As I was flying home after two days at the Association of Pet Dog Trainers annual conference last month, I found myself thinking some paradoxical, possibly off the deep end thoughts. I could defend such thoughts by noting that I’d been averaging about 3 hours of sleep per night for the previous 5 days. Or I could mention that I’d gotten up at 3 that morning to catch an early flight. But truth be told and thanks to my knowledge of animal behavior and probably normally confused mind, I often find myself evaluating what I hear from more than one perspective.
Such was the case regarding a presentation about a series of experiments done with dogs to determine if they understood what it meant when humans pointed at something.
At this point some of you may be rolling your eyes heavenward and thinking, “They needed to study that? Of course dogs know what it means when we point to something! My dogs do it all the time!”
Well, be that as it may for some pet dogs and even most of them all of the time, most of the time, or just under certain circumstances, this is a hotly debated subject in some academic circles. Hence the need to design experiments that eliminate most of the variables that would normally attend such human-canine interactions and find ways to ignore those variables one cannot. In other words, it’s necessary to put animals in unnatural settings in hopes that what one learns may be applicable to what happens in real life. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
Dilly
As my sleep-deprived mind revisited this presentation on that droning plane to Philadelphia (direct flights from Atlanta to my New Hampshire airport being both rare and costly), I found myself thinking about pointing from the dog’s perspective. That immediately reminded me of Dilly, a pup from Frica’s first litter. More specifically, it reminded me of a story his owner, my friend Rita, had shared with me about Dilly the week before the conference.
The back-story to this is that Rita takes a bottle of water with her when she’s in the car, and Dilly has seen her drink from the bottle multiple times. One day Dilly touched the bottle with his nose and Rita put some of the water in a bowl for him. After that, any time he wanted water, he’d touch the bottle with his nose and she’d give him a drink. Naturally Rita and I were convinced this was evidence of his superior intelligence which I claimed he got from his equally intelligent mother.
Fast forward to the week before the conference when Rita emailed me. She was working from home, this time with her trusty water bottle on a table in her living room. When Dilly touched the water bottle there, her mind immediately made the connection that he was thirsty. But they weren’t on some long trek in the car. They were at home where he had a water bowl in the kitchen. What could he be trying to tell her? As it turned out, the obvious. Someone had forgotten to fill his water bowl that morning.
His equally intelligent mother
I agree with Rita’s interpretation that Dilly’s ability to make the original connection and then to adapt what he learned to a different set of circumstances is a good example of canine cognitive skills. Meanwhile those of you who believe in a mechanistic view of animals are probably raging at the utter uselessness of anecdotal, i.e. real world, evidence in addition to shouting all kinds of reasons why his behavior demonstrates nothing of the kind.
But while the battle rages on with what to me are sometimes unseemly and unprofessional sniping at those with opposing views during scientific presentations—which to me only undermine the speaker’s credibility—the memory of Dilly’s behavior got me thinking about pointing from the dog’s side. Scientific presentations such as the one I attended make it clear how much effort researchers must expend to teach dogs to recognize what it means when a person points to an object and make the desired response. But does it require as much effort for a dog to teach us to look at where the dog is pointing and do that same thing?
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that dogs are much better at getting us to respond to their versions of pointing. In addition to pointing with their noses, they also point with their eyes. If they want us to look at something ahead and on the ground while they keep their eyes and/or noses on it, many will raise a front paw and hold perfectly still.
For example, if I’m in the same room with Ollie and he stands still and stares at the front door, I know he really has to relieve himself. He holds his body still, there’s no tail-wagging, no ball in his mouth. This point to the door is different from the one that tells me the cat is standing on the other side of door or he wants to go out and explore while I get the mail from the mailbox at the end of the driveway.
My response to Ollie’s “I gotta go!” point is not a conditioned response on my part. Ollie never assumed that point at the door in response to bladder or rectal distress prior to eliminating on the rug in front of the door which resulted in my never missing that unrelated cue again. He assumed a body posture unrelated to either posture that he would assume to urinate or defecate that nonetheless communicated to me, “I gotta go right now.” When I opened the door that first time and every time since, he ran to his favorite clump of ornamental grass and peed or zipped to the back border of the flower bed and fertilized it. Then he came back in.
