As a dog owner, I admit I’m biassed, but people are often surprised at just how much mental activity dogs are capable of – and I’ve got an excellent example from my own golden retriever.
According to the soon-to-be-published The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments Pavlov did much more than train dogs to salivate when they heard a bell ring. Using their reaction to stimuli he was able to deduce, for instance, that they could measure periods of time reasonably accurately, and distinguish musical notes in a chord.
Vilmos Csanyi’s If Dogs Could Talk gives an even more powerful insight into the surprising mental abilities of dogs, sometimes even exceeding what the great apes are capable of in cognition.
My own example is less large scale, but still impresses me. Our dog
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has developed at least one clear piece of sign language. When she wants you to rub her tummy, she lies on her side and moves her front paws towards her head. This doesn’t make sense unless you realize that the only way she can stroke herself is to bring her front paws up either side of her face in a more exaggerated version of exactly the same movement.
Her sign for ‘stroke me’ is a curtailed version of the action by which she strokes herself. Okay, it’s not rocket science, but I still think it’s clever.
Our golden retriever has very clear sign-language that she uses when she wants to rip your arm off. It starts when she sinks her teeth into your arm and pulls…
That’s not quite the same, Henry. I’m describing using an abstracted to motion to request something. You’re describing an assault. It’s the difference between signalling to someone ‘do you want another drink’ with an oscillation of a hand hold an invisible glass, and a Glasgow kiss.
When one of my cats flops over and shows me her lovely furry belly, it means “please rub my belly, kind human”. When her sister does it, it means “touch this and I’ll take your hand off”. The trick is to remember which is which in the half-light and brain fog of an early morning.
Brian – less facetiously, I don’t think your loveable hound is using any kind of language at all – because my retriever does the same thing.
Strictly, language – even sign language – is an artificial system for the representation of concepts. Even if the capacity for language is hard-wired (a minefield of argument in itself) the specific forms of language must be learned. The fact that my dog and yours do the same things suggest otherwise, as they have not met each other nor have had the opportunity to acquire language from shared sources.
However, golden retrievers are highly inbred, so will share behaviours or ‘tics’ simply by being related. Moreover, I guess what we could be seeing is something like a reflex, or, if more cognitive, nothing more linguistic than a gesture, for which dogs (as cursorial quadrupeds with limited forelimb movement, essentially back and forth, with no pronation; and not much in the way of separable digits) will have only a limited repertoire, so such gestures will be the same by chance.
More speculatively, one notes that (1) dogs have been companions of people for many tens of thousands of years, and (2) the breeding of dogs, especially gun-dogs and family dogs such as retrievers, has put a premium on effective communication between human and animal, and extreme tractability of the dog, so one might be easily (mis)led to read into any human-like behaviour more than it perhaps deserves.
As well as being the owner of more pets than I can count, I also handle manuscripts in this area, from time to time, and the greatest worry that any researcher into animal cognition has is anthropomorphism. Experiments on animals in this area are extremely difficult to conduct. The experimental design is complicated and the statistical interpretations very subtle. The shadow cast by Clever Hans is a long one.