THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Surely our mutual love of play is one of the reasons that dogs and people get along so well. As Karen London and I write in Play Together, Stay Together, “Play is powerful stuff. It influences so many things, including development, motivation, emotions, physiology, communication and behavior. Wow! That’s an impressive list.”

After years working as Applied Behaviorists, it was clear to Karen and I that play has the power to strengthen one’s relationship with a dog, or alternatively, to destroy it. You can use play to teach self control and good manners, or to inadvertently teach a lack of frustration tolerance and a lot of rude behavior that ends up getting a dog into trouble. You can use play to allow a dog to release tension, to learn a behavior incompatible with a problematic one, or to become wound up and hyper-reactive. The list goes on and on. Play is so important that one of my favorite seminars is one I did on play (Dog Play DVD), talking about both between dogs and between people and dogs.

So here’s the question, How do YOU play with your dog?

Willie and I have several different ways to play that have become incorporated into our daily routine. After the chores are done (dogs, cats, sheep and birds fed), Willie and I play with one of his favorite toys, usually an old plastic disc. Because of his shoulder we can’t play his favorite game of all, which is a classic run and fetch game (he’d love NOTHING more than to catch the frisbee in the air but those days are long over), so we’ve evolved into either 1) he runs around in silly circles with the frisbee in his mouth while I clap and encourage him, 2) I put him on a stay and throw it and then release him to go get it once it’s landed (but this only if there is a lot of snow on the ground, and only 3 to 4 times at most) or 3) he goes on a stay and then I hide his toy somewhere in the front yard. We always play some hide and seek games, because it gets him running around without stressing his shoulder.

Later in the day we play lots of object-related games in the house. Our favorite are tug games. It’s great exercise for him (and me) and we combine it with lots of exercises in self control like “get back” and “drop.” Then we’ll usually do a round of tricks, also in the evening. Usually earlier we’ll have been on a walk up the hill, and in better weather it might include working him on sheep, but that’s just not possible right now.

As I write this I realize that Willie loves two kinds of play: Object play with me (which he also plays by himself, tossing objects into the air and running around the house) and playing chase games with other dogs. Willie doesn’t like rough and tumble play or any kind of play with lots of contact with other dogs: he wants to run and run and run and run, and sometimes I think nothing in the world makes him happier. I wish I could run as fast as he. If I could, we’d dash around the pasture together like foals in springtime. Alas, I’m built like a sturdy hiker and not a runner, so that’s just never gonna’ happen.

I’m not the only one interested in how you play with your dog. There’s an interesting study ongoing at the The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Columbia University (Barnard College) about how people play with their dogs, and they (and I!) would love it if you would participate. The study, run by Alexandra Horowitz (author of The Inside of a Dog) and Julie Hecht (author of the fantastic blog, dogspies, will investigate interspecific play between people and dogs by collecting videos of people playing with their dogs for future analysis. You can learn more about it by going to a brief description of the study and what you have to do to participate.

I’m going to send in a video of me and Willie playing tug, because we both seem to enjoy it so much. It’s hard to choose though, because we do have so many different ways of playing. By the way, I’m focusing on Willie because Tootsie simply never plays with anything. At all. I don’t worry about it for a moment. She wants food and cuddles (in that order), and loves sniffing around outside now that she’s discovered she’s a spaniel (and eating cat poop now that she’s discovered she’s a dog). It would be lovely if she and Willie would play, but then, it would be lovely if I had arms like Angelina Jolie, and both of those have about equal chances of happening and both Tootsie and I are pretty happy anyway.

Here’s the video I’m sending to the Horowitz lab:

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Snow snow snow snow. Did I mention it’s snowing? It’s snowed here almost every other day, although yesterday it began as rain. That’s the worst possible weather scenario you can get this time of year: first it gets everything wet and super slippery, then it freezes into ice and then snows on top of it. It makes everything extra dangerous (the hospital emergency rooms were full to the brim from falls), and creates a hard coating of ice between layers of snow. But I’m still happy we are getting the moisture and that we have a real winter this year. I will admit I’m getting a little cabin fever-y, but I’m so glad that the earth is getting back some of the moisture that we missed last year. We were 12 inches down and in “severe drought” through fall, so I hope that all this snow will soak into the ground come mud season. But right now it’s all about the snow. We didn’t get the huge storm that is probably hitting the East coast right now, just got 3-4 inches yesterday, but it’s still basically a white and blue/grey world out there. I love the way the snow tops off the fence posts, like whipped cream on a sundae:

I wish everyone could have heard Alexandra Horowitz’s talk that introduced the conference this morning. She gave an articulate and thought provoking speech about the “umwelt” of the dog.  “Umwelt” is a term coined by Uexkull to mean the world of an organism, as it is sensed, perceived and interpreted. The point, which was well explained by Alexandra, is that each species sees the world differently, based on their perceptual abilities (ie, bees see colors we don’t, dogs smell things we don’t) and the parts of their environment that are relative to them. Some have said that because each species, literally, lives in different worlds, we can never really understand what it is like to be another animal. (This was famously addressed in philosopher’s Nagel’s oft-cited article, “What is it like to be a Bat?”)

Alexandra (and I) agree with that comment to some extent — how could we ever really know what it is like to have a nose like a dog’s? — , but not to the extent that we shouldn’t give it a good try. After all, we can’t really know what goes on in the mind of another person, but we can made inferences. We can use our knowledge about the sensory capabilities of an animal and how it interacts with its environment to know a tremendous amount about who it really is and what’s going on inside its mind.

Given what we know about dogs, as listed by Horowitz: The world, to them, is:

Incredibly smelly — imagine that a simple flower contains a history of the insects that have visited it, the people who picked it, the petal that is dying versus the petal that is just about to reach its peak.

Full of our Knees (go down to your dog’s height and look at the world from there.. boy is it different),

Running at a Different Rate — I love this concept of hers, that scents come and go at different rates than visual signals, disappearing, moving around, full of information about the past in a sensory world that make look the same to us but is constantly changing to a dog. She also reminded us that dogs see at a faster “flicker-fusion” rate than humans, such that their brains divide visual signals into smaller units than do ours. Could it be that they then are quicker to see movements when they begin than we? We do know that they are better at seeing movement than we are…

Full of Details — that may be irrelevant to us, like the scent on the carpet, the slime trail of slugs on a blade of grass.

Evaluated based on how a dog can relate to it: Can it fit in my mouth? Do I chew it or chase it? Just as we see a pencil and a mitten as 2 completely different things, dogs may categorize them as the same; as things that can be picked up and put in the mouth, (or slept on, or rolled in, etc etc).

All of this is not new, in a way, but then, of course, it is, because we all need reminding that our reality is just that, ‘our reality,’ and it is no more a reflection of truth than is a bee’s view of flowers with ultraviolet stripes pointing to the pollen, or a dog’s map of the scent of a hidden toy, carried along by the breeze.

In summary, her talk was a great introduction to tomorrow’s topic of Canine Cognition. The afternoon was great fun, with an inspiring session done by Victoria Stilwell, a great champion of positive training methods, as is Kyra Sundance, trick trainer extraordinaire. Given that I’m introducing the day tomorrow, I’d better close here and get back to working on my talk. [pardon any mis-spellings, etc.... I usually proof but need to finish up my talk!]

I am, I will admit, a tad tuckered. Many of us did a book signing and I signed books for one and three quarter hours. The process is incredibly reinforcing, I am so incredibly grateful to meet so many wonderful, gracious people, but I lost my voice by the end. But I did get an extra treat….after having our pictures taken who knows how many times, Victoria and I turned the tables and got a picture of us together. Great fun.

True confession: I haven’t finished the book The Wolf in the Parlor. I might not, at least not in the near future. Here’s why:

As I said in my last post, the author’s thesis is that “people and dogs, around 12,000 years ago, linked their evolutionary paths together and evolved socially and physically to take on supportive roles. He argues, according to the reviews, that humans lost some of our brain power because dogs took over those functions, and dogs lost some of theirs because we became their protectors and nurturers.” It seems downright churlish of me to stop reading before I read for myself the full extent of his argument, but what I’ve read in the first 60 pages has put me off a bit.

I mentioned earlier that the thesis itself sounded a bit simplistic, but I love speculation and the more the merrier if it’s based on good, solid information. But Franklin’s supporting information seems thin, at best. Here’s an example: Interested in the early evolution of the domestic dog, the author goes to his local library. But he finds little of value, he tells us. He says “Some of the more promising works included a few generalized remarks about the development of the dog; they all sounded the same, and had a ‘just so’ tone to them.” He goes on later to say that the books he ended up checking out were also a disappointment. “Most were superficial, showed some misunderstanding of biology, or were otherwise unsuitable…”. Never in this section does he mention other ways of researching the topic.. he writes as though he accepts that his library has all material relevant to his question. As a lover of libraries, I can tell you that even really, really good ones can only house a small portion of relevant books, and many of those are profoudly out of date. As a science writer, I would assume he is adept at internet searches…?