Once he taught me that response, it made life easier for both of us.
As regular readers of this commentary know, I would be the last person to claim that Ollie possesses Einsteinian potential. On the other hand, what does it say about my mental ability relative to him that he’s able to teach me to open the door and let him out to eliminate? What does it say about all those animals who can “point” their owners in the right direction—to open doors, fill empty water or food bowls, take them for a walk, pet them? Using just their body language. Without any preconditioned promise of reward if we do or threat of punishment if we don’t obey the command.
As I hovered in that strange mental state between sleep and wakefulness droning through the clouds on my way home, it dawned on me that companion dogs, at least, might be a lot more skilled at teaching us than we are at teaching them for one simple reason: They pay more attention to our behaviors, what we do naturally, what we respond to and to what we do not. And then as the result of this awareness, they teach us to make the correct response to a variety of pointing gestures in the most energy-efficient way possible. Not only that, a lot of them are aware of us enough to teach us commands that we can easily teach to other humans.
Think about that in terms of the methods we used to teach dogs. Gotta admit sometimes it makes me wonder which one of us is smarter…
Like most pet owners, I’ve often commented that my animals have taught me far more than I’ve ever taught them. But when I see how much effort is put into proving that animals can or cannot think, I wonder if my dogs and cat chuckle at the thought of this. Maybe there aren’t that many dogs who can learn to orient toward what we’re pointing at (and that includes orienting toward something the person thinks the dog would love to orient to that might not appeal to the dog at all). But I would be most hesitant to say that this was evidence that these animals were incapable of any higher thought processes associated with this phenomenon.
My personal and professional experience with countless domestic dogs and cats over the years leaves no doubt in my mind that animals are very adept at training humans to do what they want us to do. If such is the result of mindlessness, what does that say about us? And if it’s the result of cognition, what does it say about them?
I suppose those misanthropes who see all humans (except them, of course) as a blight on the natural landscape would say it proves that humans are dumber than the dumbest animal. But I see it as evidence of how much easier it is to teach members of another species when you know them well because then you want to make learning as easy for them as possible. Maybe you do this because it’s the most energy-efficient way to get what you want. Maybe you do it because you love and respect them. Whatever the reason, understanding how animals teach us may benefit them and us as individuals and a species as much if not more than learning about how we teach them.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.
As I was flying home after two days at the Association of Pet Dog Trainers annual conference last month, I found myself thinking some paradoxical, possibly off the deep end thoughts. I could defend such thoughts by noting that I’d been averaging about 3 hours of sleep per night for the previous 5 days. Or I could mention that I’d gotten up at 3 that morning to catch an early flight. But truth be told and thanks to my knowledge of animal behavior and probably normally confused mind, I often find myself evaluating what I hear from more than one perspective.
Such was the case regarding a presentation about a series of experiments done with dogs to determine if they understood what it meant when humans pointed at something.
At this point some of you may be rolling your eyes heavenward and thinking, “They needed to study that? Of course dogs know what it means when we point to something! My dogs do it all the time!”
Well, be that as it may for some pet dogs and even most of them all of the time, most of the time, or just under certain circumstances, this is a hotly debated subject in some academic circles. Hence the need to design experiments that eliminate most of the variables that would normally attend such human-canine interactions and find ways to ignore those variables one cannot. In other words, it’s necessary to put animals in unnatural settings in hopes that what one learns may be applicable to what happens in real life. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
Dilly
As my sleep-deprived mind revisited this presentation on that droning plane to Philadelphia (direct flights from Atlanta to my New Hampshire airport being both rare and costly), I found myself thinking about pointing from the dog’s perspective. That immediately reminded me of Dilly, a pup from Frica’s first litter. More specifically, it reminded me of a story his owner, my friend Rita, had shared with me about Dilly the week before the conference.
The back-story to this is that Rita takes a bottle of water with her when she’s in the car, and Dilly has seen her drink from the bottle multiple times. One day Dilly touched the bottle with his nose and Rita put some of the water in a bowl for him. After that, any time he wanted water, he’d touch the bottle with his nose and she’d give him a drink. Naturally Rita and I were convinced this was evidence of his superior intelligence which I claimed he got from his equally intelligent mother.
