GIVE HIM SOMETHING TO DO

One of the best ways to see your dog's capacities and interests is simply to provide a lot of possible things to interact with. Wiggle a string in front of your dog's nose along the ground; stash a treat in a shoebox; or invest in the many creative dog toys that are marketed. A rich set of things to burrow into, nose, chew, bob, shake, pursue, or watch will engage your dog—and keep him from finding his own burrowable and chewable objects among your possessions. Outside, agility training or some simulacrum obstacle course is a well-defined way to engage and interest many energetic but driven dogs. But interest can be spiked simply by a weaving, smell-laden path, or the unexplored reaches of a field.

Dogs like both the familiar and the new. Happiness is novelty—new toys, new treats—in a safe, well-known place. It can be cure for boredom, too: the new requires attention and prompts activity. Hiding food to be searched for is one example: they must move around to explore the space, using nose and paw and mouth together. You need only watch the exuberance of an agility dog on a new course to see how good new is.

PLAY WITH HIM

In youth, but even throughout their lives, dogs are constantly learning about the world, like the developing child. Games that children find mind-bogglingly fun work with dogs too. Peekaboo, disappearing around the corner or under a blanket instead of behind hands, is especially fun when dogs are learning about invisible displacement, that objects continue to exist when you can no longer see them. Dogs are astute perceivers of associations, and you can play with that: ring the bell before dinner, Ivan Pavlov found, and the dogs anticipate dinner. You can connect bells—or horns, whistles, harmonica, gospel music, just about anything—not just with food, but with people arriving, or the time for a bath. Make a string of associations—and treat your dog's actions as adding to that string. Play imitation games, mirroring what your dog does: jumping on the bed, yelping, pawing the air. Note your dog's current skills, and try to stretch his ability. If he seems to know walk or ball, start using words that make more subtle distinctions: smell walk and blue ball; evening smell walk and blue squeaky ball. And at any age, play with your dog as a dog would. Choose your play signal—play-slap your hands on the ground, mimic panting close to his face, race away with looks back at him—and play. Treat your hands as he does his mouth and grab head, legs, tail, belly. Give him a good toy to hold on to, or be prepared for some nips. Watch as your own tail may begin to wag.

LOOK AGAIN

Much enjoyment can be had in noticing the invisible-visible features of your dog: the things we typically see through that are on display right in front of us. We now know how attentive dogs can be to people, and to our attention: notice the various and creative methods your dog uses to try to get your attention. Does he bark or bray? Stare at you wistfully? Sigh loudly? Walk back and forth between you and the door? Lay his head on your lap? Find the methods you like, and respond to them, letting the others fade away naturally.

Notice how your dog uses his eyes; the frenzy of his nose; how his ears fold back, prick up, and pivot toward a distant bark. Notice all the sounds he makes, and all the sounds he notices. Even the way the dog moves, an action so familiar as to make him recognizable at a distance, is transformed on closer examination: what gait does he use? A medium-sized dog may stride forward in the classic walk, the rear foot on one side of the body slowly chasing the front foot to the ground, the diagonal paws moving almost in sync. Hurrying a little, he trots, the diagonal legs now in tandem, occasionally finding himself with only one paw of four fully on the ground. Between the trot and the walk is the gait of the short-legged: typical of the bulldog, front-heavy with a wide stance, his rear end rolling as he walks. Leggy dogs do better at the gallop, the run of greyhounds, wherein the two rear feet precede the two front to the ground, the dog's body alternating between outstretched, and airborne and spring-loaded. In the gallop that fifth toelike digit partway up the front leg of most dogs—the dew claw—is used for stability and leverage; at a gallop's end you might find the usually clean dew claw with a dollop of mud under it. Toy-sized dogs half-bound, bringing their two hind legs forward at once but uncoupling their front footfalls. Other dogs pace, their left legs moving forward and falling at once, followed quickly by the right. Mesmerize yourself trying to keep track of the complexity of your dog's gait.

SPY ON HIM

To understand what your dog's day at home without you might be like, by all means videotape it. One of the distinct pleasures I got with Pumpernickel was seeing her act without me. Despite hours of videorecording, I rarely turned my camera on to her. It was only when she didn't expect me—when a friend had taken her out, and I arrived unannounced—that I got to see her carry on without me.

It was spectacular to see. You can re-create this kind of spectacle by setting up a videotape at your home when you leave for the day. I recommend this "eavesdropping" not because it reliably reveals spectacles—it does not—but because it allows you to see your dog's life without you there. You will more fully understand what his day might be like by watching a snippet of the day pass later, minute by minute.

What I saw in my eavesdropping was Pump's independence, freed not just from the need to check back with me, but from the kind of scrutiny to which I subjected all her behavior. She existed capably without me, for the hours that I milled about in the bookstore, had an extra-long run, went elsewhere for dinner followed by elsewhere still for drinks. This was at once reassuring and fully humbling. I am glad that she managed the day on her own, yet I am sometimes mystified that I ever left her alone at all.

Most dogs are simply alone all day with little to do, expected to wait it out until we return, and then act just as we want them to. And we are surprised and horrified when they actually do something in our absence! That dogs endure this (and much worse misinterpretation and neglect) is almost part of their constitution. We can, and do, get away with it. But dogs are individuals. It is for this reason that they require—and deserve—more attention to their umwelt, to their experience, to their point of view.

DON'T BATHE YOUR DOG EVERY DAY

Let them smell like a dog as long as you can stand it. Some dogs will even develop painful skin sores from regular bathing. And no dog wants to smell like a bathtub that has had a dog in it.

READ THE DOG'S TELLS

Like novice poker players, dogs reveal what could be called their "tells"—their intent, their "hand"—with every move, if you simply look. The configuration of the face, head, body, and tail are all meaningful. And there is more to it than whether the tail is wagging or the dog is barking: dogs can say more than one thing at a time. A barking dog whose tail fans the sky is not "about to attack" but is instead more curious, alert, uncertain—and interested. A furiously wagging low tail undermines the aggressiveness of a familiar dog snarling as he guards a ball.

Given the salience of eye contact to all canids, and the dog's use of gaze, you can get a lot of information about an unknown dog from his eyes. Constant eye contact can be threatening: do not approach a dog by gazing non-stop, which may be perceived as staring him down. If he is staring at you, you can deflect his gaze by turning away slightly, breaking eye contact. They do the same when they are tense: turning their head to the side, or distracting themselves with a yawn or a sudden interest in a smell on the ground. If you think you are the recipient of a threatening stare, you can confirm it by looking for its accompaniment: hackles up, ears up, tail up, body frozen. A stare with a tongue darting licks into the air is more adoring than aggressive.

PET FRIENDLY

Though they nearly all look pettable, not every dog likes to be petted. Attending to that is not only polite, it is sometimes imperative: a fearful or sick dog might respond to touch with aggression. There are great individual differences in dogs' sensitivity to petting, and their current interest can be changed by their state of health, their state of happiness, and past experience. For most dogs, the right touch by a human is a calming, bonding experience. Light touch is irritating or exciting; a firm hand is relaxing; too firm a hand is probably oppressive. They (and you) can be physically calmed by steady, continuous strokes from the head to rump, or by capable deep muscle massage. Watch your dog's reaction and find his preferred touch zones. And let him touch you back.

GET A MUTT

If you don't have a dog yet, or are getting another dog, I have just the breed for you: the breedless dog, the mutt. The myth that a shelter dog, especially a mixed-breed dog, will be less good or less reliable than a purebred dog is not just wrong, it is entirely backward: mixed breeds are healthier, less anxious, and live longer than purebreds. When you buy a bred dog, you are simply not buying a fixed object, guaranteed to act in certain ways—regardless of what the breeder tells you. What you might get is a dog with an overriding fixation, born of breeding for a task that he will likely never do while living with you (who nonetheless will still be wonderfully doggy). Mutts, on the other hand, with the bred characteristics diluted, wind up having lots of latent abilities and less mania.

ANTHROPOMORPHIZE WITH UMWELT IN MIND

On walks Pump was never satisfied with being on one side of the path or the other: she weaved back and forth capriciously. Holding her on leash I was constantly readjusting my hand on the thing. Sometimes I'd insist she stay to one side of me, and she sighed at me while we both glanced knowingly at the good un-smelled spots on the other side.

Even with a scientific take on the dog, we find ourselves using anthropomorphic words. Our dogs—my dog—make friends, feel guilty, have fun, get jealous; understand what we mean, think about things, know better; are sad, are happy, are scared; want, love, hope.

This way of talking is easy, and sometimes useful, but it is also part of a bigger, more exceptionable phenomenon. As we recast every moment of a dog's life in human terms, we have begun to completely lose touch with the animal in them. It is no longer the rare dog who is shampooed, clothed in garments, and feted on his birthday. That may seem benign, but it is also part of a de-animalizing of dogs that is somewhat radical. We are rarely present for their births, and many people will choose not to be present for their own dogs' deaths. We eliminate sex for the most part: we neuter dogs and we discourage the slightest lascivious thrusts of the hips. They are fed sanitized food, in bowls; they are largely restricted to a leash-length distance from our heels. In cities, their excrement is bundled up and thrown away. (Happily, we have not yet taught them to use the toilet … convenient though we know that would be.) Breed types are described like products, with specified features. It seems as though we are trying to get rid of the animal part of the dog.

If we assume that we have reduced the animal factor to zero, we are in for some unhappy surprises. Dogs do not always behave just as we think they should. They may sit, lie down, and roll over—but then will revert magnificently. They suddenly squat and urinate in the house, bite your hand, sniff your crotch, jump on a stranger, eat something gnarly in the grass, don't come when you call them, roughly tackle a much smaller dog. In this way, our frustrations with dogs often arise from our extreme anthropomorphizing, which neglects the very animalness of dogs. A complex animal cannot be explained simply.

The alternative to anthropomorphizing is not simply treating animals as precisely unhuman. We now have the tools to take a more measured look at their behavior: with their umwelt and their perceptual and cognitive abilities in mind. Nor need we take a dispassionate stance toward animals. Scientists anthropomorphize … at home. They name their pets, and see love in a named-dog's upward-turned gaze. In research, names are verboten: while they might help tell animals apart, they are not benign. Naming a wild animal "colors one's thinking about it forever afterwards," a preeminent field biologist noted. There are obvious observational biases that are introduced when you name the subject of your observations. Jane Goodall famously violated this maxim, and "Graybeard" became known to the world. But "Graybeard" for me connotes a wise, old man: as a result, I may be more likely to perceive his behavior as indicative of his wisdom than see it as foolishness. Instead, to distinguish individual animals, most ethologists use identifying markings—leg bands, tags, or marking fur or feathers with dye—or look for identity in habitual behavior, social organization, or natural physical features.*

To name a dog is to begin to make him personal—and thus an anthropomorphizable creature. But we must. To name a dog is to assert an interest in understanding the nature of the dog; to not name the dog seems the pinnacle of disinterest. Dogs named Dog make me sad: the dog is already defined out of being a player in the owner's life. Dog has no name of his own; he is only a taxonomic subspecies. He will never be treated as an individual. What one is doing when naming a dog is starting him on the personality that he is to grow into. When trying out names for our dog, calling words out at her—"Bean!" "Bella!" "Blue!"—to see if any prompted a reaction, I felt that I was searching for "her name": the name that was already hers. With it, the bond between human and animal—wrought of understanding, not projection—could begin to form.

Go look at your dog. Go to him! Imagine his umwelt—and let him change your own.

Postscript: Me and My Dog

I sometimes find deep recognition in photos of her in which her eyes were not distinguishable from the darkness of her coat. It represents to me the way in which there was always something mysterious about her existence to me: what it was like to be Pump. She never laid it out there in the open. She had a privacy about her. I feel privileged that I was let into that private realm.

Pumpernickel wagged into my life in August 1990. We spent nearly every day together, until the day of her last breaths in November 2006. I still spend every one of my days with her.

Pump was a total surprise. I didn't expect to be changed constitutionally by a dog. But it quickly became apparent that the description "a dog" didn't capture the astounding abundance of facets to her, the depth of her experience, and the possibilities of a lifetime knowing her. Before long, I felt pleasure simply at her company and pride at watching her act. She was spirited, patient, willful, and disarming all in one great furry bundle. She was sure of her opinions (she had no truck with yipping dogs) and yet open to new things (as the occasional fostered cat—despite each's unwavering disinterest). She was effusive; she was responsive; she was great fun.

What Pump was not was a subject in my research (at least, not intentionally). Still, I brought her with me when going to watch dogs. She was often my passkey into dog parks, and into dog circles: without a dog companion, a person may be treated suspiciously by dogs and owners alike. As a result, she wanders through many of my videos of bouts of play—through and out, as my video camera was trained on my unwitting subjects, not on my Pump. Now I regret my camera's unemotional oversight of her. Though I captured the social interactions I wanted, and was eventually, after much reviewing and analysis of the behaviors of the interactants, able to discover some surprising abilities of dogs, I missed some moments of my dog.

Every dog owner would agree with me, I suspect, about the specialness of her own dog. Reason argues that everyone must be wrong: by definition, not every dog can be the special dog—else special becomes ordinary. But it is reason that is wrong: what is special is the life story that each dog owner creates with and knows about his own dog. I am not exempt from feeling that, even from a scientific vantage. Behavioral scientific approaches to dogs, far from displacing this story, simply build on the singular understanding of the dog owner—on the expertise that each dog owner has about her dog.

When Pump was nearly at the end of her life, undeniably old, she lost weight, her muzzle grayed, she slowed sometimes to a stop on walks. I saw her frustrations, her resignations, her impulses pursued or abandoned; I saw her considerations, her control, her calm. But when I looked at her face, and into her eyes, she was a puppy again. I saw glimpses of that unnamed dog who so cooperatively let us plop a too-big collar around her neck and walk her out of the shelter and thirty blocks home. And then thousands of miles since.

After knowing Pump, and losing Pump, I met Finnegan. I already cannot imagine not knowing this new character: this leaner on legs, this stealer of balls, this warmer of laps. He is incredibly unlike Pumpernickel. Yet what she taught me has made every moment with Finnegan infinitely richer.