Eventually, in the books he checks out (we never know which books those are), he finds references to a paleontologist named Stanley Olsen, who spent decades finding and measuring fossils of domestic dogs (dogs can be distinguished from wolves by their shorter muzzles and smaller teeth). He published some of this work in 1974, and Franklin moved heaven and earth to find a copy (The Origins of the Domestic Dog: The Fossil Record) and traveled to the University of Arizona to interview Olsen. Let me be clear: I’d give a lot to interview Olsen myself, he sounds absolutely fascinating and extremely knowledgeable. But 1974 is 35 years ago, and what we’ve learned about the fossil record since then is astounding.  Still, I love that Franklin went to meet him–but what about other sources of information about the evolution of the domestic dog? Surely Franklin found many interesting books on that topic? And what books did he read? He is a science writer after all, so I expected him to clearly list his sources.

I turned to the back to see if he had read, for example, Ray and Lorna Coppinger’s book Dogs, its subtitle being “A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution.” But there is no bibliography or reference section, a surprise unto itself. I turned to the index, and Coppinger is indeed mentioned, but only briefly, and only in regard to a discussion about dogs losing the terminal portion of the hunting sequence inhibited (find, chase but don’t kill and eat). Franklin loves Coppinger’s suggestion that dogs are wolves with the ‘kill’ portion of their behavior inhibited, but adds that other scientists “. . . criticized Coppinger’s idea for various technical reasons, …” but doesn’t tell us what those were. Neither had he read Coppinger’s book; he learned about him in a manuscript being edited by James Serpell (now that’s a book I can’t wait to read, I’ll alert you as soon as I find it, don’t know if it’s out yet.)

There are some wonderful sections of The Wolf in the Parlor. Franklin clearly adores dogs and the connection between them and people. He is not only smitten with his current Standard Poodle, he credits him for saving his life (I skipped to the end). If I had no other books to read I’d finish the entire book, and someday I imagine I will. But right now Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog is luring me in, and I just got a book written about a search and rescue dog that looks like a page turner. The wolves in the parlor are just going to have to lie down and stay for awhile.

Meanwhile, back at the farm: It rained! Oh boy oh boy, it finally rained, after almost 3 weeks of no rain. I’m the first to admit 3 weeks isn’t long in many areas of the drought-stricken country, and I know it’s flooding right now in some areas, but we really, really needed the rain and just looking at the moisture soaking into the ground feels so nurturing and good. Willie and I got to go to a new place to work sheep; a good friend and neighbor’s not far away just got a small flock to work her rescue BC on. We had a ball; Will was wonderful, I was a bit slow–not being used to faster reacting sheep, but a good time was had by all. Well, maybe not the sheep, but Will was excellent around them and worked them very quietly. The trick with Will is balancing his speed with his lack of confidence (too slow and he loses power and confidence, too fast and he starts the sheep running.) We’ll be back soon I’m sure!

Here’s a video I took this morning, in the rain by the way, of Willie & Lassie playing with their Chewber. At first you’ll just see Willie, while I make silly noises to hype him up and get him exercising without having to stress his shoulder by fetching or leaping. It takes him longer to get moving than usual (because I have the camera?), but you can see how he runs and shakes the Chewber as if he was trying to kill it. (What was that about the final stage of the hunt being inhibited? Just kidding, I think Coppinger is right to some extent on that; I don’t think I’d use a wolf as a herding partner!).

As I do every morning, I asked Will to lie down and let Lassie get the toy. Watch how she turns and looks at him when she returns. Anthropomorphically, I always imagine her saying “I’ve got the toy-oy. Nee Nee Nee Boo Boo!”

Well, I had wanted to write about a book one of you asked about: The Wolf in the Parlor, but life seems to have its own schedule and I have only just started it. It is one of the gazillion books I am sent by publishers to review and I have to admit I have a hard time keeping up. (But I’d miss them if they didn’t come! It’s one of those high quality problems.) The book is by Pulitzer prize winning science writer Jon Franklin and has received rave reviews from the kind of places that authors dream of (Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist etc.)

