Two more interesting books: A favorite of mine, In the Kingdom of Gorillas has been revised and updated since it first came out a few years ago. It was written, truth in lending here, by two good friends of mine. I pretty much kiss the hems of their pants, because they are the people who did as much as anyone (actually more in my opinion) to save Mountain Gorillas from extinction. Amy spent years living with gorilla families, and with her husband and co-author Bill Weber, spent years convincing the governments of several countries that a well-managed gorilla tourist program would be economically more valuable than cutting down the remaining forest and growing crops. They are brave, intrepid people who are a big part of the reason that I and my friends got to spend a rapturous 45 minutes sitting amongst an extended family of gorillas in Rwanda a few years ago. In the Kingdom of Gorillas is a fascinating account of their attempts to learn about gorillas, their life with gorillas, and their relationships with other researchers and agencies. (And yes, they knew Diane Fossey well. Some of their stories about her are in this book. Others, well, are better left unpublished.) If you want to read about Amy and Bill’s close encounters with these amazing animals, and marvel at the hard work and stamina it took to save the species, pick up the book.
The second book was sitting on a table by my desk until I got comments from my last blog about wishing dogs could communicate with us more than they do. Many people wrote in (when asked what they would like to know about canine cognition) saying they’d like to know more about how their dog could communicate with them more specifically and more effectively. Sometimes I yearn for the same thing, but one comment also reflected my worries about that ability: do we really want to hear what they have to say? Would our dogs relentlessly sign CHICKEN CHICKEN CHICKEN I WANT MORE CHICKEN if we taught them how?
But here’s the book: Dogs Can Sign, Too by Sean Senechal. Here’s what it says on the back: “Imagine being able to ask your poodle, “Who’s at the door?” and having her respond “It’s Katy.” Or asking your golden retriever, “Do you want a treat?” and him responding, “No, water.” Myself, I’ve never met a GR who would pass up a treat for water, but hey, maybe it’d been in the desert and was seriously dehyrdrated… Anyone read the book yet? Taught your dog to sign? If so, let us know. I’ll pick it up soon and let you know what I think. Or, I’ll have Willie write it up.
Here’s the sunrise early this morning, a still, foggy breathless patch of time and space:
Beth says
Oh no, never would I teach my dogs to sign! I’m pretty sure my male Corgi would repeatedly express his disappointment in what he views as his humans’ horrible decision-making abilities.
He already makes his displeasure very plain. He can’t understand why on earth we leave large groups of people, or dogs, or people and dogs, and insist on heading home. He doesn’t understand why we walk by picnics without picking up some “free” food.
I’m pretty sure he thinks we are dumb as a box of rocks, and I really don’t want to hear that all day!
Frances says
On re-reading the preview of Dogs can sign too, I remembered what put me off buying it before. In the introduction, the author repeatedly uses “literacy” as synonymous with “language” skills – which combined with the rather verbose and repetitive style got in the way of the message for me. I suspect it needs a really good editor to make the content more accessible – but I would love someone else to read it, and let me know if I should persevere! (Hint)
Linda says
After working with my young grandchildren using sign language, I tried it on my Corgi/Keeshund. I was amazed that she would sit and stare at me while I ate, waiting for a nugget. She would take a long time to give up and decide there was nothing more. Now, a simple shake of my hands (meaning all gone) and she immediately gets up and moves on. I would like to expand on this and am looking forward to reading the book.
Alexandra says
I suspect that given the chance, Copper would tell me about 500 times a day that he’d like something to eat (he’s a Lab) but I will give it a read.
Nan says
A few years ago an NPR April Fools day report was about interpretive talking collars for dogs (I think the idea got stolen for UP). But the really funny part was the host interviewing Jeffrey Masson and saying, “So, it turns out dogs actually lie about love all the time!” It was a great line that stuck with me, but I can’t imagine it’s true. I’ll have to try the signing.
