THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Yesterday something happened with Willie that reminded me of something most of us already know. . .  the fact that our dogs are continually trying, often desperately, to communicate with us. They can’t use words, they don’t write letters and, thank god, they can’t twitter. But they live in constant contact with members of another species, a species that can either ignore their efforts, or fine tune their abilities to translate what their dog is trying to “say.”

Here’s what happened with Willie: Lassie,  Will and I had just finished a lovely country walk with friends (two and four-legged) and were chatting outside of the house of the mutual friend who owns the property. Picture: three people talking outside of the house, three dogs at their feet, and Willie, the 4th dog, hanging out, fifteen feet away. Willie began to leave the area and walk down a path edged with tall prairie grasses. He quickly moved out of sight, and since there was a wandering, unaccompanied two year-old child in the area, I wanted to keep an eye on him. I called him back and asked him to stand and stay. He did, until I turned my head for a few seconds toward my friends. When I looked back, Willie was gone. I called him back again, told him to sit and stay.

You guessed it. The second I turned my head, Willie was gone again. This continued one more time, which was atypical of Will. Heaven knows he has his problems, but this isn’t one of them. I called him back again, a tiny bit frustrated but mostly confused. Will came up the path and I said something like “Will? What’s going on?”

I wish more than I can say that I could show you a picture of his face when I said that. (WARNING: Anthropomorphic attribution to follow.) What I saw in his eyes was an honest, pleading look that I read as “PLEASE PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME STAY HERE.” His look was so intense I practically have tears in my eyes writing about it. (Okay, I actually did get teary as I typed that, but just for a minute and not very much and just don’t tell anybody, okay?)

“Willie, do you want to go to the car?” I asked, and he turned and ran to the car. I followed him through the prairie grasses, and found him at the car door, looking back and forth between it and me, like Lassie in a movie with Timmy trapped in the well. I put him in his crate and walked back to Lassie and my friends. As I did, I remembered that TWO YEARS AGO, the dog we had walked with today went after Willie over a stick in exactly the same area. There was no contact at all, but an impressive bark/charge that clearly scared Will (he urinated as he rolled over submissively). There has been nothing between the dogs ever since, but they used to play lots of chase games together, and now they don’t.

Will, alpha-wanna-be that he is, will always be a dog with a lot of fears, and as he matures, he tries to hard to find ways to stay out of trouble. He avoids situations of conflict and he play bows frequently (I taught him to do that to help him relax; he does it often now, I think because he’s learned it is a way of managing tension). I can’t help but think what it would have been like for him if I had interpreted his behavior after the walk as a “challenge to my dominance.” What a nightmare for him, and what a betrayal of our relationship that would have been.

This story reminds me of the first time I saw Sandra Davis and Pepper do freestyle. As the music began, Pepper left her side for a few feet and raised his nose up into the air. Instead of correcting him, Sandra stopped the music and said “Pepper, what is it?” She let him move across the floor, sniffing something in the air intently. When he appeared satisfied she called him back, cued the music to start again and blew away the crowd with an awesome performance. I never will forget that reminder to us all to respect our dogs, and to listen to what they are trying to communicate. [By the way, I talked about this once in a seminar in New Mexico, and someone in the audience said “Sandra is right here!”  And there she was, in the audience, and I got to thank her in person. What an honor.)

Meanwhile, back at the farm, I continue my crazed, obsessive gathering of summer’s bounty. There are now 12 quarts of black raspberries in the freezer, along with heaven knows how many packages of strawberries, rhubarb and now cherries that I picked from a generous friend’s tree yesterday. This weekend I’m going after Blueberries at an organic farm down the road. I made a Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry pie yesterday. This ‘eating locally and seasonally’ sure is fun and ecologically a good thing to do, but it’s not helping me control my waistline. Tonight I take a rest for harvesting, and take Will to work sheep at a friends. Oh boy, she has a huge field so we can try a 300 yard outrun. Oh boy, can’t wait, I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s Will and Lassie this morning, chewing on their stuffed Kongs, and illustrating for all the world to see that I didn’t vacuum the rug this weekend.