She lifted her head and turned toward me, her head pulsing slightly with her breathing. Her nose was dark and wet, her eyes calm. She began licking, full long licks of her front legs, of the floor. The tags of her collar clonked on the wood. Her ears lay flat, curling up a little at the bottom like a felted leaf, dried in the sun. Those days her front toes were a little splayed, her paws turned clawlike as though in preparation to pounce. She did not pounce. She yawned. It was a long, lazy afternoon yawn, her tongue languidly examining the air. She settled her head down between her legs, exhaled a kind of har-ummmp, and closed her eyes.

Notes and Sources

In addition to the sources listed by chapter below, I refer to the following books frequently. Each is a scholarly yet accessible approach to dog behavior, cognition, or training; I recommend them all for anyone interested in further details of dog science.

Lindsay, S. R. 2000, 2001, 2005. Handbook of applied dog behavior and training (3 volumes). Ames, Iowa: Blackwell Publishing.

McGreevy, P., and R. A. Boakes. 2007. Carrots and sticks: Principles of animal training. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miklósi, Á. 2007. Dog behavior, evolution, and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Serpell, J., ed. 1995. The domestic dog: Its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PRELUDE

on determining species brain differences:

Rogers, L. 2004. Increasing the brain's capacity: Neocortex, new neurons, and hemispheric specialization. In L. J. Rogers, and G. Kaplan, eds. Comparative vertebrate cognition: Are primates superior to non-primates? (pp. 289–324). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

UMWELT

on the dolphin smile:

Bearzi, M., and C. B. Stanford. 2008. Beautiful minds: The parallel lives of Great Apes and dolphins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

on the fear grin in chimpanzees:

Chadwick-Jones, J. 2000. Developing a social psychology of monkeys and apes. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.

on eyebrow-raising in monkeys:

Kyes, R. C., and D. K. Candland. 1987. Baboon (Papio hamadryas) visual preferences for regions of the face. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 4, 345–348.

de Waal, F. B. M., M. Dindo, C. A. Freeman, and M. J. Hall. 2005. The monkey in the mirror: Hardly a stranger. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 11140–11147.

on chicken preferences:

Febrer, K., T. A. Jones, C. A. Donnelly, and M. S. Dawkins. 2006. Forced to crowd or choosing to cluster? Spatial distribution indicates social attraction in broiler chickens. Animal Behaviour, 72, 1291–1300.

on muzzle biting and standing-over in wolves:

Fox, M. W. 1971. Behaviour of wolves, dogs and related canids. New York: Harper & Row.

on shock experiments:

Seligman, M. E. P., S. F. Maier, and J. H. Geer. 1965. Alleviation of learned helplessness in the dog. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 73, 256–262.

on umwelt, ticks, and functional tones:

von Uexküll, J. 1957/1934. A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. In C. H. Schiller, ed. Instinctive behavior: The development of a modern concept (pp. 5–80). New York: International Universities Press.

on pessimistic rats:

Harding, E. J., E. S. Paul, and M. Mendl. 2004. Cognitive bias and affective state. Nature, 427, 312.

on dog kisses:

Fox, 1971.

on the dog's sense of taste:

Lindemann, B. 1996. Taste reception. Physiological Reviews, 76, 719–766. Serpell, 1995.

"dogs have … a striking way of exhibiting their affection …"

Darwin, C. 1872/1965. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 118.

BELONGING TO THE HOUSE

on the variety of canids:

Macdonald, D. W., and C. Sillero-Zubiri. 2004. The biology and conservation of wild canids. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

on raisin toxicity:

McKnight, K. Feb. 2005. Toxicology brief: Grape and raisin toxicity in dogs. Veterinary Technician, 26, 135–136.

etymology of "domesticated":

I drew this wording from Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary: domestical and domestick are both partially defined "belonging to the house; not relating to things publick."

on the fox domestication experiments:

Belyaev, D. K. 1979. Destabilizing selection as a factor in domestication. Journal of Heredity, 70, 301–308.

Trut, L. N. 1999. Early canid domestication: The farm-fox experiment. American Scientist, 87, 160–169.

on wolf behavior and anatomy:

Mech, D. L., and L. Boitani. 2003. Wolves: Behavior, ecology, and conservation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

on domestication:

There are many current theories of dog domestication. The one presented here is corroborated by both the recent mtDNA findings, and by a better understanding of the genetics of selection. It is elaborated in R. Coppinger and L. Coppinger. 2001. Dogs: A startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution. New York: Scribner.

Clutton-Brock, J. 1999. A natural history of domesticated mammals, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

on earliest date of domestication:

Ostrander, E. A., U. Giger, and K. Lindblad-Toh, eds. 2006. The dog and its genome. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Vilà, C., P. Savolainen, J. E. Maldonado, I. R. Amorim, J. E. Rice, R. L. Honeycutt, K. A. Crandall, J. Lundeberg, and R. K. Wayne. 1997. Multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dog. Science, 276, 1687–1689.

on development:

Mech and Boitani, 2003.

Scott, J. P., and J. L. Fuller. 1965. Genetics and the social behaviour of the dog. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

on poodle/husky difference in development:

Feddersen-Petersen, D., in Miklósi, 2007.

on wolf rope task:

Miklósi, Á., E. Kubinyi, J. Topál, M. Gácsi, Zs. Virányi, and V. Csányi. 2003. A simple reason for a big difference: Wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do. Current Biology, 13, 763–766.

on eye contact:

Fox, 1971.

Serpell, J. 1996. In the company of animals: A study of human-animal relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

on breeds:

Garber, M. 1996. Dog love. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Ostrander et al., 2006.

on leg length-chest depth ratios:

Brown, C. M. 1986. Dog locomotion and gait analysis. Wheat Ridge, CO: Hoflin Publishing Ltd.

on the Ibizan and Pharaoh:

Parker, H. G, L. V. Kim, N. B. Sutter, S. Carlson, T. D. Lorentzen, T. B. Malek, G. S. Johnson, H. B. DeFrance, E. A. Ostrander, and L. Kruglyak. 2004. Genetic structure of the purebred domestic dog. Science, 304, 1160–1164.

on breed specs:

Crowley, J., and B. Adelman, eds. 1998. The complete dog book, 19th edition. Publication of the American Kennel Club. New York: Howell Book House.

on the dog genome:

Kirkness, E. F., et al. 2003. The dog genome: Survey sequencing and comparative analysis. Science, 301, 1898–1903.

Lindblad-Toh, K., et al. 2005. Genome sequence, comparative analysis and haplotype structure of the domestic dog. Nature, 438, 803–819.

Ostrander et al., 2006.

Parker et al., 2004.

on aggressive breeds:

Duffy, D. L., Y. Hsu, and J. A. Serpell. 2008. Breed differences in canine aggression. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 114, 441–460.

on sheepdog behavior:

Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001.

on packs:

Mech, L. D. 1999. Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77, 1196–1203.

Mech and Boitani, 2003, especially L. D. Mech, and L. Boitani. "Wolf social ecology" (pp. 1–34) and Packard, J. M. "Wolf behavior: Reproductive, social, and intelligent" (pp. 35–65).

on dog and wolf tracks:

Miller, D. 1981. Track Finder. Rochester, NY: Nature Study Guild Publishers.

on feral dogs:

Beck, A. M. 2002. The ecology of stray dogs: A study of free-ranging urban animals. West Lafayette, IN: NotaBell Books.

on Italian free-ranging dogs:

Cafazzo, S., P. Valsecchi, C. Fantini, and E. Natoli. 2008. Social dynamics of a group of free-ranging domestic dogs living in a suburban environment. Paper presented at Canine Science Forum, Budapest, Hungary.

on the wolf socialization project:

Kubinyi, E., Zs. Virányi, and Á Miklósi. 2007. Comparative social cognition: From wolf and dog to humans. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2, 26–46. "blooming, buzzing confusion":

William James used these words to describe the lack of organization of the information that an infant first receives through her inchoate senses: James, W. 1890. Principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt & Co., p. 488.

"white and shapeless lump of flesh …":

Pliny the Elder. Natural history (tr. H. Rackham, 1963), Volume 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Book 8(54).

SNIFF

generally interesting readings on smell:

Drobnick, J., ed. 2006. The smell culture reader. New York: Berg.

Sacks, O. 1990. "The dog beneath the skin." In The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales (pp. 156–160). New York: HarperPerennial.

on sniffing:

Settles, G. S., D. A. Kester, and L. J. Dodson-Dreibelbis. 2003. The external aerodynamics of canine olfaction. In F. G. Barth, J. A. C. Humphrey, and T. W. Secomb, eds. Sensors and sensing in biology and engineering (pp. 323–355). New York: SpringerWein.

on the anatomy and sensitivity of the nose:

Harrington, F. H., and C. S. Asa. 2003. Wolf communication. In D. Mech, and L. Boitani, eds. Wolves: Behavior, ecology and conservation (pp. 66–103). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lindsay, 2000.

Serpell, 1995.

Wright, R. H. 1982. The sense of smell. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

on the vomeronasal organ:

Adams, D. R., and M. D. Wiekamp. 1984. The canine vomeronasal organ. Journal of Anatomy, 138, 771–787.

Sommerville, B. A., and D. M. Broom. 1998. Olfactory awareness. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 57, 269–286.

Watson, L. 2000. Jacobson's organ and the remarkable nature of smell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

on human pheromone detection:

Jacob, S., and M. K. McClintock. 2000. Psychological state and mood effects of steroidal chemosignals in women and men. Hormones and Behavior, 37, 57–78.

McClintock, M. K. 1971. Menstrual synchrony and suppression. Nature, 229, 244–245.

on moist noses:

Mason, R. T., M. P. LeMaster, and D. Muller-Schwarze. 2005. Chemical signals in vertebrates, Volume 10. New York: Springer.

on smelling us:

Lindsay, 2000.

on distinguishing twins by scent:

Hepper, P. G. 1988. The discrimination of human odor by the dog. Perception, 17, 549–554.

on bloodhounds:

Lindsay, 2000.

Sommerville and Broom, 1998. Watson, 2000.

on using footsteps to detect trail:

Hepper, P. G, and D. L. Wells. 2005. How many footsteps do dogs need to determine the direction of an odour trail? Chemical Senses, 30, 291–298.

Syrotuck, W. G. 1972. Scent and the scenting dog. Mechanicsburg, PA: Barkleigh Productions.

on the smell of tuberculosis:

Wright, 1982.

on the smell of disease:

Drobnick, 2006. Syrotuck, 1972.

on cancer detection:

a partial list of the many studies:

McCulloch, M., T. Jezierski, M. Broffman, A. Hubbard, K. Turner, and T. Janecki. 2006. Diagnostic accuracy of canine scent detection in early-and late-stage lung and breast cancers. Integrative Cancer Therapies, 5,30–39.

Williams, H., and A. Pembroke. 1989. Sniffer dogs in the melanoma clinic? Lancet, 1, 734.

Willis, C. M., S. M. Church, C. M. Guest, W. A. Cook, N. McCarthy, A. J. Bransbury, M. R. T. Church, and J. C. T. Church. 2004. Olfactory detection of bladder cancer by dogs: Proof of principle study. British Medical Journal, 329, 712–716.

on epileptic seizure detection:

Dalziel, D. J., B. M. Uthman, S. P. McGorray, and R. L. Reep. 2003. Seizure-alert dogs: A review and preliminary study. Seizure, 12, 115–120.

Doherty, M. J., and A. M. Haltiner. 2007. Wag the dog: Skepticism on seizure alert canines. Neurology, 68, 309.

Kirton, A., E. Wirrell, J. Zhang, and L. Hamiwka. 2004. Seizure-alerting and -response behaviors in dogs living with epileptic children. Neurology, 62, 2303–2305.

on urine marking:

Lindsay, 2005.

Lorenz, K. 1954. Man meets dog. London: Methuen.

on bladders' single use:

Sapolsky, R. M. 2004. Why zebras don't get ulcers. New York: Henry Holt & Company.

on anal sacs:

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

Natynczuk, S., J. W. S. Bradshaw, and D. W. Macdonald. 1989. Chemical constituents of the anal sacs of domestic dogs. Biochemical Systematics and Ecology, 17, 83–87.

on anal sacs and vets:

McGreevy, P. (personal communication).

on scratching the ground after marking:

Bekoff, M. 1979. Ground scratching by male domestic dogs: A composite signal. Journal of Mammalogy, 60, 847–848.

on antibiotics and smell:

Attributed to John Bradshaw by Coghlan, A. September 23, 2006. Animal welfare: See things from their perspective. NewScientist.com.

on the Manhattan grid:

Margolies, E. 2006. Vagueness gridlocked: A map of the smells of New York. In J. Drobnick, ed., The smell culture reader (pp. 107–117). New York: Berg.

on brambish and brunky:

These words were coined by Calvin and Hobbes artist Bill Watterson, and put in the mouth of his cartoon tiger Hobbes.

"brilliant smell of water …":

Chesterton, G. K. 2004. "The song of the quoodle," in The collected works of G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 556. (In this same poem he commented on the relative "noselessness" of man.)

MUTE

"blank bewilderment":

Woolf, V. 1933. Flush: A biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 44.

"uncommunicating muteness":

Lamb, C. 1915. Essays of Elia. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., p. 53.

on the dog's hearing range:

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

on the "Mosquito" teenager repellent:

Vitello, P. June 12, 2006. "A ring tone meant to fall on deaf ears." The New York Times.

on alarm clocks:

Bodanis, D. 1986. The secret house: 24 hours in the strange and unexpected world in which we spend our nights and days. New York: Simon & Schuster.

on growls:

Faragó, T., F. Range, Zs. Virányi, and P. Pongrácz. 2008. The bone is mine! Context-specific vocalisation in dogs. Paper presented at Canine Science Forum, Budapest, Hungary.

on dog and wolf sounds:

Fox, 1971.

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

on laughs:

Simonet, O., M. Murphy, and A. Lance. 2001. Laughing dog: Vocalizations of domestic dogs during play encounters. Animal Behavior Society conference, Corvallis, OR.

on distinguishing high-pitched sounds:

McConnell, P. B. 1990. Acoustic structure and receiver response in domestic dogs, Canis familiaris. Animal Behaviour, 39, 897–904.

on Rico and other vocabularians:

Kaminski, J. 2008. Dogs' understanding of human forms of communication. Paper presented at the Canine Science Forum, Budapest, Hungary.