LynnSusan says
Thanks for the book report, Trisha! My list grows ever longer with all these wonderful suggestions.
By the time I retire I will have a long list to keep me occupied!
Amy Vedder and Bill Weber are your good friends? Wow! How I would love to be a fly on the wall during that dinner party!
I’m a bit skeptical about dogs signing (ummm—they have no thumbs, after all)but will put that book on my list too, with an open mind.
AnneJ says
I have 2 little kids who, while delightful, are exhausting with the constant talking. So I’m many times over grateful for my dogs’ silence. I can read a lot in their eyes, or just sit and be together.
parlance says
Oh, I think I have to read that book! I’ll wait until I hear what you think of it, though. (I mean the book about dogs signing.)
Heidi Meinzer says
I would not doubt for a second that our dogs are “signing” to us all the time, and that we are just not adept enough to pick up on what they are saying! As a puppy, my Shepherd mix did stand in front of the stove staring and barking at a burner we had accidentally left on until I finally came to the kitchen to see what was going on. I would love to teach her to sign — she’s not so food-oriented, so who knows what she’d come up with!
Lolly says
I will be interested to hear what the book “Dogs Can Sign,” has to say, but I find myself being more interested in finding ways to discover and interpret their natural ways of communication.
I have lived with five guide dogs over almost 27 years, seven days a week 24 hours a day, and I don’t think I could ever say that I understand them completely. There will always be surprises, and I must confess, I like it that way. To me, that’s part of the joy of living with a dog.
One of my recent facinations is being with a group/pack of guide dogs from the same program, and watching them interact with each other. That’s a little bit of heaven… (:)
em says
What a fascinating possibility! I haven’t read the book, but maybe I’ll check it out. I confess to being among those who wonder how valuable a tool dog sign language would be. It would be really interesting to find out just how much linguistic sophistication a dog is capable of understanding.
My suspicion is that sign language wouldn’t add much to Otis’ communication. As it is, he’s a fairly easy read (I think, anyhow). His body language, vocalizations, and facial expressions are pretty specific and pretty consistent in most instances. As I stop to really think about it, I can differentiate between quite a few specific combos of posture and expression to correctly ‘read’ his reactions to a whole bunch of situations. For instance, when we’re walking in the woods and he pops his head up and focuses, I know he’s noticing something. Then, depending on his attitude, posture, facial expression, and movement, I can predict what it is he’s interested in probably 90% of the time. There are quite a few categories: Deer, rabbit, squirrel/chipmunk, mouse, and coyote all have distinct postures. ‘Dog’ is broken down into three: Strange dog, known dog, and loved dog. If he’s too far away to ID a familiar dog by sight or smell, he reacts as if it is a ‘strange dog’, but then shifts to either ‘known’ or ‘loved’ dog as he gets close enough to figure out who is coming. In all cases, I can tell by looking at him what it is that he hears/smells well before whatever it is comes out of the brush or around the bend. He also has characteristic postures for ‘unknown sound’, ‘unknown smell’ as well as ‘general critter-big (horses/cows/etc.)’ and ‘general critter-small’ (racoons, porcupines, skunks).
It might be cool to ask, ‘who’s at the door?’ and get a ‘linguistic’ response, but I have the feeling that beyond ‘daddy’, ‘grandma’ (I can already tell by his reaction if it is either of these people) and maybe a small handful of others, the answer he’d give would either be ‘friend’ or ‘stranger’, and he doesn’t need sign language to communicate that.
As to the more abstract stuff-‘what do you want’ or ‘what do you want to do?’ it would be truly fascinating to learn just how much he thinks in the abstract. Would he say, ‘chicken’ rather than ‘beef’ out of the blue without being presented with the option? Would he mean it, or would he really be asking for ‘food’? If you put both on the ground, would he truly prefer the thing that he asked for? Similarly activity preferences-can he really contemplate a detailed activity plan like ‘go to the park to swim in the creek’ or would he be more limited to general ideas like ‘play’, ‘walk’, etc.?
