Dog’s-eye View

Last summer, something happened that showed me how utterly our lives are steeped in anthropomorphism. We got a dog. And she couldn’t talk. Well, that’s the shorthand version. The full text is that I’d caved in to over a decade of my children’s pleading, we’d acquired a puppy, and I found that I didn’t know how to relate to her or begin to understand her. Although she was clearly a beautiful creature, I wondered why on earth I’d taken on more responsibility when the freedom of an empty nest was just around the corner. I was regretting the whole enterprise when my sister happened to say that the puppy seemed kind. In a flash my feelings changed. ‘Kind Dog!’ I almost yelped. ‘Like Kind Dog in the Ant and Bee books!’ I felt a sudden rush of warmth and affection for this small creature which was now related to a fictional dog I’d loved as a child.

In case you weren’t raised on them, the Ant and Bee books were an endearing, lightly educational series for children written in the 1950s and ’60s by Angela Banner, in which Kind Dog helps the two insects out of various scrapes. Without really noticing, in the course of the story you learned about something: the alphabet, counting, colours. Kind Dog always wore a dark green hat, which our puppy didn’t, but otherwise she did look a bit like him. My Kind Dog moment shows how we project human emotions on to animals and how children’s literature builds on that, as well as how long the effects of that literature endure. Our childhoods are peopled (significant word) by animals with human characteristics: Babar the Elephant, Beatrix Potter’s tales, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Black Beauty, Watership Down. There are good reasons for this. Using animals as people gives emotional distance when the message is powerful or scary or painful. It’s also imaginative and fun and outside the rules that govern real life. Once you start playing spot-the-talking-animal, you realize they’re everywhere, not least on television where adverts are full of loquacious bulldogs and chirpy meerkats. Even the Bible has a chatty serpent in the first book and (less famously) a talking donkey in the Book of Numbers. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls is a example of anthropomorphism used for social commentary – a rich tradition which continues right up to the work of one of my favourite cartoonists, Art Spiegelman. His profoundly moving graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, would almost certainly have been too much to bear if the Nazis and the Jews had been depicted as people rather than cats and mice: it’s the same distancing principle as with the children’s books. Anthropomorphism is an innate part of our psychology: we have evolved to read each other’s faces and we instinctively try to do the same with animals. It’s seen in primitive religions – the Ancient Egyptians worshipped animals – and early myths and fables, such as Aesop’s. But it doesn’t equip you for owning a dog. Quite the contrary, in fact. For that you need another sort of book, and I don’t mean the canine equivalent of those bringing-up-baby manuals, although there are plenty of them too. The book I discovered I needed as an antidote to my anthropomorphic upbringing is called Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (2009). It looks at what scientists know about the biology and psychology of dogs, and from that information tries to work out how the world seems to them. Inside of a Dog was in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and completely passed me by because, like the baby books, you don’t need it until you’ve got your own. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, is uniquely qualified for the ambitious task of getting inside the bodies and minds of another species. Her CV includes a BA in philosophy and a PhD in cognitive science studying dogs, plus earlier stints as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and a fact-checker for the New Yorker. And, it perhaps goes without saying, she’s a dog person: in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book, the dogs come first. Horowitz tells us not just what is known but how it is known, walking us through the various experiments that have been used in researching canine cognition in a way that is thorough but doesn’t frighten the non-scientist. Where there is no reliable information on dogs, she describes studies of other animals that might shed some light. The content is scholarly but the execution is readable. The first part of the book considers the physical ways in which the dog perceives the world. Most of us know that smell is the dog’s dominant sense, the equivalent of sight for us, but here we find vivid details. A dog can detect a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic-sized pools of water. A bloodhound has 600 million sensory receptor sites in its nose compared to our 6 million. Dogs have the weirdly named vomeronasal organ which sits about the roof of the mouth and