Kaminski, J., J. Call, and J. Fischer. 2004. Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for "fast mapping." Science, 304, 1682–1683.

on conversational maxims:

Grice, P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, eds., Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.

on whimpers, barks, and other vocalizations:

Bradshaw, J. W. S., and H. M. R. Nott. 1995. Social and communication behaviour of companion dogs. In J. Serpell, ed., The domestic dog: Its evolution, behaviour, and interactions with people (pp. 115–130). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, J. A., and M. W. Fox. 1976. Vocalizations in wild canids and possible effects of domestication. Behavioural Processes, 1, 77–92.

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

Tembrock, G. 1976. Canid vocalizations. Behavioural Processes, 1, 57–75.

on characteristics and kinds of barks:

Molnár, C., P. Pongrácz, A. Dóka, and Á. Miklósi. 2006. Can humans discriminate between dogs on the base of the acoustic parameters of barks? Behavioural Processes, 73, 76–83.

Yin, S., and B. McCowan. 2004. Barking in domestic dogs: Context specificity and individual identification. Animal Behaviour, 68, 343–355.

on dog bark decibels:

Moffat et al. 2003. Effectiveness and comparison of citronella and scentless spray bark collars for the control of barking in a veterinary hospital setting. Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association, 39, 343–348.

"But man himself cannot express love and humility …":

Darwin, C. 1872/1965, p. 10.

on hackles:

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

on antithesis:

Darwin, 1872/1965.

on tails:

Bradshaw and Nott, 1995.

Harrington and Asa, 2003.

Schenkel, R. 1947. Expression studies of wolves. Behaviour, 1, 81–129.

on posture:

Fox, 1971.

Goodwin, D., J. W. S. Bradshaw, and S. M. Wickens. 1997. Paedomorphosis affects agonistic visual signals of domestic dogs. Animal Behaviour, 53, 297–304.

on intentional communication:

Kaminski, J. 2008.

more on urine marking:

Bekoff, M. 1979. Scent-marking by free ranging domestic dogs. Olfactory and visual components. Biology of Behaviour, 4, 123–139.

Bradshaw and Nott, 1995.

Pal, S. K. 2003. Urine marking by free-ranging dogs (Canis familiaris) in relation to sex, season, place and posture. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 80, 45–59.

DOG-EYED

on the visual range of canids:

Harrington and Asa, 2003. Miklósi, 2007.

on distribution of photoreceptors in retinae:

McGreevy, P., T. D. Grassia, and A. M. Harmanb. 2004. A strong correlation exists between the distribution of retinal ganglion cells and nose length in the dog. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 63, 13–22.

Neitz, J., T. Geist, and G. H. Jacobs. 1989. Color vision in the dog. Visual Neuroscience, 3, 119–25.

on arctic wolves:

Packard, J. 2008. Man meets wolf: Ethological perspectives. Paper presented at Canine Science Forum, Budapest, Hungary.

on Frisbee-catching:

Shaffer, D. M., S. M. Krauchunas, M. Eddy, and M. K. McBeath. 2004. How dogs navigate to catch frisbees. Psychological Science, 15, 437–441.

on dogs' recognition of their owners' faces:

Adachi, I., H. Kuwahata, and K. Fujita. 2007. Dogs recall their owner's face upon hearing the owner's voice. Animal Cognition, 10, 17–21.

on cows noticing visual details:

Grandin, T., and C. Johnson. 2006. Animals in translation: Using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

SEEN BY A DOG

on imprinting in geese:

Lorenz, K. 1981. The foundations of ethology. New York: Springer-Verlag.

on newborn and infant humans' visual abilities and development:

The information about infants' visual abilities comes from a century of research. A nice summary is given in Smith, P. K., H. Cowie, and M. Blades. 2003. Understanding children's development. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

on infant tongue protrusion:

Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198, 75–78. (They not only stuck out their tongues at day-or even hour-old infants. They also pursed their lips and opened their mouths wide as if in surprise. Even newborns repeated these expressions back at them—or tried to: lip-pursing is probably not a motor ability voluntarily available to the newly born.)

on Kanzi:

Savage-Rumbaugh, S., and R. Lewin. 1996. Kanzi: The ape at the brink of the human mind. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

on Alex:

Pepperberg, I. M. 1999. The Alex studies: Cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

on the dog-keyboard:

Rossi, A., and C. Ades. 2008. A dog at the keyboard: Using arbitrary signs to communicate requests. Animal Cognition, 11, 329–338.

on gaze avoidance:

Bradshaw and Nott, 1995.

on dogs looking at faces:

Miklósi et al., 2003.

on breeders preferring dark eyes:

Serpell, 1996.

on gull fixed action pattern:

Tinbergen, N. 1953. The herring-gull's world. London: Collins.

on gaze in human conversation:

Argyle, M., and J. Dean. 1965. Eye contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 28, 289–304.

Vertegaal, R., R. Slagter, G. C. Van der Veer, and A. Nijholt. 2001. Eye gaze patterns in conversations: There is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seattle, WA.

on following a pointing gesture:

Soproni, K., Á. Miklósi, J. Topál, and V. Csányi. 2002. Dogs' responsiveness to human pointing gestures. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 116, 27–34.

on gaze-following:

Agnetta, B., B. Hare, and M. Tomasello. 2000. Cues to food location that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) of different ages do and do not use. Animal Cognition, 3, 107–112.

on attention-getting:

Horowitz, A. 2009. Attention to attention in domestic dog (Canis familiaris) dyadic play. Animal Cognition, 12, 107–118.

on sonorous mouth-licking:

Gaunet, F. 2008. How do guide dogs of blind owners and pet dogs of sighted owners (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for food? Animal Cognition, 11, 475–483.

on showing:

Hare, B., J. Call, and M. Tomasello. 1998. Communication of food location between human and dog (Canis familiaris). Evolution of Communication, 2, 137–159.

Miklósi, Á., R. Polgardi, J. Topál, and V. Csányi. 2000. Intentional behaviour in dog-human communication: An experimental analysis of "showing" behaviour in the dog. Animal Cognition, 3, 159–166.

on retrieving games:

Gácsi, M., Á. Miklósi, O. Varga, J. Topál, and V. Csányi. 2004. Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human's attention. Animal Cognition, 7, 144–153.

on manipulating attention:

Call, J., J. Brauer, J. Kaminski, and M. Tomasello. 2003. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117, 257–263.

Schwab, C., and L. Huber. 2006. Obey or not obey? Dogs (Canis familiaris) behave differently in response to attentional states of their owners. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 169–175.

on begging experiments:

Cooper, J. J., C. Ashton, S. Bishop, R. West, D. S. Mills, and R. J. Young. 2003. Clever hounds: Social cognition in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris). Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 81, 229–244.

on attending to a video projection:

Pongrácz, P., Á. Miklósi, A. Doka, and V. Csányi. 2003. Successful application of video-projected human images for signalling to dogs. Ethology, 109, 809–821.

on why commands relayed by speakers don't work:

Virányi, Zs., J. Topál, M. Gácsi, Á. Miklósi, and V. Csányi. 2004. Dogs can recognize the behavioural cues of the attentional focus in humans. Behavioural Processes, 66, 161–172.

CANINE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

"I am I …":

Stein, G. 1937. Everybody's Autobiography. New York: Random House, p. 64.

on autistic people using dogs to read others:

Sacks, O. 1995. An anthropologist on Mars. New York: Knopf.

on Clever Hans:

Sebeok, T. A., and R. Rosenthal, eds. 1981. The Clever Hans phenomenon: Communication with horses, whales, apes, and people. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

on dogs reading trainers' body movements:

Wright, 1982.

on dogs anticipating us on walks:

Kubinyi, E., Á. Miklósi, J. Topál, and V. Csányi. 2003. Social mimetic behaviour and social anticipation in dogs: Preliminary results. Animal Cognition, 6, 57–63.

on distinguishing threatening and friendly strangers:

Vas, J., J. Topál, M. Gácsi, Á. Miklósi, and V. Csányi. 2005. A friend or an enemy? Dogs' reaction to an unfamiliar person showing behavioural cues of threat and friendliness at different times. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 94, 99–115.

NOBLE MIND

on neophilia:

Kaulfuss, P., and D. S. Mills. 2008. Neophilia in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and its implication for studies of dog cognition. Animal Cognition, 11, 553–556.

on physical cognition:

Miklósi, 2007.

on string-pulling:

Osthaus, B., S. E. G. Lea, and A. M. Slater. 2005. Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) fail to show understanding of means-end connections in a string-pulling task. Animal Cognition, 8, 37–47.

on use of social cues:

Erdohegyi, A., J. Topál, Zs. Virányi, and Á. Miklósi. 2007. Dog-logic: Inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use. Animal Behavior, 74, 725–737.

on dogs looking to humans to solve task:

Miklósi et al., 2003.

on milk-bottle tits:

Fisher, J., and R. A. Hinde. 1949. The opening of milk bottles by birds. British Birds, 42, 347–357.

on chickadees experiment:

Sherry, D. F., and B. G. Galef Jr. 1990. Social learning without imitation: More about milk bottle opening by birds. Animal Behaviour, 40, 987–989.

on detour learning:

Pongrácz, P., Á. Miklósi, K. Timar-Geng, and V. Csányi. 2004. Verbal attention getting as a key factor in social learning between dog (Canis familiaris) and human. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 118, 375–383.

on infant imitation:

Gergely, G., H. Bekkering, and I. Király. 2002. Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Nature, 415, 755.

Whiten, A., D. M. Custance, J-C. Gomez, P. Teixidor, and K. A. Bard. 1996. Imitative learning of artificial fruit processing in children (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 110, 3–14.

on dog imitation:

Range, F., Zs. Virányi, and L. Huber. 2007. Selective imitation in domestic dogs. Current Biology, 17, 868–872.

on "do it" task:

Topál, J., R. W. Byrne, Á. Miklósi, and V. Csányi. 2006. Reproducing human actions and action sequences: "Do as I Do!" in a dog. Animal Cognition, 9, 355–367.

on theory of mind:

Premack, D., and G. Woodruff. 1978. Does a chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 515–526.

on false belief test:

Wimmer, H., and J. Perner. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.

on Philip, the dog who informs about the keys:

Topál, J., A. Erdõhegyi, R. Mányik, and Á. Miklósi. 2006. Mindreading in a dog: An adaptation of a primate "mental attribution" study. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 6, 365–379.

on the function of play:

Bekoff, M., and J. Byers, eds. 1998. Animal play: Evolutionary, comparative, and ecological perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fagen, R. 1981. Animal play behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

on play-fighting not improving later fighting skills:

Martin, P., and T. M. Caro. 1985. On the functions of play and its role in behavioral development. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 15, 59–103.

more on dogs' use of attention, attention-getters, and communication in play:

Horowitz, 2009.

on play signals:

Bekoff, M. 1972. The development of social interaction, play, and meta-communication in mammals: An ethological perspective. Quarterly Review of Biology, 47, 412–434.

Bekoff, M. 1995. Play signals as punctuation: The structure of social play in canids. Behaviour, 132, 419–429.

Horowitz, 2009.

on the (un)fairness experiment:

Range, F., L. Horn, Zs. Virányi, and L. Huber. 2009. The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 340–345.

INSIDE OF A DOG

on counting:

West, R. E., and R. J. Young. 2002. Do domestic dogs show any evidence of being able to count? Animal Cognition, 5, 183–186.

on disjunctive syllogisms:

This is the stoic philosopher Chrysippos of Soloi, according to Bringmann, W., and J. Abresch. 1997. Clever Hans: Fact or fiction? In W. G. Bringmann et al., eds., A pictorial history of psychology (pp. 77–82). Chicago: Quintessence.

one of the original scientific attempts to try to operationalize anthropomorphisms:

Hebb, D. O. 1946. Emotion in man and animal: An analysis of the intuitive process of recognition. Psychological Review, 53, 88–106.

on the suprachiasmatic nucleus:

A nice review of some recent work: Herzog, E. D., and L. J. Muglia. 2006. You are when you eat. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 300–302.

on changes in sleep with age:

Takeuchi, T., and E. Harada. 2002. Age-related changes in sleep-wake rhythm in dog. Behavioural Brain Research, 136, 193–199.

on the movement of smells in a room:

Bodanis, 1986. Wright, 1982.

on bees' sense of time:

Boisvert, M. J., and D. F. Sherry. 2006. Interval timing by an invertebrate, the bumble bee Bombus impatiens. Current Biology, 16, 1636–1640.

"boredom is rarely discussed in the non-human scientific literature":

But see Wemelsfelder, F. 2005. Animal Boredom: Understanding the tedium of confined lives. In F. D. McMillan, ed., Mental health and well-being in animals (pp. 79–91). Ames, Iowa: Blackwell Publishing.

"man is the only animal who can be bored":

Fromm, E. 1947. Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York: Rinehart, p. 40.

on the mirror test:

Gallup, G. G. Jr. 1970. Chimpanzees: Self-recognition. Science, 167, 86–87. Plotnik, J. M., F. B. M. de Waal, and D. Reiss. 2006. Self-recognition in an

Asian elephant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 103,17053–17057.

Reiss, D., and L. Marino. 2001. Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 98, 5937–3942.

on sheepdogs' knowing they are not sheep:

Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001.

Snoopy quote:

Gesner, C. 1967. You're a good man, Charlie Brown: Based on the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. New York: Random House.

on scrub-jay caching:

Raby, C. R., D. M. Alexis, A. Dickinson, and N. S. Clayton. 2007. Planning for the future by western scrub-jays. Nature, 445, 919–921.

on ontogenetic ritualization:

Tomasello, M., and J. Call. 1997. Primate cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

on medieval punishment of dogs:

Evans, E. P. 1906/2000. The criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals. Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

on owners thinking dogs know right and wrong:

Pongrácz, P., Á. Miklósi, and V. Csányi. 2001. Owners' beliefs on the ability of their pet dogs to understand human verbal communication: A case of social understanding. Cahiers de psychologie, 20, 87–107.

on teddy-bear guard-dog:

Kennedy, M. August 3, 2006. "Guard dog mauls Elvis's teddy in rampage." The Guardian.

on guilt experiments:

Horowitz, A. 2009. Disambiguating the "guilty look": Salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour. Behavioural Processes, 81, 447–452.