I have a sneaking suspicion that signing ‘FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!’ or ‘PLAY, PLAY, PLAY!’ might look a lot like the ‘gimme food’ and ‘throw the @#%* ball’ dance that many of us already know and love. Still, it would be a fabulously interesting thing to witness dog sign language.
Pamela says
Honey already knows one sign: she sits down and scratches at her collar when she doesn’t feel like coming back inside from playtime. Funny, I never needed to teach her that one!
Lee Charles Kelley says
Charlie Rose had Time Magazine’s science editor Jeffrey Kluger on a few weeks ago. They showed a videotape of Kanzi the bonobo who can, reportedly, understand human language.
Here’s a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE
On the tape, Kanzi’s teacher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, sits cross-legged on the floor, across from Kanzi. She’s wearing a welder’s mask. She asks Kanzi to perform some simple tasks, each one involving two nouns, a verb, and a preposition. All goes quite smoothly, and Kanzi’s abilities seem quite remarkable, until the last task.
Savage-Rumbaugh says, “Kanzi, pour the Perrier water…” and then pauses. During that pause, Kanzi reaches for a jelly jar, not the bottle of Perrier. Then Savage-Rumbaugh finishes her sentence, “…in the jelly.” It’s only then that Kanzi picks up the bottle of Perrier and pours it into the jelly jar.
Neither Charlie Rose nor Jeffrey Kluger seemed to notice that during his last task Kanzi had acted out of sequence with his teacher’s words. If he’d only been responding to her words, he would’ve reached for the Perrier bottle first, then waited to hear where he was supposed to pour it. Does this mean that Savage-Rumbaugh “cheated?” I don’t think so. That pause seemed like a genuine break in her normal speech patterns, not part of a Clever Hans-like parlor trick.
Does this mean Kanzi really isn’t able to attach word-like “meanings’ to objects and actions? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that — in this one instance, at least — something other than a linguistic ability was probably at play; the behavior had either been “rehearsed” so many times that Kanzi automatically reached for the jelly jar, or else it shows that animals can pick up mental images from us, as William Campbell has written about.
What does this have to do with whether dogs can learn to use sign language?
Monkeys and apes have what scientists call evolutionary precursors to the kinds linguistic centers found in the human brain. A dog’s brain is less evolved than an ape’s brain, so unless we were to rewrite some of the most basic principles of evolution and neuroscience, it’s very unlikely that dogs would have the kind of language centers found in our brains, or that they would even have the evolutionary precursors that apes have.
Michael Arbib, of USC, has a unique theory on how human language evolved through those precursors in monkeys. He writes, “the ability to imitate is one of the evolutionary stages that marks the evolutionary path from mirror neurons [found] in the common ancestor of monkey and human to language in the human. The paper will take us through five hypothesized stages of evolution,
1. grasping
2. a mirror system for grasping (i.e., a system that matches observation and execution),
3. an imitation system for grasping,
4. a manual-based communication system, and
5. speech.”
If Arbib’s theory is correct, it would mean that while dogs seem to have mirror neurons, giving them the ability to imitate the actions of others, absent an ability to grasp things, they could not have evolved any real linguistic ability. It’s more likely that they communicate with us on an emotional level, and do so in ways we’re usually unaware of ) like the dog who alerted his owner that the burner on her stove was on — an example of a behavior designed to get the owner to do something, as opposed to getting the owner to understand something).
For anyone interested, I’ve written several articles on canine communication for PsychologyToday.com.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/201007/do-dogs-intentionally-use-their-body-language-communicate
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/201007/canine-communication-ii-calming-signals-the-mel-gibson-tapes
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/201008/canine-communication-iii-are-dogs-telepathic
LCK
PS: Kanzi reportedly once gave his teacher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the signs for fire and marshmallows, then stacked some firewood, used a match to light the wood on fire, put a marshmallow on a stick, and roasted it over the fired he’d just made!
em says
Pamela: How funny that Honey scratches to put off coming inside. Otis does that, too!
