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

by Alexandra Horowitz

Here is our first tool to getting that answer: imagining the point of view of the dog. The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uexküll. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt (OOM-velt): their subjective or “self-world.” Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal. Consider, for instance, the

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; the rest are not even noticed, or all look the same. The

Second, how does the animal act on the world? The tick mates, waits, drops, and feeds. So the

Thus, these two components—perception and action—largely define and circumscribe the world for every living thing. All animals have their own

last night (unless it involved a lot of garlic). We, the ticks, and every other animal dovetail into our

environment: we are bombarded with stimuli, but only a very few are meaningful to us.

Understanding a dog’s perspective—through understanding his abilities, experience, and communication—provides that vocabulary. But we can’t translate it simply through an introspection that brings our own umwelt along. Most of us are not excellent smellers; to imagine being a smeller, we have to do more than just think on it. That kind of introspective exercise only works when paired with an understanding of how profound the difference in umwelt is between us and another animal.

Indisputably our bed. The dog does not know all the things about the bed that make it such a glaringly different object to us. He may, indeed, come to learn that there is something different about the bed—by getting repeatedly scolded for lying on it. Even then, what the dog knows is less “human bed” versus “dog bed” but “thing one gets yelled at for being on” versus “thing one does not get yelled at for being on.

Looking at behavior to learn about an animal’s mental experience is precisely the idea behind some cleverly designed recent experiments. The researchers

truck. All of the rats learned this easily. But when the rats were played a new sound, one between the two learned pitches, what the researchers found was that the rats’ environment mattered. Those who had been housed in a predictable

environment interpreted the new sound to mean food; those in unstable environments did not. These rats had learned optimism or pessimism about the world. To watch the rats in the predictable environments jump with alacrity at every new sound is to see optimism in action. Small changes in the environment were enough to prompt a large change in outlook. Rat lab workers’ intuitions

The dog is an animal domesticated, a word that grew from a root form meaning “belonging to the house.” Dogs are animals who belong around houses. Domestication is a variation of the process of evolution,

But he arose from just one ancient Canidae line, animals most likely resembling the contemporary gray wolf.

Later genomic mapping has revealed that forty genes now differ between Belyaev’s tame foxes and the wild silver fox. Incredibly, by selecting for one behavioral trait, the genome of the animal was changed in a half century. And with that genetic change came a number of surprisingly familiar physical changes: some of the later-generation foxes have multicolored, piebald coats, recognizable in dog mutts everywhere. They have floppy ears and tails that curl up and over their backs. Their heads are wider and their snouts are shorter. They are improbably cute.

The most brazen among them may have overcome any fear of these new, naked human animals and begun feasting on the scraps pile. In this way, an accidental natural selection of wolves who are less fearful of humans would have begun.

explain dog behavior. The recently popular dog trainers are admired for their full embrace of the wolf side of dogs. They are often seen mocking the second group, which treats their dogs as quadrupedal, slobbery people. Neither has got it right. The answer is plumb in the middle of these approaches. Dogs are animals, of course, with atavistic tendencies, but to stop here is to have a blinkered view of the natural history of the dog. They have been retooled. Now they are animals with an asterisk. The inclination to look at dogs as animals rather than creations of our psychology is essentially right. To avoid anthropomorphizing, some turn to what might be called unsympathetic

biology: a biology free of subjectivity or such messy considerations as consciousness, preferences, sentiment, or personal experiences. A dog is but an animal, they say, and animals are but biological systems whose behavior and physiology can be explained with simpler, general-purpose terminology. Recently I saw a woman

For instance, it is high time we revamp the false notion that our dogs view us as their “pack.” The “pack” language—with its talk of the “alpha” dog, dominance, and submission—is one of the most pervasive metaphors for the family of humans and dogs. It originates where dogs originated: dogs emerged from wolflike ancestors,

*Not only do dogs not typically hunt to feed themselves—whether encouraged to or not—but what hunting technique they have is, it has been noted, “sloppy.” A wolf makes a calm, steady track toward

moose hunt. What domestic dogs do seem to have inherited from wolves is the sociality of a pack: an interest in being around others. Indeed, dogs are social opportunists. They are attuned to the actions of others, and humans turned out to be very good animals to attune to.

Despite their sometime wildness, dogs never revert to wolves. Stray dogs—those who lived with humans but have wandered away or been abandoned—and free-ranging dogs—provisioned with food but living apart from humans—do not take on more wolflike qualities. Strays seem to live a life familiar to city dwellers: parallel to and

cooperative with others, but often solitary. They do not self-organize socially into packs with a single breeding pair. They don’t build dens for the pups or provide food for them as wolves do. Free-ranging dogs may form a social ordering like other wild canids—but one organized by age more than by fights and strife. Neither hunts cooperatively: they scavenge or hunt small prey by themselves. Domestication changed them.

The dog laugh is a breathy exhalation that sounds like an excited burst of panting. We could call it social panting: it is a pant only heard when dogs are playing or trying to get someone to play with them. Dogs don’t seem to laugh to themselves, off sitting in the corner of the room, recollecting how that tawny dog in the park outsmarted her human this morning. Instead, dogs laugh when interacting socially. If you have played with your dog, you have probably heard it. In fact, doing your own social panting toward a dog is one of the most effective ways to elicit play.

Though it might not be under the control of the dog, social panting does seem to be a sign of enjoyment. And it may induce enjoyment—or at least alleviate stress—in others: playing a recording of the sounds of dog laughter at animal shelters has been found to reduce barking, pacing, and other signs of stress in the dogs housed there. Whether mirth feels like what it does in humans is yet to be studied.

Given the relative scarcity of barking in wolves, some theorize that dogs have developed a more elaborate barking language precisely in order to communicate with humans.

Wolves bark to convey alarm, but rarely, and they make more of a “woof” sound than anything like the protracted dog barking with which we are familiar. Dogs do not just bark more than wolves; they have developed numerous variations on the theme.

There are a handful of distinguishable barks, used reliably in a handful of distinguishable cases. Dogs bark to get attention, to warn of danger, in fear, as a greeting, in play, or even out of loneliness, anxiety, confusion, distress, or discomfort. The meaning is in the context of their use, but not only in the context: spectrograms of dog barks show that they are mixtures of the tones used in growls, in whimpers, and in yelps. By altering the prevalence of one tone over the others, the bark takes on a different character—a different gist. Early research into dogs’ vocalizations concluded that all dog barking was

attention-getting barking. In fact they do attract attention, assuming someone is c...

But recent studies have made more subtle discriminations between barks. While in some way all barks come down to some manner of “attention-getting,” one might as well say that we ...

Stranger barks

isolation barks

Play barks,

higher sounds are entreaties—to friends, for companionship—and as such are submissive requests, not warnings.