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

by Alexandra Horowitz

In this book I introduce you to the science of the dog. Scientists working in laboratories and in the field, studying working dogs and companion dogs, have gathered an impressive amount of information on the biology of dogs—their sensory abilities, their behavior—and on the psychology of dogs—their cognition.

When it comes to describing our potential physical and cognitive capacities, we are individuals first, and members of the human race second.

By contrast, with animals the order is reversed. Science considers animals as representatives of their species first, and as individuals second.

instance, many trainers use the analogy of dog-as-tame-wolf as informative in how we should see and treat dogs.

That is, no training program has been evaluated by comparing the performance of an experimental group that gets training and a control group whose life is identical except for the absence of the training program. People who come to trainers often share two unusual features: their dogs are less “obedient” than the average dog, and the owners are more motivated to change them than the average owner.

It is increasingly in vogue to speak not of pet ownership but pet guardianship, or pet companions.

usually call the dog “him,” as this is our gender-neutral term. The reputedly more neutral “it” is not an option, for anyone who has known a dog.

Umwelt: From the Dog’s Point of Nose

And by looking at our dogs from another perspective—from the perspective of the dog—we can see new things that don’t naturally occur to those of us encumbered with human brains. So the best way to begin understanding dogs is by forgetting what we think we know.

The first things to forget are anthropomorphisms.

For that purpose, anthropomorphisms fail to help us incorporate those animals into our homes, and have the smoothest, fullest relationships with them. This is not to say that we’re always wrong with our attributions: it might be true that our dog is sad, jealous, inquisitive, depressed—or desiring a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But we are almost certainly not justified in claiming, say, depression from the evidence before us: the mournful eyes, the loud sigh. Our projections onto animals are often impoverished—or entirely off the mark. We might judge an animal to be happy when we see an upturn of the corners of his mouth; such a “smile,” however, can be misleading. On dolphins, the smile is a fixed physiological feature, immutable like the creepily painted face of a clown. Among chimpanzees, a grin is a sign of fear or submission, the furthest thing from happiness.

It may seem a benign slip from sad eyes to depression, but anthropomorphisms often slide from benign to harmful. Some risk the welfare of the animals under consideration.

Both dogs and wolves have, clearly, their own coats permanently affixed.

There are occasions when wolves get pressed upon the back or head: it is when they are being dominated by another wolf, or scolded by an older wolf or relative.

This interpretation is borne out by most dogs’ behavior when getting put into a raincoat: they may freeze in place as they are “dominated.”

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.

All animals have their own umwelten—their own subjective realities,

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

Objects are defined by how you can act upon them: what von Uexküll calls their functional tones—as though an object’s use rings bell-like when you set eyes on it. A dog may be indifferent to chairs, but if trained to jump on one, he learns that the chair has a sitting tone:

cedar chips—overwhelming perfume to a dog but pleasant to us).

Dogs, on the other hand, never answer in the way we’d hope: by replying in sentences, well punctuated and with italicized emphases. Still, if we look, they have plainly answered.

functional use of mouth licking—“kisses” to you and me—the behavior has become a ritualized greeting. In other words, it no longer serves only the function of asking for food; now it is used to say hello. Dogs and wolves muzzle-lick simply to welcome another dog back home, and to get an olfactory report of where the homecomer has been or what he has done. Mothers not only clean their pups by licking, they often give a few darting licks when reuniting after even a brief time apart. A younger or timid dog may lick the muzzle, or muzzle vicinity, of a bigger, threatening dog to appease him.

Since these “greeting licks” are often accompanied by wagging tails, mouths opened playfully, and general excitement, it is not a stretch to say that the licks are a way to express happiness that you have returned.

Trying to understand a dog’s perspective is like being an anthropologist in a foreign land—one peopled entirely by dogs.

Ultimately they will serve as scientific building blocks for an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog: halfway to being honorary dogs ourselves. Belonging to the House

Dog training books often insist that “a dog is an animal”: this is true but is not the whole truth. The dog is an animal domesticated,

Dogs are animals who belong around houses. Domestication is a variation of the process of evolution, where the selector has been not just natural forces but human ones, eventually intent on bringing dogs inside their homes.

The silver fox in Siberia in the mid-twentieth century was a small, wild animal that had become popular with the fur trade. Kept in pens, bred for their choice fur coats, particularly long and soft, the fox was not tamed but was captive. What Belyaev made of them, with a much reduced recipe, were not “dogs,” but were surprisingly close to dogs.

Beginning with 130 foxes, he selectively chose and bred those that were the most “tame,” as he described it. What he really chose were those foxes that were the least fearful of or aggressive toward people.

Still others accepted the food and even wagged and whimpered at the experimenter, inviting rather than discouraging interaction. These were the foxes Belyaev selected.

These “tame” foxes were allowed to mate, and their young were tested the same way. The tamest of those were mated, when they were old enough; and their young;

After forty years, three-quarters of the population of foxes were of a class the researchers called “domesticated elite”:

He had created a domesticated fox.

forty genes now differ between Belyaev’s tame foxes and the wild silver

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.

HOW WOLVES BECAME DOGS

Wolves are dogs before the accoutrements. The coat of domestication makes dogs quite different creatures, however.

One idea is that the humans’ relatively fixed communities produced a large amount of waste, including food waste. Wolves, who will scavenge as well as hunt, would have quickly discovered this food source. 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.

Eventually, people would begin intentionally breeding those animals they particularly liked.

The wolves taken up by humans were probably less hunters than scavengers, less dominant and smaller

Most dog breeds we recognize today have only been developed in the last few hundred years.

They lost some of their tendency toward pack behavior: scavengers don’t need the proclivity to hunt together.

The change from wolf to dog was striking in its speed. Humans took nearly two million years to morph from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens, but the wolf leapfrogged into dogness in a fraction of the time. Domestication mirrors what nature, through natural selection, does over hundreds of generations: a kind of artificial selection that hurries up the clock.

The present-day wolf is not the ancestor of the dog; though wolves and dogs share a common ancestor.

Generally, dogs are slower to develop physically and behaviorally.

There are differences in social organization: dogs do not form true packs;

Though they don’t hunt cooperatively, they are cooperative: bird dogs and assistance dogs, for instance, learn to act in synchrony with their owners. For dogs, socialization among humans is natural; not so for wolves, who learn to avoid humans naturally. The dog is a member of a human social group; its natural environment, among people and other dogs.

Wolves seem to be better at solving certain kinds of physical puzzles.

As we’ll see, what dogs lack in physical skills, they make up for in people skills.