In addition to the standard can’t-come-now-scratching stall technique, he has two advanced moves. The first I taught him inadvertently: when we first brought him home he was recovering from entropion surgery and had stitches in his eyelids. Since it was important that he not be allowed to scratch at them, I’d interrupt any any attempt to scratch, but then soothe his itchies by gently rubbing his face. After maybe two days, Otis would come into a room, catch my eye, and then wave his foot in the general direction of his face, not actually trying to scratch. As soon as he felt he had caught my attention he’d immediately desist, and crane his neck toward me, holding his face out for rubs. He still does this, years after the stitches have come out.
The second move is the one he does most often, and it’s one that he initiated himself. One day, I took pity on Otis as he stood in the yard, trying to scratch his belly with his back foot. His legs are too long and his chest is too deep for him to actually reach his belly this way, but the grass was wet and he clearly didn’t want to plop down, curl up and scratch with his teeth, as he typically does. So I made the fateful decision to bend over his shoulders, reach around his ribs and rub his belly while he was still standing up. (There are advantages to being a tall, skinny dog…) The combined effect of this hug/belly scratch was evidently like manna from heaven because since then, I have seen this signal EVERY DAY (I mostly give in…he’s just so CUTE balancing there with his back foot waving and a beseeching expression on his face). While his chest and belly no doubt do itch some of the time, this move has become the go-to technique for attention-getting, affection-seeking, and stalling in the face of something he doesn’t want to do.
The second ‘advanced move
Anna says
I guess I am not so much trying to teach my dogs sign language but rather trying to truly understand what they sign naturally to me. I am working on my obersavation skills but still have many things I wish I could figure out.
Case in point: this weekend I took my 12 month old femle corgi to a dog show where her breeder was going to be showing her littermate sister and we had not seen them since I took Penny home with me at 10 weeks of age. Unlike corgis in general Penny is a bit shy when her big brother is not with her and I had left him at home on Satuday. She was staying behind me when suddenlly she starting running toward the outdoor ring when I looked to see what she was up to here was her breeder Pat coming toward us about some 150 feet away… she greeted Pat with typical corgi friendliness… with everyone else she was cautious. When Pat got her sister out of the vehicle Penny shyed away from her… Penny will greet some dogs and does so very well while other she just backs away from… IF I could only see what she sees maybe I could figure out what bothers her so I can help her work it out.
Ellen H says
If teaching a dog to ring a bell to go out is any indication of what communication can do, I don’t think I want to go there. Our spaniel puppy is very good at ringing a bell to go outside but rings it all the time even when she just came in. This particular puppy is persistent too in that she will continue to ring until I give up in frustration. (I know – giving in is reinforcement.) I can only imagine what she would do if she had a wider range of vocabulary.
Susan says
I had a remarkable cat, my heart cat, Notrump. He was very doglike, extremely bonded. He ran to the door to greet us when we came home, threw himself to the floor, rolled onto his back and purred so loud and hard he drooled.
When laser pointers became affordable to the masses, I bought l and brought it home to see how he would respond to it. He went crazy and loved it. Somehow, he invented a signal for “I want to play laser” which was to sit on the corner of our table and lift one paw in the air (like a limp wrist). When we saw that, we would either play, or say, sorry, we can’t play right now, and give him a pet and a kiss.
I found it remarkable that he devised his own means of communication – we did not have to teach him, he taught us.
I now have 2 very different dogs. Both are sweet, but one is a glutton and if taught sign would be the student signing “chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken omg gotta go poop NOW!”
The other one….I’m intrigued. I think we’d have conversations. He’s such a sensitive boy.
Susanne says
Love that picture!
I do enjoy reading your blog, though I must admit I also look forward to seeing the pictures. Thanks!