turbo-charges their sense of smell. A scent gives them information about time, too – they can tell how long ago it was made. All of this means that the local lamp post is like a community noticeboard for a passing dog. When it comes to sight, it’s a myth that dogs see in black-and-white. Whereas humans have three kinds of photoreceptors (cones) on their retinae, dogs only have two, and fewer of them. The ones they lack are sensitive to red, so they experience colour most strongly when it’s in the blue-green range. If we choose a red ball for our dog, it’s to help us find it, not them. The arrangement of their retinal cells also means that they can’t see things that are under their noses or focus as sharply as we do on things directly before them. Dogs with long noses have a ‘visual streak’ with the photoreceptors arranged more densely in a horizontal band across the middle of the eye, which gives them better panoramic and peripheral vision than humans – useful for spotting prey. Dogs also have a higher ‘flicker-fusion’ rate than we do: if they see an old-style film they can spot the gaps between the frames. Because they see things a split second before we do, Horowitz suggests that to dogs we must always seem a little slow. However, the book is far more than a series of not-many-people-know-that facts, fascinating though they are. The author is constantly trying, by using science ‘rigorously, but creatively’, to imagine what the dog’s experience of the world – its so-called Umwelt – is like. And the thing that she keeps returning to is the extent to which their world is inextricably wrapped around ours. They are attuned to us in a way that feels magical, almost psychic – they seem to read us as if they have a sixth sense. This, she explains, is because ‘through the artificial selection of domestication, they have evolved to be sensitive to just those things that importantly make up our cognition, including, critically, attention to others’. We may be studying them now, but they have been studying us for millennia: reading this book is just returning the compliment. The second part of the book addresses dog cognition – what do they think about? What do they know? Do they have an awareness of the consciousness of another? It tackles their sense of time, of past and future, their sense of self (dogs routinely fail the mirror test, the standard test of animal self-awareness – but the author can’t help pointing out that mirrors don’t smell and maybe dogs don’t care about appearances). It also asks whether they have a sense of mortality or of right and wrong. And it’s bad news for people who think their dog is a person in disguise: that ‘guilty’ look is almost certainly a response to our body language and, despite anecdotal accounts of dogs rescuing people, experiments have shown that they don’t recognize an emergency situation. Yet our bond with dogs is so close that – apart from chimpanzees – they are the only species for which human yawning is contagious. The book ends by exploring this bond, which Horowitz breaks down into three parts – touch, the greeting ritual and timing. In the last of these she likens playing with a dog to a dance in which we match and mimic each other. Dogs are also good for our health, and not just because they force us to go on walks. When we’re with them our feel-good hormones go up and our stress hormone, cortisol, goes down. It’s mutual: human company can lower a dog’s cortisol level, too. The book’s title plays on this quotation, attributed to Groucho Marx: ‘Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.’ It works better in American English, where ‘outside of’ means ‘except for’. So we may miss the implied levity, the suggestion that the book captures the fun and joy of having a dog, and has a lighter touch than all the science might imply. To that end, the text is leavened with lyrical descriptions of the behaviour of Horowitz’s adored dog, Pump (short for Pumpernickel). I wasn’t sure about these sections at first – they seemed at odds with the scientific rigour and slightly gauche – but by the end I was so moved I had to wipe the tears from my eyes. These little hymns of appreciation remind us that science, love and a dash of anthropomorphism can co-exist. As I look at our dog, now a sleek, mostly obliging one-year-old, I feel a debt of gratitude to this book. It provides a much-needed counterbalance to the anthropomorphism that is all around us. Of course I think I can tell what she’s feeling behind those big, amber eyes, and sometimes I do still wish she could speak. But at the same time I’m very aware of how she might perceive the world and how our actions and demands might seem to her. If Kind Dog helped me to love her, Inside of a Dog helped me to understand and respect her. It gave her the dignity and separateness that she deserves. It made me love her not for her similarity to me but for her otherness. For her creatureness. For her dogness.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 65 © Rebecca Willis 2020