Vollmer, P. J. 1977. Do mischievous dogs reveal their "guilt"? Veterinary Medicine, Small Animal Clinician, 72, 1002–1005.

on the blind Labrador Norman:

Goodall, J., and M. Bekoff. 2002. The ten trusts: What we must do to care for the animals we love. New York: HarperCollins.

on emergency experiment:

Macpherson, K., and W. A. Roberts. 2006. Do dogs (Canis familiaris) seek help in an emergency? Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 113–119.

"What is it like to be a bat?":

Nagel, T. 1974. What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.

on Stanley's view of the world:

Sterbak, J. 2003. "From here to there."

on personal space:

Argyle and Dean, 1965.

on differences in heeling styles:

Packard, 2008.

on a snail's perception of a tapping stick:

von Uexküll, 1957/1934.

on pressure release as reinforcement in horses:

McGreevy and Boakes, 2007.

on slaughterhouse design:

Grandin and Johnson, 2005.

on perception of objects under yellow light:

I owe my understanding of the blood-draining effect of yellow light to the exhibit "Room for one colour" by the artist Olafur Eliasson, in which he lights a room by bulbs emitting an extremely narrow range of what appears as yellow light.

Wittgenstein on dogs:

Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical investigations. New York: Macmillan.

on the length of a moment:

von Uexküll, 1957/1934.

on clicker training:

McGreevy and Boakes, 2007.

on the wolves' provocative showing of food:

Miklósi, 2007.

YOU HAD ME AT HELLO

on vasopressin in the prairie vole:

Alcock, J. 2005. Animal behavior: An evolutionary approach, 8th ed. Sunder-land, MA: Sinauer Associates.

on sheepdog imprinting:

Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001.

on not all animals being equally anthropomorphizable:

Eddy, T. J., G. G. Gallup Jr., and D. J. Povinelli. 1993. Attribution of cognitive states to animals: Anthropomorphism in comparative perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 49, 87–101.

on our attraction to infants and other neotonized creatures:

Gould, S. J. 1979. Mickey Mouse meets Konrad Lorenz. Natural History, 88, 30–36.

Lorenz, K. 1950/1971. Ganzheit und Teil in der tierischen und menschlichen Gemeinschaft. Reprinted in R. Martin, ed., Studies in animal and human behaviour, vol. 2 (pp. 115–195). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

"we need the eggs":

Said by Woody Allen's alter ego Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, 1977.

on biophilia:

Wilson, E. O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

on touch:

Lindsay, 2000.

on Harlow studies:

Harlow, H. F. 1958. The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673–685.

Harlow, H. F., and S. J. Suomii. 1971. Social recovery by isolation-reared monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 68, 1534–1538.

on the alleviation of puppies' distress with soft toys:

Elliot, O., and J. P. Scott. 1961. The development of emotional distress reactions to separation in puppies. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 99, 3–22.

Pettijohn, T. F., T. W. Wong, P. D. Ebert, and J. P. Scott. 1977. Alleviation of separation distress in 3 breeds of young dogs. Developmental Psychobiology, 10, 373–381.

"thermotactile sensory probe":

Fox, M. 1971. Socio-infantile and socio-sexual signals in canids: A comparative and developmental study. Zeitschrift fuer Tierpsychologie, 28, 185–210.

on our tactile resolution:

Attributed to the psychophysicist Ernst Heinrich Weber by von Uexküll (1957/ 1934).

on whiskers:

Lindsay, 2000.

"redirected appeasement ceremony":

Lorenz, K. 1966. On aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., p. 170.

on guide dogs and the blind:

Naderi, Sz., Á. Miklósi, A. Dóka, and V. Csányi. 2001. Cooperative interactions between blind persons and their dog. Applied Animal Behavior Sciences, 74, 59–80.

on dog-human play:

Horowitz, A. C., and M. Bekoff. 2007. Naturalizing anthropomorphism: Behavioral prompts to our humanizing of animals. Anthrozoös, 20, 23–35.

on timing patterns of flirters:

Sakaguchi, K., G. K. Jonsson, and T. Hasegawa. 2005. Initial interpersonal attraction between mixed-sex dyad and movement synchrony. In L. Anolli, S. Duncan Jr., M. S. Magnusson, and G. Riva, eds., The hidden structure of interaction: From neurons to culture patterns (pp. 107–120). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

on synchrony between dogs and people:

Kerepesi, A., G. K. Jonsson, Á. Miklósi, V. Csányi, and M. S. Magnusson. 2005. Detection of temporal patterns in dog–human interaction. Behavioural Processes, 70, 69–79.

on dogs' sensitivity to cortisol and testosterone:

Jones, A. C., and R. A. Josephs. 2006. Interspecies hormonal interactions between man and the domestic dog (Canis familiaris). Hormones and Behavior, 50, 393–400.

on dogs' sensitivity to play styles:

Horváth, Zs., A. Dóka, and Á. Miklósi. 2008. Affiliative and disciplinary behavior of human handlers during play with their dog affects cortisol concentrations in opposite directions. Hormones and Behavior, 54, 107–114.

on lowered blood pressure, other measures, and hormone changes:

Friedmann, E. 1995. The role of pets in enhancing human well-being: Physiological effects. In I. Robinson, ed., The Waltham book of human-animal interactions: Benefits and responsibilities of pet ownership (pp. 35–59). Oxford: Pergamon.

Odendaal, J. S. J. 2000. Animal assisted therapy—magic or medicine? Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 49, 275–280.

Wilson, C. C. 1991. The pet as an anxiolytic intervention. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 179, 482–489.

on other dog-owning benefits:

Serpell, 1996.

on contagious yawns:

Joly-Mascheroni, R. M., A. Senju, and A. J. Shepherd. 2008. Dogs catch human yawns. Biology Letters, 4, 446–448.

on Derrida, naked, and his cat:

Derrida, J. 2002. L'animal que donc je suis (à suivre). Translated as "The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)." Critical Inquiry, 28, 369–418.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MORNINGS

on herding and the "eye":

Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001.

on handedness in dogs:

P. McGreevy, personal communication.

on training:

See McGreevy and Boakes, 2007, for some ideas.

on preference for the new:

Kaulfuss and Mills, 2008.

on dog gaits:

Brown, 1986.

"colors one's thinking about it forever afterwards":

So said George Schaller, whose many books are full of named animals. Quoted in Lehner, P. 1996. Handbook of ethological methods, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 231.

on zebra-finch leg-band preferences:

Burley, N. 1988. Wild zebra finches have band colour preferences. Animal Behaviour, 36, 1235–1237.

Acknowledgments

Of the following dogs:

No one who knew Pumpernickel will be surprised that my most ardent thanks go to her, for choosing us at the shelter and for allowing me the incredible pleasure of knowing her. I have thanked her many times since, with cheese taking over where words failed me. Thanks to Finnegan, for being his own dog, and for being such an utterly doggish dog. Every day is improved to have him come running madly toward me. Thanks to the dogs of yore: to Aster, who endured a lot of childhood foolishness and taught me how to be less foolish; to Chester, who could grin and growl at the same time; to Beckett and Heidi, who in death highlighted what is precious; and to Barnaby, who in catness highlighted what is dog. Of the following people:

One hears that books are difficult to write. If so, this is not a book, for it was a delight to write, as it is delightful to observe and be with dogs and think dog-thoughts full-time. I was even more pleased that I would be handing the book over to the people at Scribner, whom I could count on to make my bagful of chapters into an actual book. I am indebted to Colin Harrison for his tireless reading of drafts and for being open to just about anything. Had I turned a book about dogs into one about cats I suspect Colin would have acceded to it … as long as it was still a good read. Many thanks to Susan Moldow for her enthusiasm from the very beginning.

Before I had an agent I scanned acknowledgments pages for those that included words that would send me scurrying to shine up a proposal to their agents. Sorry, Kris Dahl, in advance, for this: she is the very person you want representing you and your book; and I thank her.

My graduate school advisors and mentors, Shirley Strum and Jeff Elman, were willing to consider how an abstruse theoretical question about cognition could be addressed by observations of dogs—and they improved the theory and the practice. I was and am still appreciative. Thanks to Aaron Cicourel, who is also, as he says, one of those folks who try to saw through wood the hard way. Marc Bekoff was one of the first to treat dog play as biologically interesting. It was his writing (with the very keen Colin Allen), and later his advice, devotion, and friendship that led me to pursue my own research.

I owe thanks to Damon Horowitz, with whom I hatched the plan to write this book, and who seemed to believe that it was a sage and realistic idea. His consummate skepticism about all matters is balanced by his unfettered support of all that matters to me. I owe pretty much everything to my parents, Elizabeth and Jay. They were the first people I wanted to show the book to, for all the right reasons. As

for you, Ammon Shea: you make me better with words, you make me better with dogs, and you make me better.

Index

abstraction, 253–54
adaptation, 31–32, 70–71
addictive behavior, 53–54
adoption of dogs, 47, 65, 262n, 266–67, 294, 301
adrenaline, 80
affection, dog kisses and, 29–31
Afghan hound, 49, 127
age
in dog years, 222n
hearing decline with, 93n
knowledge of death, 235–37
in wolf hierarchies, 40, 58–59
aggression
body language showing, 109–10, 112
dachshunds and, 53n
designation in dogs, 52–55
in domestication process, 35
eye contact and, 147, 148–49
hormones and, 172
play versus, 5, 61–65, 270
sounds made and, 102
touch and, 293
of wolves, 59
agility training, 288
agonistic, 102
Aibo robot dog, 276
akinetopsia, 132
Alex (parrot), 145n
allelomimetic behavior, 274–79
Allen, Woody, 264–65
American Kennel Club, 49, 50
American Staffordshire terrier, 53n
anal sacs, 84–85, 112, 117

animal cognition, 4–7
anticipation in, 166–72
attention in, 144–59, 290–91
attitudes toward studying dogs, 3–4, 6–7
begging experiments, 155–57
big-brain hypothesis and, 8–9
learned optimism and pessimism, 27–28
play in, 196–205
primates as subjects of, 4–5, 102n
subjective experiences of dogs, 241–58
theory of mind and, 190–96
video cameras and, 5–6
what dogs know, 210–41
see also communication; physical cognition; social cognition; training
animistic, 102n
anosmia, 72
anthropomorphism
adaptiveness of, 31–32
behavior-reading versus, 18–19, 26–28, 31–32
clothing for dogs, 17–19, 29, 56
history, 15
scientific attitude toward, 3–4
temperament and, 47–48
training and, 57–61
umwelt and, 14–17, 23, 31–32, 263n, 294–96
antibiotics, 85, 86
anticipating behavior, 166–72
antidepressants, 16
antithesis, 110, 112
area centralis, 127
artificial odors, 25–26, 69, 71, 72, 86, 292
artificial selection, 6, 35–37, 41
assistance dogs, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 240, 274
associative learning (associations), 10–11, 167–68, 182, 225, 232–33, 289
attachment
of dogs, 42–43, 63–65
greeting and, 43, 271–72
of human infants, 43

of socialized wolves, 63–64

attacks, in rough-and-tumble play, 1–2, 24, 62, 196–98, 200, 202, 205–6, 221
attention, 139–59
of animals, 144–59, 290–91
avoiding, 143, 144
baited buckets and, 150–51
defined, 139
to dogs, 290–91
joint, 58
manipulating attention, 143, 155–58
to our behavior, 140–41
in play, 152–53, 199–205
"psychic powers" of animals, 163–72
to sounds around you, 251–52
stages in child development, 141–44
types of, 139, 142–44
see also attention-getter; eye contact
attention-getter
bark, 98, 105–8, 152, 153, 154, 171
bump, 152
exaggerated retreat, 203
in-your-face, 152, 200, 203
kinds of, 152–53, 199–200
matching level of inattention, 203
pawing, 152
used in play, 152–53, 199–205
audition
auditory attention, 139
changes in, 169
importance of, 122
range of hearing in dogs, 92, 93–94
range of hearing in humans, 21–22, 23–24, 92–94
in rats, 28
ultrasonic sounds, 91, 93, 241–43
see also sounds made
Australian shepherd, 53
autism
lack of eye contact in, 140, 192

theory of mind and, 192

use of dogs to read behavior, 162 autobiographies, pet, 119, 225–27

baboons
animal cognition research on, 4
eyebrows raised in display, 16
baby talk, 95–96
ball dogs, 126–32, 154, 287
barks
as communication, 98, 105–8, 152, 153, 154, 171
contagious, 108
decibels of, 105
frequencies of, 105–6, 107–8
types of, 98–99, 100, 106–8
see also attention-getter; sounds made
basenji, 50
basset hound, 77–78
bathing dogs, 85–86, 292
baths, 19, 86
bats
echolocation of, 91, 241–43
flehmen, 74
beagle, 49, 71, 72
bears, birth of, 64–65
beastomorphism, 60
beds
dog, 25–26, 86
human, 25–26
bees, 91, 215
begging
in dogs, 155–56
experimental trials using, 155–57

behavioral science

animal cognition research in, 4–5, 13–14, 27–28, 102n operant conditioning and, 10–11, 189–90