Dont forget to pack your camera when you go to NZ.
Peter P says
Hi Trisha,
I’m a first time dog owner and I’m glad to have stumbled on your books and I’ve been through most of them over the last few months. Just wanted to say thanks for all of that information and advice.
With regards to what dogs may be thinking, I found this article that cites evidence that dogs do indeed dream when they sleep.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/640298.html
I thought you might find it interesting.
Ellen Pepin says
I don’t think that I would like for my dogs to be able to tell me exactly what they are thinking. My two dogs already do a pretty good job of telling me what they want. Sometimes I wish they could talk, but the fun for me is to learn what they want by reading their facial expressions, their body movements, and listening to their whines or barks.
Kat says
I’m intrigued by the number of people who are doubtful about the benefits of having a dog that could communicate more effectively, i.e. in a fashion easier for their humans to interpret. The reluctance seems to me to be the result of human unwillingness to listen to what the dog has to say. And in all fairness, who in their right mind would want to listen to feed me, feed me, feed me continuously. Personally, I’m very intrigued by the idea of having a canine companion who could communicate more sophisticated concepts to me. I already do pretty well on understanding feed me, walk time, more petting, etc., but I can’t help but wonder how our relationship would change if we had a shared system of communication. Would Ranger be happier, for want of a better term, if he could tell me unambiguously what his plan for the day looked like and if he didn’t have to guess what I want when I’m teaching him a new behavior.
I imagine a conversation something like this. Me: I want you to learn a trick called ‘say your prayers’. Him: Sure, how does it go? Me: When I put my hands together like this or tell you ‘say your prayers’ you put your front paws up on something, elbows down , right paw over left and put your muzzle between your legs then wait until I say ‘Amen’. Him: Left over right is more comfortable. Me: Sure, left over right then. Him: Like this? Me: Exactly, you’re such a smart and clever dog. Him: I know.
Obviously, I don’t think Ranger suffers from false modesty in the least and clearly my imaginary conversation is simplistic but I love the idea of him being able to tell me why he doesn’t want to do it the way I’m trying to teach it. It’s not infrequent that he has his own preference for how a trick should be done and I’m slow to catch on because I’m focused on the steps I’ve mapped out and not on what he’s trying to tell me about what works better for him.
Frances says
I, too, love the idea of a conversation such as you describe, Kat. In our case, however, it would go something like:
Me: Sophy, I want you to learn a trick called
cathy says
Peter P mentions the article about dogs and dreaming which brought to mind my corgis after being boarded this weekend. I swear both boys were having nightmares. One woke me up after an hour of sleep or so with this eery frightning howl that he very occasionally does in his sleep. Back to sleep. A couple of hours later the other woke me with woofing and whining and his feet moving while he was sleeping. The third corgi slept soundly the whole night.
I thought it was interesting how many people who wrote in had corgis. My first corgi boy who has since passed, was labelled by many family members as the smartest dog they’d ever met because he had learned so many words and also had taught me signals for his wants. When I got him as a pup and and only dog, I talked to him like he was a little kid learning to talk. It was sort of by accident, but he learned to listen to me intently waiting for words he knew. I think that’s why he struck people as intelligent, because he listened. One time when he was an adolescent, we had the car mostly packed to go home, after a weekend at Grandma’s. Then we sat down to eat a piece of pie brfore leaving. He, however was ready to go! I very conversationally said to him, “well, you can get your blanket while you are waiting.” To our astonishment, he raced to the other end of the house and came out of the bedroom running down the hall dragging his blanket to the kitchen. It was amazing because I had never consciously taught him the word blanket.
The main sign he taught me was that he learned to paw at the oven door to show me he was hungry. It expanded to him pawing at the sliding glass door and then looking at me (the oven also had a reflective glass door) when I was late with this food. The first times he did this the oven wasn’t on so there were no good smells coming from it. Once I figured it out I added are you hungry and then fed him so I did reinforce it.