I’m working on an article for The APDT Chronicle on what are called “secondary emotions” in non-human animals. I have an article in the latest issue (May/June 2009) about “primary emotions” like fear and anger, and am following up with a smaller one about emotions like jealousy, guilt and empathy. I guess it’s obvious from my last big book, For the Love of a Dog, that I’m fascinated by the topic of emotions in other animals, and equally fascinated by our perception of them.

Almost by definition, primary emotions are accepted as occurring in a wide variety of species; and yet, I’ve had numerous people disagree with the concept that animals can experience some of them, with the most concern about attributing anger to non-humans. (As I’ve written earlier, anger is an extremely primitive, basic emotion, and denying the existence of it in other mammals is hard to justify once you know the biology behind it, but it seems to be important for people to try.)

There is much more controversy and confusion over what are called the “secondary emotions” in animals, which are generally argued to exist only in humans, and are believed to require complex cognitive abilities often uniquely attributed to us, including self awareness and what’s called “theory of mind.” These emotions, like jealousy, empathy, pride, guilt and shame can be further categorized as “self-conscious emotions” like jealousy and “self-conscious evaluative emotions” like guilt and shame. The “evaluative” modifier refers to the requirement that the experience of guilt or shame is based on evaluating a behavior against a rule or standard that is understood by the individual experiencing it.

I’m reading an interesting article related to all this in Cognition and Emotion (2008, 22(1), 3-20) by Morris, Doe and Godsell about secondary emotions and the perceptions of pet owners. The authors do an excellent job summarizing the controversy, arguing that secondary emotions are not necessarily uniquely human, and describing a study in which pet owners were asked if a list of primary and secondary emotions were observed in their pet (including dogs, cats, horses, birds, rats, rabbits….). In a second study, they asked owners to describe the situations in which the emotion of jealousy occurred. (”Can you give examples of the situations in which your dog gets jealous?”) Needless to say, this is tricky stuff–publishing an article in a scientific journal about what owners think of their pets–and in my opinion, the authors did a great job with it. I especially like their thoughtful discussion about the value (and problems) of owner reports, including the obvious fact that just because someone thinks their dog is jealous doesn’t mean that their dog is jealous.

They address these issues extremely well, and conclude by, in part, arguing that the behavior described by the owners (as the basis for their perception of jealousy) are the same behaviors described as jealousy in humans. In their study the context of the presumed occurrence of jealousy always involved a triad of people and animals, in which one animal attempted to divert attention away from another by pushing between the other two or vocalizing. Thus, they focus on the behavior of the animals, showing that the “jealous” animals did exactly what humans do when we label their behavior as motivated by jealousy. They correctly argue that this is not proof that non-human animals experience jealousy, but that it is important information that suggests we should at least seriously consider it. Here here.

Note that for this second study they focused on what I think of as the “simplest” of secondary emotions: jealousy. I’ve long argued that jealousy is simply a form of anger (”I Want It, You Have It and I Don’t and I”m Angry about It.) It seems logical to me that the other secondary emotions are indeed the result of a more complicated type of cognition . . . but, what do you think? Can dogs be guilty (fyi, I’m not saying they can’t, but think this is the emotion most often MIS-attributed to dogs). Can dogs feel shame? True Empathy? I’d love to get a conversation started about this….

By the way, the study I cited above found differences in secondary emotions attributed to animals based on species: Over 70% of dog owners reported jealousy and guilt in their dogs and over 70% of horse owners reported jealousy and pride. Interesting, hey? Is this a result of our expectations? Mis-reading their facial expressions? A true species difference?

Meanwhile, back at the farm: Spring is in all its glory and I honestly don’t know how it could be more beautiful. Here’s our giant Lilac bush, back lit by the Sunburst Locust and the Oak/Hickory forest across the road:

Redford is now safely  ensconced at Jim and Peg’s beautiful farm. It can be dangerous to put two unfamiliar rams together; they are highly territorial and can injure or even kill each other. We talked at length about how to make the transition safe: the standard method is to put them together in a pen so small that they can’t back up and ram into each other with any force. Peg also got two “ram shields” that block their forward vision and are reputed to prevent aggression. She thought she’d use them once she let the rams out into a bigger pen after a few days–she’s had rams stand side by side in small pens for a few days, and then immediately back up and shake the ground with the jack hammer-like force of their bony heads smashing together.