Bekoff, Marc, 237–38 Belgian Tervuren, 193–95

belly, exposing, 110
Belyaev, Dmitry, 35–37
big-brain hypothesis, 8–9, 44
bike-chasing, 170–71
biophilia hypothesis (Wilson), 265n
bird dogs, 43, 49, 54
biting
games based on, 42
meanings of, 62–63
muzzle biting, 18–19

bitter taste, 30 bladders, 60–61, 83, 115, 116

blind persons, dog companions for, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 274
bloodhound, olfaction in tracking, 77–78
blue tit, milk-bottle raiding of, 185
see also imitation
body language, 91, 108–14, 118
bonding
components of, 266–79
cross-species, 259–82
dog-human, 259–82
of domesticated silver foxes, 37
greeting ritual and, 29, 30–31, 263–64, 271–73
impact of bond effect, 279–82
mutual responsiveness in, 263–66, 274–79
pair bond, 260–61
proximate/ultimate explanations for, 265–66
temporal patterns and, 274–79
touch and, 266–71, 293
bonobos, 4–5, 145n
border collie, 48, 96–97, 98
boredom, 216–17, 288–89
see also time, experience of
Bouvier des Flandres, 50
boxer, 51
brain
anatomy of olfaction and, 71–75
anatomy of vision and, 125, 126–32

big-brain hypothesis, 8–9, 44

breathing sounds, 103
breeds, dog, 47–55
American Kennel Club, 49, 50
ancient, 48–49
categories of, 49–52
characteristic traits of, 40, 42n, 47–52, 112, 114, 127–28, 287
closed gene pool of, 50–52
development of, 40, 48–49
differences in development, 47–48
"dog fancy" shows, 49n
genomes of, 50–52
modern, 49–50
mutts versus, 294
physical range, 43–44
purebred, 49–50, 51, 71
selective breeding, 40
threshold differences between, 52–55
briard, 50
bulldog, 114
bull terrier, 5
bumblebees, use of time, 215
bumps, 152
butyric acid, 20–21, 79

caching behavior, 210n, 226, 227, 227n
Cairn terrier, 50
camouflage, 123
cancer, detection of, 81–82
see also olfaction
Canidae family, 34, 38, 82–84
cats
attention in, 145
fetch and, 277
flehmen, 74
Cavalier King Charles spaniel, 114
character-reading, 168–70
chasing behaviors, 169–71

chatter, 103
chickadees, 185
see also imitation
chickens, spatial preferences of, 16–17
Chihuahua, 1–2, 124, 205–6
children
attention-getting in, 152, 153, 234
autism and, 140, 162, 192
developmental stages, 43, 141–44, 146, 162–63
epileptic seizure prediction in, 82n
fear of strange dogs and, 79–80
gaze bias of, 148n
guilt and, 230, 234
hearing abilities of, 93n
overimitation by, 188, 188n
rescue dogs and, 237–39
theory of mind, 192–93, 218, 234–35
see also infants, human

chimpanzees

animal cognition research on, 4–5, 102n, 145, 147, 148, 150–51, 157, 193
begging experiments with, 156
big-brain hypothesis and, 8–9
contagious yawns and, 280
human evolution and, 61–62, 62n
"mark" test of self-awareness, 218–19, 220
smile of, 16
chow chow, 3, 50
cilia, smell and, 71, 74
circadian rhythms, 88, 212–15, 227–28
see also time, experience of
cities and city design
grid-based, 86–87
human visual perception and, 136–37
life of urban dogs, 163, 283–85
in odor control, 86–87
paving, 86–87
personal space and, 17
sounds and, 251–52

street filth and, 56, 295

Clever Hans, 163–66
clicker training, 256n
see also training
cloned dogs, 52
clothing
anthropomorphism and, 17–19, 29, 56
dog height and, 244–45
odors on, 71, 75–76, 77, 78, 85, 244
raincoats for dogs, 17–19

coats for dogs, 17–19

cognition. see animal cognition; physical cognition; social cognition
collie, 48, 96–97, 98
color vision, 128–29, 250, 252
see also vision

commands, 60, 96, 157–58, 171–72, 231, 231n

learning to obey, 182–83, 189–90, 204n, 285–86

communication, 89–119
asking dogs in, 26–28
barks as, 98, 105–8, 152–54, 171
of bats, 91, 241–43
body language in, 91, 108–14, 118
commands in. see commands
of dogs, 1–2, 5–6, 89–91, 108–18. see also sounds made; urine
dog tells, 292–93
of elephants, 91
eye contact in, 45–47
of fireflies, 91–92
of frogs, 92
human vocalizations, 90–91
intentional, 115–18
keyboard use in, 145n
of monkeys, 91, 94
naming, 96–97, 98, 295–97
pitch of sounds made, 93–96, 98–108
pointing in, 49, 143, 150–52, 287

posture in, 80–81, 89–90, 108, 109–10, 111, 153 prosody in, 93–94, 95, 251

shaking in, 113–14
showing, 154
of socialized wolves, 63–64
urine as, 22, 82–84, 114–18
see also language
comparative psychology, 206–7
concealing behavior, 234–35
confirmation bias, 169n
conversational maxims, 97–98
coprophagia (feces eating), 73
cortisol, 172–73, 279–80 see also hormones
countermarking, 117
counting ability, 163–66, 210
coursing dogs, 48
courting behavior, 83–84, 277–78
cows, slaughterhouse behavior of, 136, 251n
coyotes, 34
cries, 101
critical/sensitive period, 42–43, 222n, 262
cropping ears, 92
cross-species bond, 259–82
crouching, 110–11
cuteness, 264

dachshund, 40, 48, 53n
darting eyes, 148
Darwin, Charles, 29, 102n, 109
daydreaming, 88

deaf persons, dog companions for, 162, 240 death, 235–37

deception, 80, 169, 192–93, 201, 234–35
demonstration, 186–90
depression
in dogs, 14, 16, 26, 27, 112
in rats, 27–28
Derrida, Jacques, 281–82
dholes, 34
diabetes, detection of, 81

see also olfaction

dingoes, 34
disease
bonding in prevention of, 279–80
olfaction in detection of, 81–82
DNA. see genes
Doberman, 51, 53n, 229–30
docked tails, 114
"dog fancy" shows, 49n
dog groomers, 85–86, 292
dog heroes. see emergencies
dog whistle, 93
dog years, 222n
dolphins
brain size of, 9n
self-awareness of, 219
smile of, 16
domestication, 33–65
archeological evidence of, 39–40
artificial selection in, 6, 35–37
definition of, 33–34
DNA evidence of, 39–40
dog-human bond and, 260
food preferences and, 33, 34
process of, 35–37, 38–47, 60–61, 64–65
of silver foxes, 35–37
theory of, 38–47
wolves and, 38–47, 55–61

dominance

body language showing, 110–11, 112, 114
in electric shock research, 19n
eye contact in, 147
hormones and, 172
licking and, 30–31
in marking behavior, 117
sounds made and, 102
in training dogs, 57–61
in wolves versus dogs, 18–19, 40, 147, 148

dopamine, 261
dreaming, 88, 124, 213, 213n
ducks
chasing behavior of, 141
greeting behavior of, 272

ears, 92–98, 109–10, 113

see also audition; sounds made eating tone, 24
eavesdropping, with video camera, 291–92
echolocation, 91, 241–43
Egypt, dog breeds in ancient, 48–49
electric shock research, 19n
elephants
brain size of, 9n
communication of, 91
flehmen, 74
periscope sniff, 69
roses and, 22
self-awareness of, 219

Elizabethan collar, 86
emergencies
knowledge of, 240–41
rescue dogs, 79, 166, 237–39
stories of dog heroes, 237–39
test of behavior during, 239–41
encephalization quotient, 9n
endorphins, 279
English cocker spaniel, 50
epileptic seizure, prediction of, 82n
see also olfaction
exaggerated retreat, 203
eyebrows, raised as display, 16, 124
eye contact
aggression and, 147, 148–49
in attending, 143–44
avoiding, 46
dog tells, 292–93
dog vision and, 133–34

as foundation for social cognition, 45–47

gaze avoidance, 45–46, 110–11, 143, 144, 148–49, 229, 232, 292–93
gaze following, 149–52, 154
lack of, in autism, 140, 192
mutual gaze, 46–47, 139, 146–49, 161, 292–93
showing, 154
staring, 15, 45–46, 110, 292–93
use of gaze, 46
eyes. see also eye contact; vision
darting, 148
of dogs versus wolves, 42

facial expressions, 110 eyebrows raised as display, 16, 124

infant imitation of, 142–43, 173, 277 see also smile

facial recognition, 142–43

false belief task, 192–93, 201 Far Side (Larson), 95

fear
anal sacs and, 84–85
communication of, 99, 112
detection of, 79–81. see also olfaction
in domestication of wolves, 37, 39
isolation barks and, 107
feces, 24, 73, 84–85, 295
feet
dog, 85
human, 71, 75–76, 78, 244
feral dogs, 59, 63, 83–84, 117–18
fetch, 277–78, 287
see also play, human-dog

Finnegan, 266–67, 301

fireflies, communication of, 91–92
flehmen, 74
flicker-fusion rate, 130–32
see also vision

flirting, timing in, 277–78

fluorescent lights, 131
foveae, 126–27
Fox, Michael, 269
foxes
in Canidae family, 34. see also Canidae family
domestication experiments, 35–37
vocalizations of, 90
free-ranging dogs, 59, 63, 83–84, 117–18
French bulldog, 114
friendly behavior, 171–72
frogs, communication of, 92
Fromm, Erich, 216
functional tone, 24–26
fur trade, domestication of silver foxes, 35–37

gaits, 290–91
galloping, 290
Gallup, Gordon, 217–20
gangs, dog-human, 57–61
gaze. see eye contact
generalizations, 8–9, 221–22
genes
divergence of dogs, 38–47
functioning of, 36–37
genetic mutations, 51
genome mapping, 36–37, 51, 52n
interaction with environment, 51–55
mitochondrial DNA, 39–40
of tamed foxes, 36–37
genitals, olfaction and, 75, 76, 87
German shepherd, 50, 53n, 104
golden retriever, 112
Goodall, Jane, 102n, 296
Grandin, Temple, 136, 251n
Great Dane, 50
greeting, 271–73

attachment behavior and, 43, 271–72 licking in, 29, 30–31, 65, 247, 272–73

ritual as part of bond, 29, 30–31, 263–64, 271–73
sniff in, 75, 76, 84–85, 86, 87–88
tail in, 3, 31, 256–57
see also kisses, dog
greyhound, 48
Grice, Paul, 97–98
grin. see smile
growl, 62, 100, 102, 221–22. see also sounds made
grunt, 101–2
guard dogs, 252
guilt, 228–35
associations and, 232–33
concealing behavior, 234–35
feeling of, 228–35
gaze avoidance and, 149, 229, 232
guilty look, 149, 228–30, 232, 233
lack of, 234
polygraph machines, 80, 169
test of, 230–33

habits, knowledge of, 166–72, 251–52
habituation, to odors, 70–71
hackles, 110, 113
half-bounding, 290–91
handedness/pawedness, 288
happiness, 26
licking and, 30–31
smiling and, 16, 145
wagging tail and, 112–13
Harlow, Harry, 268–69
harriers, 49
head bow, 201
head size, 8–9, 44, 124
hearing. see audition; sounds made

heeling, 287–88

height, of dogs, 23, 40, 110n, 112, 169–71, 243–45
herding behavior, 49, 53, 54, 71, 262, 287
hierarchy

lack of, in domestic dogs, 57–61
of the senses, 133–34
in wolves, 40, 58–59
hippopotamus marking, 84
Homo sapiens
dog recognition of owner, 25–26, 29–31
in domestication process, 38–47
early settlements of, 38–39
evolution of, 40–41, 61–62
hormones
affected by petting dog, 261
contagion of in dogs, 80, 280
cortisol, 172–73, 279–80
detection by dogs, 80, 172–73, 280
detection by sharks, 77
endorphins, 279
oxytocin, 261, 279
pheromones and, 73–75, 79–81, 83
prolactin, 279
testosterone, 172
threshold levels of, 53
vasopressin, 261

horse

counting behavior of "Clever Hans,"163–66 pressure-release as reinforcement, 249n

hounds, 50
howl, 100, 101, 103
hunting
chasing behaviors and, 169–71
dogs bred for, 43, 49, 53–54
style of dogs, 43, 57, 57n, 59
style of wolves, 34, 38–40, 43, 57n, 58
in training dogs, 57–61
husky, 42n, 48, 50, 114, 135
hyenas, 34n
hypothalamus, 212–13

Ibizan Hound, 48–49n

imitation
in animal cognition research, 183–90
blue tit and chickadee behavior, 185
demonstration and, 186–90
"do as I do" task, 142–43, 186–90
of facial expressions, 142–43, 173, 277
learning through, 183–86
mirroring, 152–53
overimitation by children, 188, 188n
role in bonding process, 274–79
stimulus enhancement versus, 184–90
true imitation, 189–90
India, free-ranging dogs in, 83–84, 117–18
individuality
genetic differences and, 51–55
of humans versus dogs, 8–9
infants, human
attachment in, 43
bonding and, 267–69, 277
cuteness of, 264
developmental stages, 43, 141–44, 146
facial recognition by, 142–43
gaze following in, 150
imitation of smile, 143, 173, 277
motherese and, 95–96
object permanence and, 178–79
overimitation by, 188, 188n
visual perception in, 142
see also children
instincts, 236–37
intelligence, 175–207
brain size and, 8–9, 44
counting ability, 163–66, 210
dog intelligence tests, 175–81
learning from others, 176, 181–83
linguistic ability in, 94–95, 96–97
problem solving, 44–45, 175–81
tool use and, 44–45, 177

see also animal cognition; physical cognition; social cognition
invisible displacement, test of, 177–78
in-your-face attention-getter, 152, 200, 203
irises, 125, 148
Irish setter, 50
Irish terrier, 50
isolation
eavesdropping, with video camera, 291–92
impact on bonding, 268–69
isolation barks, 107
lack of marking and, 116
noise making of dogs and, 118

jackals, 34
Jack Russell, 245
jaguars, 15
joint attention, 58

Kanzi (bonobo), 145n
keyboard use, 145n
Kipling, Rudyard, 119
kisses, dog, 29–31
see also licking

Koko (gorilla), 273 komondor, 113

Labrador retriever, 53, 127–28, 237–38
language
barks compared with, 105–6
commands. see commands

human use of, 26–27, 64, 94

linguistic ability of animals, 94–95, 96–97, 145n
role in memory, 224
vocabulary in, 96–97, 145n
Larson, Gary, 95
laughter, 103–4
learned helplessness, 19n
learned optimism/pessimism, 27–28

learning, 176, 181–83

associative, 10–11, 167–68, 182, 225, 232–33, 289
through demonstration, 186–90
through imitation, 183–86

to obey commands, 182–83, 189–90, 204n, 285–86 from observation, 26–28, 183–90

of umwelt of blind companion, 134–35, 162, 274 see also training

leg bands, 296n
licking
Elizabethan collar and, 86
functional use of, 29–31
as greeting, 29, 30–31, 65, 247, 272–73
muzzle licking, 30–31
in olfaction, 30–31, 73, 74
to prompt regurgitation by mother, 29–30, 272–73
sonorous mouth licking, 152
urine, 73, 74
of world, 246–47
lifetime, length of, 222n, 264
Linnaean classification, 38n
lizards, vomeronasal organ in, 73
looking. see vision