As I said, I’ve just started it, but I can tell you that the book’s main thesis is that people and dogs, around 12,000 years ago, linked their evolutionary paths together and evolved socially and physically to take on supportive roles. He argues, according to the reviews, that humans lost some of our brain power because dogs took over those functions, and dogs lost some of theirs because we became their protectors and nurturers. It sounds interesting, although admittedly, a bit far-fetched to me (what of all those cultures in which dogs are considered pests?  what about all the others things that happened around 12,000 years ago, like the domestication of plants?), but I will finish it this weekend with interest. I’m all in favor of speculation; even if it turns out to be dead wrong, it causes us to do a lot of thinking.

I have to admit, with apologies to the author, that I was originally put off when he begins by explaining that most of his life he thought dogs were of little interest. Along with his hypothesis of why dogs and humans are so closely linked together, the book includes his personal journal from the land of dog-neutral to the world of dog lover.  Although I suspect I will appreciate his journey, it struck me a bit at first as yet another “I didn’t understand and now I do and so you should too” books that plop themselves in book store windows on a daily basis. How many thousands of books are written by people who start out depressed or totally disorganized or not caring about animals, and then have an epiphany and want to tell us all about it and how now they get it and we should too.

Oh dear, I sound so cynical. My apologies. Perhaps I’m just a tad tuckered, having gotten home late at night after speaking at the Humane Animal Welfare Society in Waukesha WI about cat behavior. Don’t get me wrong, I had a ball, it is SO fun to talk about cats and their behavior with other cat lovers, but it’s a long drive and I didn’t get home til after 11 pm. This from the girl who likes to be in bed by 9:30!)

On the up side, even in the early pages, Jon writes beautifully about how a standard poodle named Charlie wormed his way into his heart and mind, and integrates the personal part of his world with his life as a science writer. He mentions that science writers are, in a way, like old time naturalists, in that they know a little bit about all aspects of science: a rare occurrence now in the age of specialization. It will be interesting to see how his personal relationship with a dog and his intellectual knowledge as a science writer blend together into speculation about the origins of our relationship and our eventual evolution.

The other book that’s getting a lot of media attention right now is Alexandra Horowitz’s book, Inside of a Dog. That’s sitting on my desk, and it would be wagging it’s tail for attention if it could. I’ll pick that one up next!

What about you? Have you read either of these? What books have you picked up recently that you found especially interesting?  Send them in, and then I can have an even bigger pile of books to read beside the couch!

Meanwhile, back at the farm: All is well, at least it will be if I ever get out of the office and outside. There are weeds that need pulling, windows that need washing, sheep that need worming, vegetables that need cooking, apples that need collecting, and most importantly, dogs that need a lot more attention than they’ve gotten this week. I have one more thing I HAVE to do today (ignoring the endless lists of SHOULDS) and then I’m out of here. Oh boy, Willie and Lassie, here I come!

And here’s a little fall color, I’ll be wallowing in it soon!

One of your fellow blog readers alerted us to a study recently published in Behavioral Processes titled “Disambiguating the “guilty look” by Alexandra Horowitz. It is a creative and well-designed study that supports what trainers, ethologists and behaviorists have been saying for years: “No, your dog isn’t expressing guilt when he cowers at the door when you come home to find he’s peed on the carpet. Rather,  he’s waving a white flag, perhaps to inhibit you from punishing him any further, and is responding to YOUR behavior rather than expressing guilt at his earlier actions.”

Here’s a summary of the study: 14 dogs and owners participated, and only dogs who were able to successfully perform a sit/stay were included.  The owner was instructed to place the dog on a sit/stay, and then show the dog a treat and use whatever cue they would normally employ to forbid the dog to take the treat (I’m assuming “no” or “leave it”). The treat was placed at the same distance from the dog in each trial, and then the owner left the room.

When the owner returned the treat was always off the floor.  The experimenter either picked up the treat and gave it to the dog, or picked it up and kept it herself. When the owner returned, he or she was informed by the experimenter if the dog had been obedient or not (not necessarily accurately). If the owner was told the dog had been obedient, the owner was been told to greet the dog on their return. However, if they were told that the dog had been disobedient, they were told to scold the dog in whatever way they would normally do. (Note that one potential pair was eliminated because the owner refused to scold the dog. Interesting. What would you have done? I think I would have participated to support the research, but kept my ‘scolding’ to the disappointed voice I use sometimes: “Oh Mr. Will…. what did you do?” It’s quiet and low key and yet Willie’s ears go down and his face changes in a way I want to call “concerned.” Needless to say, I never do it “after the fact,” but I probably would have in this case because of my interest in the results of the study. I don’t think it would have set Willie back in any substantial way, but if I thought it would I wouldn’t have considered it.)