After thinking about it, she decided to put them in adjacent small pastures at first to let them become familiar. I agreed with the plan, and with a bit of “loading-into-the-truck” drama, we got Redford settled in a small pasture with a couple of wethers (neutered males) beside the Katahdin ram, who I call Chili Bean.

Peg went to check on them a bit later, and found that Redford and friends had crawled on their knees through a low, tiny hole in the fence…  and cuddled up to Chili. Here are the boys now, best of friends and potentially amused at all of our concerns. . .(could that be a secondary emotion in sheep, best labeled “amusement brought on by the behavior of humans”?)

xxx

Your comments have been so interesting about the ‘fair’ and/or “jealous” issue that I thought I’d respond in another post for everyone to read. I’ve included some of your comments, because they add so richly to the discussion.

First off, I agree with many who’ve commented that we need to be very cautious about making interpretations from the results of this study. The bottom line is that while the dog’s responsiveness degraded, as expected, if the food reinforcement was taken away, it degraded faster if another dog was observed receiving reinforcement. That was the “inequality aversion” that the authors mentioned (and yes, I believe it was the media that added “fairness” and “jealousy.” The dogs also could receive one of two rewards, brown bread or sausage. While a similar primate study found that the subjects responded differently to a ‘high quality’ versus a ‘low quality’ reward, the dogs are described as not caring. I’m especially cautious of interpreting this result as a meaningful species difference: who knows if the difference between what the primates got was the same as the difference between brown bread and sausage? (Have you ever had real European brown bread? I’d fly across the Atlantic just to get some if I could afford it… But perhaps it is a species difference in that dogs are scavengers and many of them love just about any kind of food. One of my BC’s, Pippy Tay, loved the sunflower seed shells under the bird feeder. The shells. LOVED them. Go figure.)

Here are some of the many interesting comments re the ‘fairness’ versus ‘jealousy’ issue:

Dee Says:

. . . in my American mind jealousy has to do with a perceived loss of interaction or affection, while fairness has to do with the inequality of reward. In this instance, and at least at first glance, the dogs seem to be refusing to work because of the inequality in earnings/rewards rather than protesting that the other dog was receiving more attention, but that’s where this study becomes very tricky…

It seemed like this was a good time to look up the dictionary definitions: Here is the result from Word Dictionary (my beloved huge dictionary is at home, I’ll look it up there over the holidays):

JEALOUS “feeling bitter and unhappy because of another’s advantages, possessions or luck.

FAIRNESS not exhibiting any bias, and therefore reasonable or impartial.

This fits a bit with what I had been thinking; Here’s my take on it: I think of jealousy as a relatively simple kind of emotion. As I said in the book For the Love of a Dog, although some scientists think jealousy is an emotion that requires “Theory of Mind,” or being able to think about the thoughts of others, I’ve always thought that it was relatively simple version of the core emotion of anger: “You’ve got it, I want it, I don’t have it, I’m not happy about that at all.” It seems reasonable to label that as a kind of frustration, which is a kind of anger, don’t you think? Note what Jennifer said in relation to that:

Jennifer Says:
My inclination is to say that the study may have been measuring something else other than the dog’s attitude in response to the other dog being rewarded…….Frustration is a far less sophisticated emotion than either jealousy or fairness (which I believe are fundamentally different from one another) and, thus, in the spirit of assuming the least complicated explanation as necessary to explain an event, I’m going to side with frustration.