Lorenz, Konrad, 83, 116–17, 141n, 261–62, 272–73

marking
anal sacs in, 84–85, 112, 117
audience and, 117–18
"mark" test of self-awareness, 218–19, 220
scratching ground in, 85
urine in, 22, 76, 82–84, 114–18
markings, 296
marmosets, sniff in, 69
mastiff, 48–49, 50, 221
mating. see sexuality
mazes, 144
McClintock, Martha, 73n
memoirs, pet, 119, 225–27

memory, 222–28
associations and, 225
autobiographical memory, 119, 225–27
prodigious human memory, 224
willpower and, 226–27
mimicry, 94
mirror
"mark" test of self-awareness, 218–19, 220
recognition in, 217–20
mirroring, 152–53
mitochondrial DNA, 39–40
moan, 100, 101–2
mongoose
hyena relation to, 34n
marking by, 84
mongrels, 47, 52
monkeys
animal cognition research on, 157
anthropomorphism and, 263n
big-brain hypothesis and, 8–9
bonding and, 267–69
communication of, 91, 94
eyebrows raised in display, 16
eye contact in, 148
in zoos, 158–59
monosodium glutamate, 30
mothers
licking behavior and, 29–30, 272–73
motherese and, 95–96
touch between child and, 267–69
see also bonding

motion blindness, 132

motion sensitivity, 48, 54, 123–24, 129–32, 167, 244–45, 249, 250–51
movement, forms of, 290–91
mutts
adoption of, 47, 65, 262n, 266–67, 294, 301
muzzles of, 71
temperament of, 294

wolves versus, 44

mutual gaze, 46–47, 139, 146–49, 161, 292–93
muzzle biting, 18–19
muzzle licking, 30–31

Nagel, Thomas, 241–43, 258

naming behavior, 96–97, 98, 295–97
narcolepsy, 51
nasal septum, 74
natural selection, 34, 38–47
neophilia, 178n
neotony, 114, 264
neutering, 295
Newfoundland, 43–44, 48
night vision, 48, 125, 128–30
nonsporting hounds, 49
Norman (Labrador retriever), 237–38
Norwich terrier, 47–48
nose
anatomy of dog, 68–69, 71–75
beagle olfactory cells, 71, 72
of humans, 71
of sheepdog, 71
wet, in dogs, 69, 74–75, 77

see also odors; olfaction; vomeronasal organ novelty, importance of, 284–85, 288–89

obedience, 182–83, 189–90, 204n, 285–86 see also right and wrong; training

objectivity, in science, 3–5, 13–14, 27–28
object permanence, 176, 178–79
observation
in animal cognition research, 4–5, 13–14, 27–28, 102n, 145, 147, 148, 161–73
animal observation of humans, 183–90
anthropomorphism and, 14–19

learning from, 26–28, 183–90. see also imitation objectivity in scientific, 3–5, 13–14, 27–28 in training process, 60–61

of zoo animals, 4–5, 8, 14–15, 158–59, 216

odors
arousal and, 110
artificial, 25–26, 69, 71, 72, 86, 292
butyric acid and, 20–21, 79
city design and, 86–87
on clothing, 71, 75–76, 77, 78, 85, 244
of dog feet, 85
dog groomers and, 85–86, 292
in experience of time, 72, 77, 78–79, 227–28, 254–56
height of dogs and, 245
human adaptation to, 70–71
of human feet and shoes, 71, 75–76, 78, 135, 244
importance to dogs, 87–88
rump sniffing, 84–85, 86, 87–88

signature odor of humans, 25–26, 74–79, 87–88, 135 smell walks and, 284–85

traveling on air currents, 71, 76–77, 123, 245, 284–85
of urine, 22, 76, 82–84, 114–18
see also olfaction
olfaction, 67–88
bloodhound ability, 77–78
cells committed to, 69, 71, 72, 73–75
changes in, 169
detection of disease and disorder, 81–82
detection of fear, 79–81
detection of human odors, 20–21, 25–26, 76–77
in dogs, 30–31, 67–88, 116–17, 122
in experience of time, 72, 77, 78–79, 84, 227–28, 254–56
expression of anal sacs, 84–85
genitals and, 75, 76, 87
habituation in, 70–71
in humans, 21–22, 23, 67–68, 72–73, 122
importance to dogs, 87–88
licking in, 30–31, 73, 74
olfactory bulb, 72–73
pheromones and, 73–75, 79–81, 83
physiology of, 69, 71–75

prediction of seizure, 82n
self-awareness and, 219–20
in sharks, 77
signature scent and, 25–26, 74–79, 87–88, 135
smell walks and, 284–85
sniff in. see sniff
in ticks, 20–21
in tracking prey, 48, 57n, 76, 77–78
urine marking, 22, 76, 82–84, 114–18
vision connected with, 127–28
see also nose; odors; sniff; vomeronasal organ
ontogenetic ritualization, 226n
open-mouth display, 108, 110, 201
operant conditioning, 10–11, 189–90
optic nerve, 135–36
optimism, learned, 27–28
orienting reflex, 141
owners
animal observation of, 161–73, 251–52
concept of, 11–12
dog recognition of, 25–26, 29–31
legal relationship with dogs, 11–12
theories about dogs, 3–4
training of dogs and, 10–11, 25–26

oxytocin, 261, 279 see also hormones

pacing, 291
packs
analogy in training dogs, 57–61
use of term with dogs, 43, 57–61

in wolves, 38, 40, 41, 43, 57–61, 103 pair bond, 260–61

panoramic vision, 124, 127–28
papillon, 43–44
paramecium, 236–37
Pavlov, Ivan, 289
pawedness/handedness, 288

pawing, 152
pecking, 185
pedomorphic dogs, 114
peek-a-boo, 142
Pekingese, 50
peripheral vision, 127–28
personality. see temperament
personal space of chickens, 16–17
of dogs, 246–47
of humans, 16–17
"territory marking" and, 83–84
of wolves, 38
pessimism, learned, 27–28
petting dogs, 266–71, 293
Pfungst, Oskar, 164
Pharaoh Hound, 48–49n
pheromones, 73–75, 79–81, 83
phonemes, 105–6
photoreceptors, 48, 126, 127–32, 168
physical cognition
attention in, 144
object displacement/permanence, 176, 177–79
rope task, 44–45
size-awareness in, 220–22
social cognition and, 176–81
tool use, 177
of wolves versus dogs, 44–45
Piaget, Jean, 162–63, 178
pigeons
"psychic powers" of, 165–66
use of time, 213, 215
pigs, slaughterhouse behavior of, 251n
pinna, 92
pit bull, 53n
pitch of sounds made, 93–96, 98–108
play, 196–205
aggression versus, 5, 61–65, 270
attention in, 152–53, 199–205

biting games, 42
cackling laugh in, 103–4
commands during, 171–72
communication in, 1–2, 5–6, 200–205
description of, 1–2, 5–6, 205–6, 277–78
dog love of, 289
between dogs of mismatched size, 1–2, 124, 205–6, 221
of domesticated silver foxes, 37
fetch and, 277–78, 287
function of, 197–98
human-dog, 277–78, 287
objects in, 24–26, 247–50
ritualization of, 198
role in bonding process, 275–79
rolling behavior in, 24, 55, 85, 286
rough-and-tumble, 1–2, 24, 62, 196–98, 200n, 202, 205–6, 221
study of, 196–205
theory of mind and, 196–205
visual streak and ball dogs, 127–28, 287
see also attention-getter; play signals
play barks, 98–99, 108
play bow, 201, 203, 205
play signals, 199–207, 226
head bow, 201
importance of, 200–201, 289
open-mouth display, 108, 110, 201
play bow, 201, 203, 205
play slap, 103, 201
play slap, 103, 201
Pliny the Elder, 64–65
pointing
as communication, 49, 143, 150–52, 287
gaze following as, 150–52, 154
temporal patterns in, 277–78
polygraph machines, 80, 169
poodle, 42n, 240
posture
antithesis and, 110, 112

as communication, 80–81, 89–90, 108, 109–10, 111, 153 tail and, 111–14

prairie voles, 261
prey, chasing behaviors and, 169–71
primates
animal cognition research on, 4–5, 102n
big-brain hypothesis and, 8–9
problem-solving skills
imitation and, 183–90
intelligence and, 44–45, 175–81
of wolves versus dogs, 180
progressive mutilation, 229
prolactin, 279
prosody, 93–94, 95, 251
protodogs, 42
protodomesticators, 40
"psychic powers,"163–72
animal knowledge of habits versus, 166–72, 251–52
confirmation bias, 169n
in counting behavior of horse, 163–66
of pigeons, 165–66
in spelling behavior of dogs, 167
see also attention
pug, 40, 50, 112, 127, 221
Pumpernickel (Pump)
adoption of, 65

anecdotes, 4–6, 13, 29, 31, 33, 34, 52, 55, 67, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89, 92, 98, 100–101,

104, 108, 111–12, 113, 114–15, 118–19, 121, 123–24, 132, 135, 139, 166–67,

169–71, 183, 184, 190–91, 196–97, 199, 209, 211, 215, 222–23, 225, 228,

229, 235, 241, 247, 256–57, 259, 271–72, 274, 276, 283–85, 291, 294

described, 3, 47, 299–301

punishment
historical types of, 228–29
scolding in, 149, 232–33
in training process, 60–61, 286
pupil size, 124–25
pups
cuteness of, 264
lack of urine marking, 117

licking behavior of mother, 29–30, 272–73
sounds made by, 101, 102
in wolf packs, 58–59

purebred dogs, 49–50, 51, 71

raincoats, dog, 17–19
raised-leg display, 83, 116, 117–18
see also urine
raisin toxicity, 33, 34, 34n
rats
big-brain hypothesis and, 8–9
fear contagion in, 80
learned optimism and pessimism, 27–28
sounds made by, 93
use of time, 213, 215
redirected appeasement ceremony (Lorenz), 272–73
reflexes, 141
REM sleep, 213n
reptiles, vomeronasal organ in, 73
rescue dogs, 79, 166, 237–39
retina, 125, 126–32, 135–36, 249
retrieving behavior, 49, 53, 54, 112, 127–28, 154, 287
rewards, in training process, 60–61
rhinoceros, 4–5, 15n
flehmen, 74
urine marking, 84
Rico (border collie), 96–97, 98, 211n
right and wrong, knowledge of, 228–35
rolling behavior, 24, 55, 85, 86, 286
rolling tones, 24
rooting reflex, 141, 269
rope task, 44–45
roses, 22, 72
Rottweiler, 53n

rough-and-tumble play, 1–2, 24, 62, 196–98, 200n, 202, 205–6, 221 rump sniffing, 84–85, 86, 87–88

saccades, 136

Sacks, Oliver, 162
salty taste, 30
San Diego Zoo, 4–5
scavengers, 39, 40, 43, 63
schizophrenia, smell of, 81
sclera, 125
SCN (suprachiasmatic nucleus), 212–13
scolding, 149, 232–33
scream, 101
scrub jay, caching behavior of, 226
Seeing Eye dogs, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 274
seizure prediction, 82n
selection

artificial, 6, 35–37, 41. see also domestication natural, 34, 38–47

selective breeding, 40
self-awareness
experience of, 217–22
knowledge of right and wrong, 228–35
"mark" test of, 218–19, 220
olfaction and, 219–20
size and, 220–22
of working dogs, 221–22

self-takedown, 221

sensitive/critical period, 42–43, 222n, 262
separation anxiety, 43, 268n, 271–72, 280
sexuality
courting behavior, 83–84, 277–78
and domestication of silver foxes, 36
flehmen and, 74
flirting and, 277–78
genetic mutations and, 51
genitals and, 75, 76, 87
hormones and, 172
neutering dogs, 295
raised-leg display in, 83, 116, 117–18
of wolves, 38, 41, 58

shake, body, 113–14

shaping behavior, 10–11
shark, olfaction of, 77
shar-pei, 50
sheepdog
early exposure to sheep, 221, 262
"eye" behavior, 287
innate behavioral tendencies, 54
nose of, 71
shepherding behavior. see herding behavior
shepherds, 49, 50, 53, 53n, 104
shoes
for dogs, 56
odor of, 71, 75–76, 78, 135, 244
showing, 154
shriek, 103
Siberian husky, 42n, 48, 50, 114, 135
sighing, 27, 153
sight. see vision
signature odor, 25–26, 74–79, 87–88, 135
sitting tone, 24
size
big-dog sounds, 102
breed differences, 43–44
height in, 23, 40, 110n, 112, 169–71, 243–45
of objects in relation to dogs, 247–50
recognition of own, 220–22

in rough-and-tumble play, 1–2, 124, 205–6, 221 toy dogs, 49, 290–91

slaughterhouses, 136, 251n
sledding, 169–71
sleep
circadian rhythms and, 88, 212–15
dreaming and, 88, 124, 213, 213n
smelling. see nose; odors; olfaction
smile
of chimpanzees, 16
of dogs, 16, 110, 256–58, 273
of dolphins, 16

happiness and, 16, 145 infant imitation of, 143, 173, 277

snarl, 102
sneeze, 68
sniff, 68–71
characterized by ethologists, 69–70, 83–84
description of, 67, 68, 69–70
in dogs, 67, 68–71, 83–88, 116–17
in elephants, 69
in greeting, 75, 76, 84–85, 86, 87–88
in humans, 70–71
in marmosets, 69
rump sniffing, 84–88
in tortoises, 69
types of, 67, 68
wet nose good for, 69, 74–75, 77
see also nose; odors; olfaction
Snoopy, 226
snuffling, 103
social cognition
animal behavior in zoos, 4–5, 8, 14–15, 15n, 158–59, 216
animal knowledge of humans, 161–73
animal preferences and, 16–17
attention in, 144–45
in detection of fear, 79–81
in domestication of dogs, 38–47
eye contact and, 45–47
linguistic ability of animals, 94–95
packs and, 38, 40, 41, 43, 57–61, 103
physical cognition and, 176–81
play and, 1–2, 5–6, 206–7. see also play
"psychic powers" of animals, 163–72
sensitive/critical period of, 43
see also attention; communication
social panting, 103–4
socks, 244
Sofia (dog), 145n
Sony, 276

