For the Love of a Dog (6 page)

The examples above illustrate why many people consider anthropomorphism dangerous. Being anthropomorphic originally meant ascribing human characteristics to the gods; the word is now used any time humans try to understand the world by putting themselves in the place of another animal. The attempt is considered such a sin in some circles that “anthropomorphism” might as well be a dirty word. Luckily, it’s a bit too long to be a satisfying expletive. “You anthropomorphic idiot” has a certain ring to it, but it’s not going to replace any four-letter words.

I, along with legions of others, was taught in zoology and psychology classes to avoid anthropomorphism like the plague. However, as often happens in our species, many took a reasonable perspective to extremes, and began to speak as though comparisons between animals and people were always incorrect. To them, any property that seemed part and parcel of who we are, like thinking, planning, and even feeling, became off-limits for nonhuman animals. However, although rationality and reason are the traits most often considered unique to our species, there’s a surprising lack of reason when you look at the “human” traits the skeptics
have
been willing to attribute to other animals.

Many people who warn about the dangers of anthropomorphism don’t hesitate to talk about animals as being “selfish” or “competitive.” It seems that the attribution of negative human traits to animals rarely receives criticism. Animals can be “manipulative” or “selfish,” but heaven help you if you talk about animals as “affectionate” or “conciliatory.” The primatologist Frans de Waal was roundly criticized when he first described “reconciliation behavior” in common chimpanzees, even though the evidence for it was overwhelming. Even seemingly
neutral terms can make some scientists uncomfortable. Two excellent scientists, Donald Owings and Eugene Morton, whose work I greatly respect, recently argued that it is wrong to look at animal communication, like the song of a whale or the whine of a puppy, as “information transfer.” That is an anthropomorphic concept, they argue. Rather, we should discuss animal communication as examples of “assessment, manipulation or management.” I’m very much in agreement with the idea that communication is often about trying to get others to do what you want. But I don’t see why the terms “manipulation” or “management” aren’t anthropomorphic, when “information transfer” is.

Another example of our hesitancy to attribute positive motivations to animals occurred in 1996, when a three-year-old boy fell into a gorilla enclosure at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Binti Jua, an eight-year-old female gorilla, picked up the child, cradled him in her arms, and then gently handed him over to one of the keepers. The story hit the national media, and within hours, experts were interviewed about this “amazing” event. Some argued that it was foolishly anthropomorphic to attribute kindness or compassion to Binti, and that she was simply doing what she’d been taught to do by her keepers.
⁷
In his book
The Ape and the Sushi Master
, Frans de Waal points out that we’d never dismiss the similar actions of a human child, even if she, too, had been taught to be gentle and nurturing by her parents. What Binti did is typical for gorillas, not in any way unusual. Gorillas are generally quiet, gentle vegetarians, who spend most of the day munching on wild celery, benevolently tolerating the antics of the youngsters. It would be a different story altogether if the boy had fallen into a pride of lions and a young female picked him up in her jaws, walked through the pride, and handed him over to a keeper. Little boys look like dinner to lions, but to gorillas they look like, well…little boys. What’s most amazing to many of us was not Binti’s behavior, but the outcry from some that attributing something akin to human compassion to a gorilla was hopelessly romantic and unscientific.

It’s not just scientists who appear to be more comfortable using negative rather than positive terms to describe animals. Dog owners,
even those who love their dogs, do it too. Millions of hapless dogs have been yelled at or even beaten because we so readily attribute our species’ worst traits to them. How quick we are to project our worst attributes onto dogs. Think how rich you’d be if you had a dollar for every time someone said “He’s doing it just to spite me!” or “He
knows
better than that!” Well, maybe your dog does “know” not to jump up onto visitors, but haven’t
you
ever forgotten your manners when you got excited, or forgotten what you wanted to say when you were nervous? What did “knowing” have to do with it when you dropped your fork at your in-laws’ house during Thanksgiving dinner? Did you do it on purpose, to spite your new spouse? I doubt it. Why are we so willing to attribute willful disobedience to dogs, but unwilling to attribute to them things like anxiety or confusion that compromise our own performances?