In the study, each dog/owner pair was given 9 trials, two control trials in which the dog was allowed to eat the treat, and others in which the owner was correctly informed or mis-informed about whether the dog ate the treat or not.

The dog’s behavior was video taped and later analyzed, categorizing 9 behaviors often used to describe a “guilty look” by owners: head, ears or tail down, raising a paw, moving away from the owner, licking, rolling onto the back, etc.

The results are not only what you’d expect, but even more so: Not only was there no correlation between behavior usually categorized as “guilty” and the dogs who actually did eat the treat, it was found that the highest rates of these behaviors was found from dogs who had NOT eaten the treat and who WERE scolded by their owners. Trials in which the dogs did eat the treat (even though handed to them by the experimenter) and who were scolded showed fewer deferential (my word) behaviors than if they had not gotten the treat.

You can’t get much better evidence for what we’ve all been saying for years: “No, your dog DOESN’T “know  better! He’s just afraid of what you’re about to do!” It’s true that there is a potential glitch in the methodology, but I think the author handles it well in the discussion.  Since the dogs who got the treat were given the treat by a human, even after being told to leave it alone, it is hard to know if the dog itself considered its behavior as being disobedient… the author’s paper after all is about being careful about making attributions (or mis-attributions) and this is a potential problem. How do we know that the dogs perceived themselves as being “disobedient?” The author did do subsequent tests to follow up on this potential problem and I think it does indeed support the original results.

Speaking though, of mis-attributions, I do have a small bone to pick (a treat to take away?) from some of the statements in the paper. Although I have been on record in speeches, books and articles that of all the emotions, guilt is the one least likely to be experienced equivalently by humans and dogs, I am included in a list of “ethologists, animal behaviorists and other scientists” who describe a “dog ostensibly guilty of a transgression…“. My interpretation of her words was that I and others were indeed arguing that “head down, ears down” is the posture of a guilty dog. That, it turns out, is not what she meant: she meant that we had written that pet owners use these postures to describe what they believe is a guilty posture. She clarified that in a gracious email to me after I wrote her about it.

I suspect my interpretation of what she wrote was in part based on something she said earlier in the Introduction: “And yet, ethologists, animal husbandrists, pet owners and others .. frequently use emotional terms to describe or explain an animal’s behavior.”

She is certainly right on target that I, and others are comfortable talking about expressions of emotions in animals. However, I’m not clear why she mentions “ethologists, animal husbandrists and pet owners” etc, but not psychologists, neurobiologists, etc. etc, including those who study emotions in animals and have for many years.

What I think is important here is to help people understand what of their emotional life is shared with dogs and what is not. Pure primal terror or rage, for example, is a profoundly primitive experience, and yet much of our own emotions are overlain with a cognitive component that dogs probably don’t share…  Surely, as I write in For the Love of a Dog, the shared emotional life of people and dogs is a glass half empty and a glass half full.  We need to take this debate beyond the two polarized perspectives of “You can’t talk about emotions in animals” and “I know my dog is guilty! Just look at him!” That’s what I tried to do in the book (and learned a ton myself by writing it.) This study is a good step toward helping professionals convince the general public that people are much too quick to attribute guilt to their dog. My own observations are that dog owners are quick to attribute the emotions least likely to experienced in similar ways by people and dogs, and miss the ones most likely to be shared (like fear). More on this topic, it’s a big one, but I’m curious what you’ve found: what emotions are you, your neighbors or your clients most likely to ascribe to their dogs (and why!)

Meanwhile, back at the farm: Willie has a broken tooth and goes in tomorrow for a general cleaning and a close examination of the tooth. (Large premolar on the top jaw.. of course the largest tooth in the mouth with three roots. jeeeez.) Then we’ll know if he needs a root canal, an extraction or just (oh please!) just a cap on it. Please do whatever you can to help me remember to NOT give Willie his stuffed Kong tomorrow morning. It is such a habit with me I am in angst already that I’ll forget!  Notes will be all over the house!

Here’s a photo of Lassie and her chiropractor, Dr. Mark McCaan. I love the comparison of facial expressions! Anyone want to venture what emotion Lassie’s face expresses?