sounds made, 98–108 bark. see barks

breathing, 103
cackling laugh, 103–4
chatter, 103
context and, 99–100
cry, 101
duration of, 100
growl, 62, 100, 102, 221–22
grunt, 101–2
high-frequency, 93, 101
howl, 100, 101, 103
method of production, 100
moan, 100, 101–2
noisy breathing, 103
pitch of, 93–96, 98–108
play slap, 103, 201
range of hearing in dogs, 92, 93–94
range of hearing in humans, 21–22, 23–24, 92–94
scream, 101
shriek, 103
sigh, 27, 153
snarl, 102
sneeze, 68
snuffling, 103
social panting, 103–4
sonorous mouth licking, 152
squeal, 101
ultrasonic, 91, 93, 241–43
whimper, 101
whine, 100, 101, 153
yawn, 110, 280–81
yelp, 98, 100–101
sour taste, 30
spaniel, 3, 49, 50, 114
species, nature of, 38n
spelling, 167
sporting hounds, 49

springer spaniel, 3
squeal, 101
standing over, 18–19
Stanley (Jack Russell), 245
staring, 15, 45–46, 110, 292–93
Stein, Gertrude, 161
Sterbak, Jana, 245
stimulus enhancement, 184–90
strange dogs, 79n
stranger barks, 107
stray dogs, 63
stress response
cortisol in, 172–73, 279–80
eye contact and, 45–46
in fear, 79–81
genes and, 36–37
sounds in, 104
tails in, 112
yawn in, 110

stroboscopic vision, 131 submission

body language showing, 110–11, 112, 114
in electric shock research, 19n
eye contact in, 147
licking and, 30–31
in training dogs, 57–61
in wolves versus dogs, 18–19
suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), 212–13
surrogate mothers, 268–69
sweat, 20–21, 75, 76, 80
sweet taste, 30
synchrony

of assistance dogs, 43, 134–35, 162, 274 in regulation of time, 274–79

tail
docked, 114
in greetings, 3, 31, 256–57

meaning of wags, 3, 31, 112–13 use of, 111–14

tapetum lucidum, 125
taste
importance of, 122
reception, 30
types of flavors, 30
teeth
showing, 110
tooth-snapping, 100
television-watching, 157
flicker-fusion rate and, 131–32
in observing animals, 14
see also vision
tells, dog, 292–93
temperament, 47–48, 55
termites, sounds made by, 93
terriers, 5, 47–48, 49, 50, 53n, 56
territory marking, 83–84
testosterone, 172
see also hormones
theory of mind, 190–207
children and, 192–93, 218, 234–35
comparative psychology and, 206–7
concept of, 190–92
dog mind and, 193–206
false belief task, 192–93, 201
nonverbal test of, 192–93
play and, 196–205
rudimentary theory of mind, 204–5
self-awareness and, 217–22
thermotactile sensory probe (Fox), 269
threshold differences, 52–55
ticks, deer, 20–22
time, 211–17, 251–56
boredom and, 216–17, 288–89
bumblebee use of, 215
circadian rhythms, 88, 212–15, 227–28

dog "pacemaker" and, 212–15
dog years and, 222n
memories and, 119, 222–28
odors and, 72, 77, 78–79, 84, 227–28, 254–56
regulation of, 274–79
temporal patterns in bonding, 274–79
time-telling by dogs, 227–28
Tinbergen, Niko, 147n
tool use, 44–45, 177
tooth-snapping, 100
tortoises, sniff in, 69
touch
as element in bonding, 266–71, 293
between mother and child, 267–69
petting, 266–67, 293
sense of, 122, 269–71 see also licking
toy dogs, 49, 290–91
toys
ball retrieval, 126–32, 154
color vision and, 128–29
dog beds and, 25
dog naming of, 96–97, 98
object displacement and, 177–79
size of objects, 247–50
tracking, 48, 57n
olfaction in, 76, 77–78
style of dogs, 48, 57n
style of wolves, 57n
vision in, 123–24, 143
training
associative learning in, 10–11, 167–68, 182
clickers in, 256n
dogs' reading of trainers in, 166–72
domestication of dogs and, 33–34
for emergencies, 240
guidelines for, 285–86
learning from others, 176, 181–83

to obey commands, 182–83, 189–90, 204n, 285–86

by owners, 10–11, 25–26 pack analogy and, 57–61

"psychic powers" of animals, 163–72, 251–52
punishment versus reward in, 60–61, 286
for scent recognition, 76, 77–78, 81–82
successes in, 11
wolf versus dog behavior and, 55–61
see also learning
trotting, 290
tuberculosis, detection of, 81
typhoid fever, detection of, 81

ultrasonic sounds, 91, 93, 241–43
umami taste, 30
umwelt
"acting into,"23#8211;24
anthropomorphism versus, 14–17, 23, 31–32, 263n, 294–96
of blind companion, 134–35, 162, 274
de-animalizing of dogs, 295
defined, 20
of dogs, 13–19, 22, 23, 24–26, 31–32, 132–37, 241–58, 287–88
functional tones and, 24–26
of humans, 21–22, 24–26, 93n
impact of dogs on human, 283–84
of ticks, 20–22
unfriendly behavior, 171–72
uniformity of species, 8–9
urine
as communication, 22, 82–84, 114–18
in detection of cancer, 81–82
ground scratching associated with, 85
hippopotamus marking, 84
licking, 73, 74
marking behavior, 22, 76, 82–84, 114–18
mongoose marking, 84
odor of, 22, 76, 82–84, 114–18
pheromones in, 73, 74, 83
punishment associated with, 60–61

raised-leg display, 83, 116, 117–18 rhinoceros marking, 84

vasopressin, 261 see also hormones

veterinarian, smell of fear and, 84–85

video cameras, 5–6, 113, 198–99, 231–32, 245, 291–92
vision, 121–37
anatomy of dog eye, 124–32
animal behavior affected by, 15n, 126–32
animal observation of humans, 161–73
area centralis, 127
balls and, 126–32, 154
color vision, 128–29, 250, 252
dog companions for blind persons, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 274
dog visual field, 135–37
flicker-fusion rate, 130–32
foveae in, 126–27

human visual perception, 21–22, 67–68, 72–73, 135–37, 141–44 lateral versus panoramic, 124, 127–28

motion sensitivity and, 48, 54, 123–24, 129–32, 167, 244–45, 249, 250–51
night vision, 48, 125, 128–30
photoreceptors, 48, 126, 127–32, 168
purpose of, 122–24
retina in, 125, 126–32, 135–36, 249
sclera, 125
tapetum lucidum, 125
television-watching, 14, 131–32, 157
in tracking prey, 123–24, 143
visual attention, 139
visual streak, 127–28, 287
of wolves, 123, 125
see also eye contact; eyes
vocabulary
of birds, 145n
of dogs, 96–97

voles, 261 vomeronasal organ, 122–23

in animals, 73–75, 79

as explanation for wet nose, 69, 74–75, 77
in humans, 74
pheromone detection in, 73–75

von Uexküll, Jakob, 20–22, 24

wagging tails, 3, 31, 112–13
walking, 169–71
allelometric behavior, 275
described, 290
smell walks, 284–85
weaning, 262n
whales
brain size of, 9n
communication of, 91
whimper, 101
whine, 100, 101, 153
whiskers, 67
whistle, dog, 93
Whiten, Andrew, 188n
Wild Animal Park (Escondido), 4–5, 15n
wild side of dogs, 61–64
willpower, 226–27
Wilson, Edward O., 265n
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 253
wolfhound, 1–2, 124, 205–6
wolves
attachment in, 63–64
behavior of, 29–30, 45, 89–90
Canidae family and, 34, 38
developmental differences between dogs and, 10, 42–45, 50–52, 55–64
divergence of, 38–47
DNA differences between dogs and, 39–40, 62
domestication of, 38–47, 55–61
dominance and submission in, 18–19, 40, 147, 148
hunting behavior of, 34
hunting by, 38–40, 43, 57n, 58
packs in, 38, 40, 41, 43, 57–61, 103

physical cognition tasks and, 44–45
physical differences between dogs and, 43–44
problem-solving by, 180
as scavengers, 39, 40, 43
socialization of, 38–47, 63–64
social organization of, 38, 40, 41
tails of, 112
touch and, 269
vision of, 123, 125

Woolf, Virginia, 119 working dogs

assistance dogs, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 240, 274
companions for blind, 43, 134–35, 152, 162, 274
guard dogs, 252
herders, 49, 53, 54, 71, 262, 287
hunters, 43, 49, 53–54
linguistic ability of, 95
rescue dogs, 79, 166, 237–39
self-awareness of, 221–22
trackers, 76, 77–78, 79

yard dogs, 180 yawn

contagious, 280–81
as sign of stress, 110
yelp, 98, 100–101

zebra finches, leg band preference in, 296n zoos

animal behavior in, 4–5, 8, 14–15, 158–59, 216 petting, 267

About the Author

Alexandra Horowitz earned her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California at San Diego, studying dog cognition. She is currently a term assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College and continues to research dog behavior. In addition to her work with dogs, she has also studied cognition in humans, rhinoceroses, and bonobos. She previously worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and a fact-checker for The New Yorker. She lives in New York City with her husband and Finnegan, a dog of indeterminate parentage and determinate character, and the fond memories of dogs past.

She also likes to sketch her dogs.

Of course, researchers soon found brains bigger than ours: the dolphin's brain is larger, as are the brains of physically larger creatures such as whales and elephants. The "big brain" myth has long been overturned. Those who are still interested in mapping brain to smarts now look at other, more sophisticated measures: the amount of convolution of the brain; the encephalization quotient, a ratio that includes both brain and body size in the calculation; the quantity of neocortex; or the gross number of neurons and synapses between neurons.

This was made most evident for me one day collecting data of the behavior of the white rhinoceros. At the Wild Animal Park it is the animals who roam (relatively) freely, and the visitors are restricted to trains that travel around the large enclosures. I was situated in the narrow patch of grass between the track and the fence, watching a typical day of rhino socializing. As the trains approached, the rhinos stopped what they were doing and moved quickly into a defensive huddle: standing with rumps together, heads radiating out in a rough sunburst. The animals are peaceful, but with poor vision they can be easily startled if they do not smell someone approaching, and they count on each other as lookouts. The train stopped, and everyone gaped at the rhinos who, it was announced by the guide, were "doing nothing." Eventually the driver moved on, and the rhinos resumed their ordinary behavior.

This is similar to what was discovered by midcentury behaviorist researchers who exposed laboratory dogs to an electric shock from which they couldn't escape. Later, put in a chamber from which there was a visible escape route, and shocked again, these dogs showed learned helplessness: they did not try to avoid the shock by escaping. Instead, they froze in place, seemingly resigned to their fate. The researchers had essentially trained the dogs to be submissive and accept their lack of control of the situation. (They later forced the dogs to unlearn the response and end the shock.) Happily, the days of experiments wherein we shock dogs to learn about their responses are over.

Not on this list are hyenas. Dog-sized and -shaped, with erect German shepherd–like ears, and prone to howl and vocalize like many garrulous canids, hyenas are in some ways doglike, but are not in fact canids. They are carnivores more closely related to mongooses and cats than to dogs.

†

Raisins are now suspected of being toxic to some dogs, even in small amounts (though the mechanism of toxicity is unknown)—leading me to wonder whether Pump was instinctively averse to raisins.

What (some) genes do is regulate the formation of proteins that assign cells their roles. When, where, and in what environment a cell develops all contribute to the result. Thus the path from a gene to the emergence of a physical trait or a behavior is more circuitous than one might initially think, with room for modifications along the way.

There is some debate over whether dogs should be considered a separate species from, or a subspecies of wolves. There is even debate over whether the original Linnaean classification scheme that demarcates species as a fundamental unit is still helpful or valid. Most researchers agree that describing wolves and dogs as separate species is the best current description. Although the two animals can inter-breed, their typical mating habits, their social ecology, and the environments they live in are very different.

Mitochondrial DNA are chains of DNA within the energy-producing mitochondria of cells, but outside the cell nucleus. They are inherited, without any change, from the mother by her offspring. The mtDNA of individuals has been used to trace human ancestry, and to estimate the evolutionary relationships among animal species.

There is also a large breed difference. For instance, poodles don't show avoidance behaviors or begin to play-fight until weeks after huskies do—when weeks represent a goodly chunk of the puppy's life. In fact, huskies develop more quickly than wolves in some ways. No one has studied how this affects their rapport with humans.

As the domestication process probably began with early canids scavenging around human groups—eating our table scraps—it is a particularly silly stance to feed dogs only raw meat, on the theory that they are wolves at heart. Dogs are omnivores who for millennia have eaten what we eat. With very few exceptions, what is good on my plate is good for my dog's bowl.

Temperament is used to mean roughly the same thing as personality, without the overtone of anthropomorphism. It is perfectly acceptable to talk about a dog's personality, if we mean the dog's "usual pattern of behavior and individual traits": behavior and traits are not exclusive to humans. Some researchers use temperament to refer to the traits as they appear in a young animal—the genetic tendency of the dog; while reserving personality to refer to adult traits and behaviors, the result of that particular temperament combined with whatever they confronted in their environment.

There is no evidence, however, that any currently existing breed can lay claim to being the descendents of the original breeds. Descriptions of both the Pharaoh and Ibizan hounds cite them as the "oldest" dog breeds, which claims seemed supported by their physical resemblance to the dogs of Egyptian paintings. However, their genomes reveal them to have emerged much more recently.

The named occupation is mostly theoretical because a minority of dogs bred for work actually do the work of their breed (predominantly hunting or herding). The rest wind up either as companions sitting on our laps, or trained, trimmed, and blown-dry to be shown at "dog fancy" shows—odd, as nibbling the crusts of our sandwiches after a nice shampoo is about as far as one can get from dredging fallen waterfowl from a swamp.

Genetic analysis tests have become available since the mapping of the genome: for a fee, companies will allegedly resolve your dog's genetic code, determined from a blood sample or swab of cheek cells, into its contributing breeds. At present the accuracy of the tests is indeterminate.

What is considered aggressive is culturally and generationally relative. German shepherds were on the top of the list after World War II; in the 1990s Rottweilers and Dobermans were scorned; the American Staffordshire terrier (also known as the pit bull) is the current bête noire. Their classification has more to do with recent events and public perception than with their intrinsic nature. Recent research found that of all breeds, dachshunds were the most aggressive to both their own owners and to strangers. Perhaps this is underreported because a snarling dachshund can be picked up and stashed away in a tote bag.

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 his prey, without any frivolous moves; untrained dogs' hunting walks are herky-jerky, meandering back and forth, speeding and slowing. Worse, they may get waylaid by distracting sounds or a sudden urge to playfully pursue a falling leaf. Wolves' tracks reveal their intent. Dogs have lost this intent; we have replaced it with ourselves.