Perhaps the answer lies in what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. It seems we humans tend to assume that the behavior of individuals we don’t know is based more on their underlying dispositions than on external influences. This is best illustrated by one enlightening study, in which students spoke to a woman who was told to be either warm and friendly, or cold and aloof. Half of the students were told that the woman was behaving one way or another because she had been instructed to act that way by the experimenters. The other half was told nothing that would explain her behavior. Amazingly, both groups of students rated the aloof woman as being
inherently
unfriendly, even if they’d been told she was just acting. It turns out that we all do this; it’s almost impossible to avoid. You may know your best friend well enough to know that her rude remarks to a salesclerk are a result of the terrible day she’s had, but if you see a stranger doing the same thing you’re likely to assume it’s because she’s a nasty person. Sadly, dogs can’t tell us that they’ve had a bad day, or that their hips hurt, and too often we assume the worst about them.

Of course, some dog owners go to the opposite extreme. Just yesterday I talked with a good friend who expressed her belief that dogs are the epitome of absolute love. I share her view that dogs can give us a pure and uncomplicated kind of love, but I don’t believe that dogs channel love, and nothing but love, every moment of every day. To imagine that everything a dog does is motivated by love and compassion is as inaccurate as adopting the other extreme. I had a client who
explained that the scars on her arms were “love bites” from her eighty-pound Lab. After watching the dog show no regard for her personal space, slam into her as she walked across the room, throw himself into her face, and repeatedly bite her arm for attention, I had a slightly different interpretation.

Either way, surely what’s best for our dogs is to find a balance between rejecting all “human” traits in our dogs and projecting our fondest dreams or worst fears onto them. It seems to me that the question of what parts of our mental life we share with dogs is a “glass half full, glass half empty” issue. Of course, our subjective experience of the world is profoundly different from that of our dogs, but we share so very much with them—surely it’s bad science to ignore that. The glass may be half empty, but it’s a big glass, and that means there’s a lot of liquid in it that shouldn’t be ignored.

An increasing number of scientists
are
looking at the glass as half full, taking the stand that being anthropomorphic isn’t always all bad. How else are we to begin, they argue, except with our own experience? Surely it is reasonable, when animals have similarly organized brains, similar physiologies, and similar behaviors, to speculate that, to some extent, they might be having similar experiences. What’s needed is a balanced perspective, in which we avoid imagining animals as mute, hairy versions of people, but continue to do all we can to understand how our experience compares with that of other animals. Not too long ago a scientist named Jacques Vauclair disagreed, saying, “Fortunately the principal aim of scientific study of the minds of other animals is not to find out what it is like to be a certain type of animal, but rather to clarify how mental states cause observable behavior.” But when asked why they began studying animal behavior, the participants at an annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society replied that their primary motivation was to see the world through the eyes of other animals. This motivation has inspired thousands of scientists to work exceptionally hard, for relatively little money, usually in mud, rain, or tropical heat, all because they want to expand their understanding of the universe. Accordingly, we dog lovers shouldn’t apologize for wanting to know what it is like to be a dog. Trying to imagine what life is like from the perspective of another animal is one of the abilities that might actually be unique to humans—why should we be ashamed of it? Of course, we’ll never completely know what it is like to be a dog, or a warthog or
a grasshopper. We’ll never
really
know what it is like to be another human either, but surely that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

