Inside of a Dog

Inside Of A Dog

 Umwelt: From the Dog's Point of Nose
 This morning I was awakened by Pump coming over to the bed
and sniffing emphatically at me, millimeters away, her whiskers
grazing my lips, to see if I was awake or alive or me. She punctuates her
rousing with an exclamatory sneeze directly in my
face. I open my eyes and she is gazing at me, smiling, panting a
hello.
 Go look at a dog. Go on, look maybe at one lying near you
right now, curled around his folded legs on a dog bed, or
sprawled on his side on the tile floor, paws flitting through the pasture of
a dream. Take a good look and now forget everything you know about this or
any dog.
 This is admittedly a ridiculous exhortation: I don't really
expect that you could easily forget even the name or favored
food or unique profile of your dog, let alone everything about
him. I think of the exercise as analogous to asking a newcomer
to meditation to enter into satori, the highest state, on the first go: aim
for it, and see how far you get. Science, aiming for objectivity, requires
that one becomes aware of prior prejudices and personal perspective. What
we'll find, in looking at dogs through a scientific lens, is that some of
what we think we know about dogs is entirely borne out; other things that
appear patently true are, on closer examination, more doubtful than we
thought. And by looking at our dogs from another perspective (from the
perspective of the dog) we can see new things that don't naturally occur to
those of us encumbered with human brains. So the best way to begin
understanding dogs is by forgetting what we think we know.
 The first things to forget are anthropomorphisms. We see,
talk about, and imagine dogs' behavior from a human-biased
perspective, imposing our own emotions and thoughts on these
furred creatures. Of course, we¹ll say, dogs love and desire; of
course they dream and think; they also know and understand us,
feel bored, get jealous, and get depressed. What could be a more
natural explanation of a dog staring dolefully at you as you leave the house
for the day than that he is depressed that you're going?
 The answer is: an explanation based in what dogs actually
have the capacity to feel, know, and understand. We use these
words, these anthropomorphisms, to help us make sense of
dogs' behavior. Naturally, we are intrinsically prejudiced toward human
experiences, which leads us to understand animals' experiences only to the
extent that they match our own. We remember stories that confirm our
descriptions of animals and conveniently forget those that do not. And we do
not hesitate to assert "facts" about apes or dogs or elephants or any animal
without proper evidence. For many of us, our interaction with
non-pet animals begins and ends with our staring at them at
zoos or watching shows on cable TV. The amount of useful
information we can get from this kind of eavesdropping is limited: such a
passive encounter reveals even less than we get from glancing in a
neighbor's window as we walk by. At least the neighbor is of our own
species.