So interesting… is jealousy more complicated than frustration? I’m not sure. I completely agree that ‘fairness’ is another issue. My interpretation of fairness leans toward the concept of social justice. Of course, we use the term in at least two ways: “That’s not FAIR!” a child might say if his brother or sister gets something bigger or better. Surely that’s the simplest version of ‘fairness’ but it’s hard to separate it out from jealousy or frustration. But what if one child (or dog) watched two OTHER children or dogs getting, or not getting an expected reward. Then what would they think? It seems to me that the most sophisticated version of fairness would relate not so much to how one is treated oneself, but how others are treated, according to some social code. Does that make sense? (That’s the study I’d love to see… how would a dog respond if he saw another being treated inequitably?!)

There are lots of other interesting comments, don’t hesitate to read them all in the earlier post, and add yours here or on the first one. Meanwhile, I’m not sure if Lassie’s chinese medicine veterinarian will make it out in yet ANOTHER snow storm. At least it is no longer 10 below and windy. Poor Lassie urinated in the house yesterday morning. I took her outside just to pee and she looked at me and ran to the door. It was brutal, truly. It’s been quite a winter already, and it’s not even the end of December yet. (Didn’t winter just start the day before yesterday? Geeez.)

Here’s a photo from last winter, (and we have MORE snow so far than we did at the same time last winter!)

But here’s some things to warm your heart: first, Jim’s famous Christmas cookies, that we decorated in yet another snow storm last week:

x

And least but not least, have you seen this? A friend sent me the url, and I can’t imagine a better holiday present to dog lovers. Here’s hoping that you and yours are able to forget about life’s troubles for a few days, and envelop yourself in love, care and gratitude. HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM TRISHA, LASSIE AND WILL.

AMAZING HOLIDAY DOG VIDEO!

I’m just back from the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I was one of several speakers discussing the Human/Animal Bond at NIH’s STEP Forum, a monthly meeting for all NIH staff designed to educate staff about issues relating to science in the public health. It was very much worth the travel; the talks given by zoo-anthropologist Dr. James Serpell, Dr. Sandra Barker and Dr. Joan Esnayra were each worth the trip alone. Dr. Serpell discussed historical and cross-cultural aspects of the human-animal bond, and dispelled the myths that “pets” are only luxuries indulged in by industrial societies and that people who love animals do so from some social pathology that prevents them from “normal” relationships with other people. His books In the Company of Animals and The Domestic Dog are classics, you might want to look them up.

Dr. Barker, a Professor of Psychiatry and active participant using animal in therapy, spoke about the impact of Animal Assisted Interventions (distinguishing between Animal Assisted Therapy, in which the animal works with a licensed therapist toward a specific goal for the client and Animal Assisted Activities, in which animals are brought in to comfort and alleviate stress–both vital efforts) and her ongoing research projects at VCU to elucidate the context in which AAT  and AAA can be clinically valuable.

Dr. Esnayra founded the Psychiatric Service Dog Society and gave a compelling speech about the effective use of assistance dogs for those with mental illness (instead of physical disabilities). She is absolutely up front about living herself with Bipolar Disorder and PTSD, and has 2 beautiful (and beautifully behaved) Rhodesian Ridgebacks who work with her (and attended the forum). We also met Mike Townsend and Donna Dellaglio, who have a Helper Monkey who has ‘changed their lives’ . Mike has severe MS, is confined to a wheel chair and no longer has the use of his arms. Kathy, their capuchin, allows him to watch television, turn lots of equipment off and on, and most importantly, use the computer. “Kathy gave Mike his life back” is a pretty inspiring thing to hear at the end of a morning on the importance of animals in our lives.

I spoke second, after Serpell, arguing that the profound love that many of us have for our dogs is a biological phenomenon that deserves more scientific attention. In my talk I speculated, as I did in the book For the Love of a Dog, that one of the reasons we become so intensely attached to dogs is that dogs have such expressive faces and as Darwin argued over a century ago, their expressions of fear, anger and happiness are very much like our own.

Those comments were soundly criticized by a veterinary behaviorist in the audience who argued that I was being problematically anthropomorphic to 1) make any association between the expressions of people and the expressions of dogs and 2) use the word ‘anger’ in association with dogs. I can’t quote the person exactly, but the point was that anger is a human construct, and it is wrong to attribute it to dogs.