There’s no question in anyone’s mind that Tammy Ogle was rescued from near death by the actions of her dogs. The story was so compelling that the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association inducted the dogs into their Hero Hall of Fame in 2004. For what it’s worth, my own interpretation of what happened is that Double, Lily, and Golly were well aware that she was badly injured, and were also aware, in some way, that she needed help. Rather than being overly romantic, this seems like the simplest explanation. Science may get complicated, but all budding scientists are taught that in the absence of certainty, the best explanation is the simplest one. It seems far more complicated, even unwieldy, to imagine a world in which Ogle’s dogs were reflexively responding to external events and had no awareness of her injuries. As highly social animals, dogs are one of the few species in which individuals will sacrifice their lives to save a member of the pack.
⁸
They are predators who hunt cooperatively, so it is part of their biological makeup to collaborate. They evolved to be problem solvers, team players, and concerned, nurturing elders who take care of needy pack members. It is not foolish romanticism that suggests that Tammy’s dogs were trying to help her. It’s good biology
.

It is foolish, however, to imagine that Tammy’s dogs engaged in a sophisticated analysis of the problem, with their minds working exactly as ours might have in the same situation. My own belief is that both of the explanations we examined at the beginning of the chapter have merit, although I suspect the truth is closer to the former rather than the latter. It’s true that the more altruistic explanation makes me feel better, but that doesn’t make it wrong. The fact that the story of Tammy and her dogs makes some of us feel all soft and melty inside doesn’t mean that our interpretation of it automatically violates the tenets of good science. Just because an explanation makes us feel good doesn’t mean it can’t be true. It’s a foolish fallacy that emotion is the enemy of reason, as we’ll see later on in the book. I will continue to believe that Tammy’s dogs knew she needed help because it’s a
reasonable explanation for their behavior, and because I watched my own Luke, the dog who started this book, save my life by risking his own
.

I’ll never know exactly what he was thinking when he scrambled, unasked, over a tall wooden fence to save me from a horned sheep who was out for blood, but he’d worked sheep long enough to know he could’ve been badly injured himself. I know that he leaped over the fence on his own initiative, without me saying a word. He never did that before, and he never did it again. He went after the horned sheep just long enough for me to get to the gate, and then he bolted out behind me. And I know that as we lay panting and bleeding on the barn floor, both exhausted and exhilarated, we were two friends gulping oxygen and relief after our shared adventure. We may be members of different species, but what we share—what Tammy and her dogs share, and what so many of us share with all of our dogs—is surely greater than what we don’t
.

We may share a lot with dogs, including parallels in brain structures, the similarity of changes in brain chemistry and activation, and the similarities in facial expressions, but that isn’t enough to silence the naysayers who argue that animals like dogs can’t experience emotions. As recently as 1989, a philosopher named Peter Carruthers wrote that unless animals have the kind of consciousness that we do (and are thus able to “think about thinking”), they may have what look like emotions, but they can’t feel them. This is not a new perspective. In the 1600s, the philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were not only incapable of thinking or having emotions, but that they couldn’t even feel pain. He illustrated this principle by nailing live dogs to barn walls and eviscerating them. While the dogs writhed and screamed, he told the crowd of onlookers that their struggles were merely automatic movements of the body—no more felt by the dog than a clock feels the movement of its hands.

As horrific as this practice was, at least Descartes had the excuse of ignorance about the biology of emotion and sensation. That excuse is no longer available, but in spite of the current state of knowledge of the shared anatomy and physiology of emotions, a small number of educated people still resist the idea that animals experience the world
around them in ways similar to ours. Carruthers, the philosopher mentioned above, went on to argue that any concern about the “pains of brutes” (
brutes?
) is unethical. He says that nonhuman animals can’t actually feel anything, no matter how they behave, and so concern about them is unethical, because it takes time and money away from helping humans. This is a not a man I’ll be inviting to the farm to meet my dogs.

Others argue that although animals such as dogs may think and feel, their mental lives are inaccessible to us, and so there is no point in trying to understand what goes on inside their heads. If, these people argue, we can never
really
know what’s going on in our own minds, much less how a dog is feeling, then attempts to guess at it can never be more than speculation. Since good scientists aren’t supposed to settle for guesses, the argument goes, we should avoid that inquiry altogether and get on with collecting hard, solid facts.