Notably, the number of behavioral similarities between chimpanzees and humans (culture and language aside for the moment) increases steadily as the number of scientific studies of the chimps also steadily increases.

… theoretically: no swimming pools have been used in such a test. Instead, experimenters use extremely small samples of an odorless medium, and then add an even more extremely small sample of sugar to one of them.

The psychologist Martha McClintock was the first to seriously study pheromone detection in humans; she and others have done savvy, fascinating studies of how our behavior and hormonal rates may be affected by pheromones or pheromone-like hormones. But the jury is still out—and loudly arguing—on these claims.

This construction—strange dog—itself seems geared to inspire fear. Its use is also based on a flawed premise: that familiar dogs will behave predictably and reliably, and unfamiliar ones will not. As we've seen, as much as we may want dogs to behave in lockstep with our desires, their simply being their own animals ensures that they will not always do so.

Research on other diseases is proceeding apace. Provocatively, dogs who live in homes with epileptics seem to be moderately good predictors of seizures. Two studies report that dogs licked the person's face or hands, whimpered, stood nearby, or moved protectively—in one case sitting on a child, and in another blocking a child's access to stairs—before seizures. If this is true, there may be olfactory, visual, or some other invisible (to us) cues that the dogs used. But as the data come from "self-report"—family questionnaires rather than data gathered more objectively—more evidence is needed. We can however, pause in admiration of the possibility of such a skill.

In reality, few people hear equally well across this spectrum. With age, the higher-frequency sounds, above 11–14 kilohertz, go undetected by the human ear. This knowledge prompted the inspired design of a product with the teenager's umwelt in mind. The device emits a 17 kilohertz tone—out of the range of most adults' hearing, but unpleasantly audible to youngsters. Shop owners have used it as a teenager repellent, to discourage loitering around their businesses.

Since the publication of Rico's successes, in 2004, other dogs (also border collies, for the most part) have been reported with vocabularies from eighty to over three hundred words: all names for various toys. You might have one of these prodigious vocabularians in your house.

Except when it is animated: a discarded plastic bag being tumbled down a city sidewalk by a breeze can provoke growls, caution, and occasional attacks by alarmed dogs. Dogs can be animistic, just as humans are in infancy: trying to make sense of the world by attributing a familiar quality (of life) to unknown objects. My plastic-bag-growling dog is in good company: Darwin described his own dog treating an open parasol moving in the breeze as a living thing, barking at and stalking it. And Jane Goodall has observed chimpanzees making threatening gestures toward thunderclouds. I've been known to fulminate thundercloud-ward myself.

Surprisingly, dogs mind each other's posture more than their height: dogs do not read simply being taller as being dominant or confident. As we'll see later, it's not quite right to say, as is often said of a bravely forward small dog, he thinks he's a big dog: Actually, he does not—he knows it is posture that matters.

The conversion to entirely digital television broadcasts will eliminate the flicker-fusion problem, making TV-viewing more viable (but no more olfactorily interesting) for dogs—who are no doubt ambivalent.

Ethologist Konrad Lorenz beautifully demonstrated this tendency of young waterfowl in the 1930s by positioning himself as that first adult creature seen by a gaggle of greylag goslings. They followed him readily, and Lorenz wound up raising the brood as his own.

Developmental psychologists rely on the fact that though infants cannot report what they are thinking, they reliably look longer at things that interest them. By using this one feature of infant behavior, psychologists gather data about what the infant can see, distinguish, and understand and what he prefers.

Well, for the most part: Kanzi the bonobo and Alex the African gray parrot are among those who have been asked and have answered: Alex was able to create and utter novel, coherent, three-word sentences based on a vocabulary built from eavesdropping on researchers; Kanzi has a multihundred-word vocabulary of lexigrams (symbolic pictures) that he can point at to communicate. And a single dog, Sofia, has been trained to use a simple eight-key keyboard concurrent with events she had already learned, like going for a walk, going into a crate, and getting food or a toy. She learned to press the appropriate key to make a request. As a communication, this behavior is closer to asking for dinner by bringing an owner an empty food bowl than it is to a full-fledged language. More abstract utterances have not been reported (nor abstract keyboards designed).

One could make an argument that this behavior was reinforced because of the survival value of looking at humans. As with infants, an adult face will hold much information, not the least of which could be where the next meal is coming from. The early-twentieth-century ethologist Niko Tinbergen similarly found that baby gulls have a strong attraction to the red-dotted beaks of adult gulls (and to any stick with a red dot placed on it by an ethologist, too).

Dogs show an additional tendency, one that people do, too, when looking at faces: to look leftward first (that is, to the right side of the face). Even young children show this "gaze bias": looking first, and longer, to the right side of an examined face. By closely observing dogs observing faces, researchers have found that dogs share this bias—when looking at human faces. When looking at other dogs, they show no gaze bias at all. Why this might be is still a matter of conjecture: perhaps we express emotions differently on each hemi-face; and perhaps dogs emote more symmetrically (lopsided ears aside). Dogs have learned to look at humans the way humans look at humans.

It should be noted that this skill is affirmed by dogs' following a pointing hand to one of two baited buckets at rates "significantly above chance." What this means is that they don't choose which bucket to search under first randomly. Instead they choose the bucket pointed at from 70 to 85 percent of the time. That's good, but they are still making the wrong judgment 15 to 30 percent of the time! Three-year-old children get the right bucket every single time. What this indicates is that the dogs' success is probably the result of a mode of understanding that is not identical to ours.

Dogs who often wind up being called people dogs for their keen interest in owners over dogs.

Spelling the word instead of saying it is, of course, usually futile. Dogs can also learn the connection between the cadence of a spelled word and a subsequent walk, even if the latter does not immediately follow the former. On the other hand, used in an unlikely context—say, sitting in the bath—the spelled word will not evoke much interest. Chances are slim you're about to up and take a walk when naked and sudsy.

While dogs may in fact distinguish between people behaving subtly differently, one suspects that anyone using their dogs this way might be susceptible to what psychologists call confirmation bias: noticing just that part of their dog's response that supports their own theories about the person. Does the gentleman seem a bit untrustworthy to you? And yes, look how your dog growled at him once: that settles it. Dogs become amplifiers of our own beliefs; we can attribute to them that which we think ourselves.

Dogs have a preference for novel objects—neophilia. One study found that when asked to retrieve an unspecified toy from a pile of familiar and new toys, dogs spontaneously chose the new toys over three-quarters of the time. This penchant for the new might explain why when two dogs carrying sticks meet in a park, they often simultaneously drop the stick they've been proudly toting around in order to try to grab the pride of the approaching dog.

The dogs' ambivalence about the scent trail may at first seem surprising, given all our talk about their olfactory skills. But simply being able to smell a trail doesn't mean that they use this ability all the time. Often dogs need to be trained to be attentive to particular scents.

My favorite example of the child's overimitation comes from an experiment that psychologist Andrew Whiten and his colleagues ran using a locked box with a tempting piece of candy inside. They were curious if three-to five-year-old children could imitate the particular means experimenters demonstrated to unlock the box (involving twisting out rods fit through barrel openings). The children watched, captivated, and were then handed the re-locked box. Whiten found that the children almost all imitated—and the youngest children over imitated—twisting the rod not two or three but sometimes hundreds of times before pulling it out. What they did not yet understand was exactly what part of the (twisting) means was necessary to get the (candy-yielding) end.

Given the importance of regular visual assurances that the game is still a game, it is perhaps not surprising that successful three-way rough-and-tumble play is much rarer than play between two dogs. As with conversation, something is missed—a play signal here, an attention-getter there—when everyone is speaking at once. Typically, only dogs familiar with each other pull off threesomes.

Another indication of the dog's perception of fairness comes from a new experiment demonstrating that dogs who see another dog getting a reward for doing an act—shaking a paw on command—but who do not themselves get rewarded for the same act eventually refuse to shake anymore. (No rewarded dog was moved by the clear injustice of the situation to share his earned bounty with his unlucky partner, though …)

As when she spent a quarter hour digging a hole in which to drop a treasured rawhide chew, but in digging actually created more of a pile than a hole: the result being that the rawhide was actually not stashed secretly away, but proudly and conspicuously displayed (itself probably the result of an imperfectly-honed caching instinct). In like manner, one might wonder if she experiences it as ironic (or as magic) when I make a show of unfurling my fingers in front of her and the treat I had in my palm is missing.

This could be another way of accounting for Rico's ability to pick the toy with the unfamiliar name out of a pile of toys: he selected the toy that he did not recognize.

With age, dogs sleep more but enter paradoxical—REM—sleep less than in youth. Scientists have theories but no final explanation for why dogs dream—and they dream vividly, if their eye fluttering, claw curling, tail twitching, and yelping in sleep is any indication. As in humans, one theory names dreams the accidental result of paradoxical sleep, which itself is a time of bodily restoration; alternatively, dreams might function as a time to practice, in the safety of one's imagination, future social interactions and physical feats or to review interactions and feats past.

When animals pass the test, skeptics highlight the logical fallacy of the conclusion: that self-aware humans use a mirror to examine ourselves does not imply that using a mirror requires self-awareness. When animals fail the test, the debate goes the other way: there is no good evolutionary reason why animals should examine something non-irritating on their heads, even if they recognized themselves. In either event, the mirror test continues to be the best test thus far developed for self-awareness, and one that uses simple equipment to boot.

I do not know if the origin of the myth of dog years—that dogs live the equivalent of seven years for every one of our years—has ever been cracked. I'd guess that it is a backward extrapolation from the length of the expected lifetime of humans (seventy+ years) to the expected lifetime of dogs (ten to fifteen). The analogy is more convenient than it is true. There is no real life-length equivalence except that we both are born and die. Dogs develop at lightning speed, walking and eating on their own in their first two months; human infants take over a year. By a year, most dogs are accomplished social actors, able to navigate dog and human worlds easily. The average child might be there by four or five. Then dog development slows, while human development skyrockets. If committed to the comparison, one could make a case for a sliding scale ratio: around 10 to 1 in their first two years, then diminishing to more like 2 to 1 in their last years. But the truly committed should consider the critical-period windows, the performance on cognitive tests, the diminishment of sensory capacities with age, and the lifespans of different breeds in their calculus.

This is similar to what has been called ontogenetic ritualization: the co-shaping by individuals of a behavior over time, until even the very initial part of the behavior carries meaning for them. In humans, an eyebrow-raise from one friend to another can take the place of a spoken commentary; as we've seen, among dogs a quick head-raise might replace an entire play bow.

Which some wolves instinctively do: even as young cubs they burrow their noses into a patch of land, drop a bone, nose-burrow some more, then proudly leave their poor excuse of a hole with a bone obviously visible. As adults they refine the behavior and do retrieve cached food—although there is no data about whether the retrieval is time-sensitive.

The medieval policy seems ridiculous to presume that dogs merit lawful consideration. It may seem equally ridiculous that our modern policy presumes that dogs do not: we still kill dogs who mortally wound a human—but now we call the dogs "dangerous" and do not bother to put them on trial (though their owners might be tried).

The command varies from owner to owner—from no! to the recently popular leave it! Each is fundamentally a negation: a sharp-sounding grammatical flourish that can be applied concurrently to any behavior to make it off-limits.

For a horse, releasing pressure on the body is sufficiently pleasurable as to be able to be used as a reinforcement in training. Perhaps it would be the same with dogs who startle at the feeling of a hand pressed firmly on their head.

As Temple Grandin has similarly noted with cows and pigs, causing the meat industry to alter the paths the animals walk into the slaughterhouse. For the industry, her work is useful in promoting less stressed, and thus better-tasting meat. For the animals, they are presumably spared from some added anxiety as they travel—one hopes unknowingly—toward their deaths.

To pull a dog from ardent sniffing is the same for him as being yanked away from a scene just as soon as you turn your eyes to it.

Clicker training tries to address this dissonance of our different "moments" and our different senses of what the dog is "doing" at any moment. Trainers use a small device that allows them to make a sharp, distinct click! when the dog has done a desired behavior and can expect an imminent reward. The click helps make a human moment salient to a dog; left to his own devices, the dog parcels up his life differently.

This might seem a good time for a young dog to meet his new owner. There is surprisingly little good science about the timing of this introduction. The forces determining when people adopt dogs are more often than not influenced by everything but the best age for a puppy to meet a person. Many states have laws prohibiting sale of puppies prior to 8 weeks, to protect against selling physically immature animals. Breeders have their own interests in mind in selling their charges. But social recognition requires experience. From two weeks to four months dogs are particularly open to learning about others (of any species). No dog should be taken away from his mother before he is weaned (which can be from six to ten weeks), but dogs should be exposed to humans as well as to littermates.

We are generally enthralled by creatures that look like us in at least some way. Notably, not every and not all animals are effused over, taken in, or anthropomorphized: monkeys and dogs regularly are, but eels and manta rays rarely are. "That barnacle just loves hanging out with me and my boat" is a sentence never uttered. The difference between the monkey and the barnacle is part evolutionary, part familiarity. An infant monkey curling a hand around a mother's finger easily evokes the same poignant scene between human mothers and infants. By contrast, however much a young eel may be yearning for contact as it slides toward its mother, its lack of limbs gets in the way of our calling the scene "touching"—or even intentional.

Edward O. Wilson, the naturalist and sociobiologist who studied ant populations in amazing detail, proposed that we have an inborn, species-typical tendency to affiliate with other animals: what has been called the "biophilia hypothesis." The notion is attractive and also much debated. It is, notably, difficult to disprove such a hypothesis. Regardless, I consider it the scientist's way of saying what Woody Allen did.

In studies with puppies, researchers found that those distressed at separation from their mothers and littermates vocalized somewhat less if given a towel or soft toy (a stuffed blue lamb). If there is knowledge to be gained here it is that a soft familiar object can be a salve (hence, in children, the power of teddy bears); in fact, such an object may reduce some of the unease dogs may manifest at being left at home alone.

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Neither are these methods benign, in some cases: there is the famous case of the zebra finches, captured and harmlessly leg-banded for identification as the researchers observed their mating tactics. Lo and behold, the only feature that they found was predictive of a male's success at breeding was the color of his leg band. Female zebra finches apparently swoon for a red band on a fella (males prefer black-banded females).