I was (and am) fascinated by her criticisms. First off, the evidence continues to grow about the continuum of the biology of emotion in mammals.. we share the same basic neuro-anatomy related to emotions, the same neuro-physiology related to emotions (serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin to name a few) and many of the same behavioral reactions. Emotions are such primitive things, it always interests me that ascribing them to non-human animals makes people uncomfortable. Of course, there’s a huge difference between how an emotion is processed in the brain of a human and that of a dog, but the glass is half full as well as half empty, and the biology of emotions is far more similar in dogs and people than it is different. In addition, I’d love to claim credit for the notion that the expressions of emotion on the faces of dogs and people are related, but since Darwin wrote about it over a hundred years ago I don’t think I’d better! Unless you believe that people and other animals have virtually no biological connection of any kind, it is sound science to compare the expressions of 2 highly social mammals who use subtle visual signals to maintain social harmony.

I am especially interested in the expressed concern that anger is “human construct.” I’ve heard that before from several different fields (mainly psychology and from other veterinary behaviorists), and yet… anger, or ‘rage’ as it is usually called in the literature, is considered one of the most basic and primal of emotions. Jaak Panskeep, the author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions calls rage one of the “core” emotions of all mammals.  Truly, you can’t attribute fear to a dog and deny then that a dog could get angry… those two emotions are too closely tied together in so many, many ways.

I believe completely and without question that dogs can experience anger, the biology to support that is overwhelming. However.. and this is a big HOWEVER… I also think that anger is one of the emotions that people most mis-understand in dogs. Owners often tell trainers or behaviorists that their dog defecated on the carpet because he was “angry” that he’d been left, when the motivating emotions was either fear of being left alone, or none in particular, because the dog simply wasn’t house trained!  I suspect that although dogs can get angry, (for example when frustrated by being pulled away from the window while barking at a passer by), dogs actually experience anger very very little compared to humans. I write more about this in For the Love of a Dog… and am inspired to write more in a magazine article somewhere, sometime . . .

But right now I’d better get home. Lassie and Willie have been waiting for me to come home and start the holidays with them, and I don’t want them to get angry at me if I come home late. (Please, oh please know that I am kidding and that no, honestly, truly, I really do not believe that my dogs will experience anger if I get home later than I am hoping to. . .

Meanwhile, have a great holiday.  I hope you have a lot to be thankful for. I certainly do and I am overwhelmed with gratitude because of it.

I am fascinated by your posts about differences in training with male and female dogs (or not.) I’ll keep reading, and in a few weeks I’ll summarize what you’ve all said on another post. But just to add to the fire, I want to ask another question about male and female dogs, but this time about the sex of your “forever” dog.

Here’s the question: If you have, or have ever had, a one-in-a-million dog, a dog who who you think of as our soul mate or your “forever dog,” was he or she the same sex as you, or the opposite? Again, I’m not saying nothing til I hear from you.

A related question is: do you think you have a different social relationship with same sex and different sex dogs? Does sex have any role in how you feel about dogs? I will tell you some thoughts of mine about this one: It feels, in some vague, difficult to articulate way, that I relate to my male dogs slightly differently than I do to my females. Perhaps it is all cultural projections, but my forever dog, Cool Hand Luke, was without question a “guy” in my mind. He is the dog, after all, that I said “.. by the next day, Luke and I had fallen in love…”. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved some of my female dogs so much it hurts. Right now, my Lassie will be turning 15 in a few weeks and my love for her makes my heart so tender I can feel it swelling as I write. But she is very much a “girl” in my mind… So, what do you think? Is this all foolish anthropomorphism?

On the home front (the freezing cold home front, it was 14 degrees this morning), I’ve been baby sitting Harriet, a poor old girl who was surrendered to the local shelter, determined to have both Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma and kidney failure, and eventually ended up in the care of a 4th year vet student, Jenna Bueley, who is probably the dearest and most amazingly caring person alive when it comes to old, sick dogs. She’s the one who helped take such incredible care of Tulip in her last year of life. Jenna had to leave on an externship, so Harriet came to live at the farm for a few days. It’s a bit cold in the farm house, so we brought out the blankets…..