings in terms of their potential dupability. This of course would call into question the trial and error method as the sole basis of learning. So in my view ascribing intention to the behavior of dogs negates the black box thesis.
The “black box” is not a thesis. We cannot know for certain what the intentions of a dog are without confirmation from the dog. That remains out of reach. It’s all speculation.
Perhaps I made my point too clumsily. I’m trying to say that; one can’t say on the one hand they’re treating the dog’s mind as a “black box” and then on the other go on to ascribe intention to the dog’s behavior, such as short term deception, because a complex psychology with quite specific thoughts automatically follow from an intention to deceive. Ascribing intention is mutually exclusive from a black box approach.
Actually, I can do exactly that. I can speculate as to the intentions of a dog based on observed evidence. But, given the “black box”, I must always allow that I could be wrong. It is, after all, speculation without confirmation from the dog. The “black box” remains the black box. And my speculations, no matter that they are based on data collected, remain speculations. For centuries mankind believed the earth was flat and that the earth was the center of the solar system.
I am free to ascribe intention to anyone or anything so long as I admit that these are just speculations, no matter how informed by observation or study. Until the day my dog looks me in the eye and says, in clear English, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant by that.” everything regarding her intentions remains conjecture.
At the risk of belaboring the point, my point remains that ascribing intention to anything the dog does, immediately injects a vast and complex human psychology into the mind of the dog, and just as immediately abrogates a neutral manner of inquiry that the “black box” approach is supposed to ensure. And no matter how open minded one might be at the end of it all, every do over will follow in kind because the notion of intention is inextricably linked to its own set of hidden assumptions. Until these are identified the Sun will always be seen to rise and fall about the earth. So my point is that allowing for error at the end doesn’t reduce the risk for error at the start.
This is what I don’t understand about the “high cognition and learning theorists,” of which I assume, you might count yourself as one. (I’m furthermore assuming that you–as do I–don’t consider the dog to be a simple stimulus–response/mindlessly conditioned learning machine; that there has to be some kind of intelligent Throughput going on in between Input and Output.) So if it is true that “dogs don’t lie,” this would automatically mean that they live wholly in the immediate-moment, and that the Throughput wouldn’t be concerned with intent in any way shape or form as intent is not of the moment. So how could a dog be capable of even petty subterfuge or a “rudimentary idea” of deception if they don’t lie? It seems that when the dog’s deception is considered a low-level benign kind of affair, the cognitive theorist is willing make an allowance for such a capacity for as it would thus be indicative of a cognitive kind of intelligence. But that lets the camel’s nose in under the tent so that it would also be the case that dogs can harbor a malevolent intent just as surely as a benevolent one. To me this is an especially difficult question for the cognitive, intent-driven theorist because dogs do have a long term memory, exhibiting a capacity to carry a prior experience forward many years into the future, even though I agree completely that dogs are not able to extrapolate from this what future consequences might come from their actions. A dog can’t be mostly in the moment and then sometimes happen to fall out, it has to be one or the other. That dogs differ from man in degree rather than kind doesn’t resolve this question either. For a mind that can harbor intent can easily lie and the cold hard truth as one psychologist said of people, is that “everyone lies most of the time and everybody knows it.” Otherwise why does telling the truth require courage? If the mind of the dog is to differ in degree rather than in kind as Dr. Coren asserts, then they too are likely to be reflexive low level liars as well which would then mean body language is meaningless. Specifically therefore, what does being a “pretty honest creature” mean?
Hi Kevin –
All good questions with, unfortunately, not very well defined answers.
So far as I can tell, we are still dealing with the “black box.” We can conjecture until the cows come home about what we believe the intentions of our dog to be. All we can observe is behaviour and repeated patterns of behaviour. So while I have my opinions on the matter, albeit based on the best science I have been able to get my hands on, without direct access to the “mind of a dog” I cannot be certain that my assumptions are correct. So there’s your caveat emptor. I’m doing the best I can with what I know.
I look at the dog’s ability to deceive as one of survival. In their world, dogs do not need to perpetuate a falsehood for days or weeks. They just need to bluff long enough to get a scrap of food or engineer an escape. We also know from behavioural testing that dogs are not concept learners but instead learn by trial and error. Those same studies have shown that even trial and error learning, if not repeated with demonstrable benefits, are quickly forgotten and the lessons must be learned again. The strongest long term memories in dogs come from classically conditioned stimuli, those events or objects that make a strong impression on them as being incredibly dangerous or incredibly advantageous. Further, dogs have shown no capacity to reflect on past events save to determine if such events would be repeatable for their benefit. They don’t feel “guilty” or “arrogant” about what they might have accomplished.
With regard to Coren’s assertion that the mind of a dog is only different in degree and not kind, I would point first to a dog’s sensory apparatus. Quite literally our dogs do not live in the same world we do. Theirs is a world made up of scents of such dazzling intensity and variety because of the olfactory apparatus they have developed in nature. Not having the same equipment, now can we possibly know how such a mind would perceive the world? Again, studies have shown that dogs approach the world “nose-first” where humans generally approach it “eyes first.” How does that change the thinking process? Does it effect how the brain develops? Can we say that a dog even has the same neural pathways in their brain only scaled down from that of a human? That much we know and the answer is no they don’t. The cerebral cortex, the area responsible for higher order thinking, language, and pattern storage, is a much smaller part of a dog’s brain by percentage than it is in a human. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that we can overlay our human “mind” on the dog and just say that it’s a smaller or lesser version of it.
So in terms of deception or lying, I think there are two things we need to consider as their caretakers and family members. First, they deceive for their own ends. By that I mean they are likely to find cause-and-effect patterns that work to their advantage. “If I bark out the window, mom will look to see what I’m barking at and then I can steal a weiner off of the table.” They come to these conclusions by trial and error learning. Secondly, by our human standards, the deceptions of the average dog are really quite simple when seen in the light of the “opportunist looking for an advantage.” So yes, our dogs can “out fox” us but are they really lying in the sense that many of us do on those days we really don’t want to go in to work and fake the sniffles on that call in to the office?
If you want to say it’s a matter of degree, I could live with that. But I still believe that dogs deceive only when they can benefit from it. There is no reinforcement in “duping the human” in and of itself.
In the context of this article, I don’t believe a dog would be able to “put on appearances” to mask their feelings when out in public with their family. They feel how they feel and it’s written all over them.
I often look into my dog’s eyes as we are walking…I like to talk to them and see with my own eyes that they are enjoying our outing. And my heart sings when I see those beautiful eyes smiling back at me…”Thanks for taking me out for a run, mom. I love hanging out with you.”