Fast forward to the week before the conference when Rita emailed me. She was working from home, this time with her trusty water bottle on a table in her living room. When Dilly touched the water bottle there, her mind immediately made the connection that he was thirsty. But they weren’t on some long trek in the car. They were at home where he had a water bowl in the kitchen. What could he be trying to tell her? As it turned out, the obvious. Someone had forgotten to fill his water bowl that morning.
His equally intelligent mother
But while the battle rages on with what to me are sometimes unseemly and unprofessional sniping at those with opposing views during scientific presentations—which to me only undermine the speaker’s credibility—the memory of Dilly’s behavior got me thinking about pointing from the dog’s side. Scientific presentations such as the one I attended make it clear how much effort researchers must expend to teach dogs to recognize what it means when a person points to an object and make the desired response. But does it require as much effort for a dog to teach us to look at where the dog is pointing and do that same thing?
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that dogs are much better at getting us to respond to their versions of pointing. In addition to pointing with their noses, they also point with their eyes. If they want us to look at something ahead and on the ground while they keep their eyes and/or noses on it, many will raise a front paw and hold perfectly still.
For example, if I’m in the same room with Ollie and he stands still and stares at the front door, I know he really has to relieve himself. He holds his body still, there’s no tail-wagging, no ball in his mouth. This point to the door is different from the one that tells me the cat is standing on the other side of door or he wants to go out and explore while I get the mail from the mailbox at the end of the driveway.
My response to Ollie’s “I gotta go!” point is not a conditioned response on my part. Ollie never assumed that point at the door in response to bladder or rectal distress prior to eliminating on the rug in front of the door which resulted in my never missing that unrelated cue again. He assumed a body posture unrelated to either posture that he would assume to urinate or defecate that nonetheless communicated to me, “I gotta go right now.” When I opened the door that first time and every time since, he ran to his favorite clump of ornamental grass and peed or zipped to the back border of the flower bed and fertilized it. Then he came back in.
Once he taught me that response, it made life easier for both of us.
As regular readers of this commentary know, I would be the last person to claim that Ollie possesses Einsteinian potential. On the other hand, what does it say about my mental ability relative to him that he’s able to teach me to open the door and let him out to eliminate? What does it say about all those animals who can “point” their owners in the right direction—to open doors, fill empty water or food bowls, take them for a walk, pet them? Using just their body language. Without any preconditioned promise of reward if we do or threat of punishment if we don’t obey the command.
As I hovered in that strange mental state between sleep and wakefulness droning through the clouds on my way home, it dawned on me that companion dogs, at least, might be a lot more skilled at teaching us than we are at teaching them for one simple reason: They pay more attention to our behaviors, what we do naturally, what we respond to and to what we do not. And then as the result of this awareness, they teach us to make the correct response to a variety of pointing gestures in the most energy-efficient way possible. Not only that, a lot of them are aware of us enough to teach us commands that we can easily teach to other humans.
Think about that in terms of the methods we used to teach dogs. Gotta admit sometimes it makes me wonder which one of us is smarter…
Like most pet owners, I’ve often commented that my animals have taught me far more than I’ve ever taught them. But when I see how much effort is put into proving that animals can or cannot think, I wonder if my dogs and cat chuckle at the thought of this. Maybe there aren’t that many dogs who can learn to orient toward what we’re pointing at (and that includes orienting toward something the person thinks the dog would love to orient to that might not appeal to the dog at all). But I would be most hesitant to say that this was evidence that these animals were incapable of any higher thought processes associated with this phenomenon.
My personal and professional experience with countless domestic dogs and cats over the years leaves no doubt in my mind that animals are very adept at training humans to do what they want us to do. If such is the result of mindlessness, what does that say about us? And if it’s the result of cognition, what does it say about them?
I suppose those misanthropes who see all humans (except them, of course) as a blight on the natural landscape would say it proves that humans are dumber than the dumbest animal. But I see it as evidence of how much easier it is to teach members of another species when you know them well because then you want to make learning as easy for them as possible. Maybe you do this because it’s the most energy-efficient way to get what you want. Maybe you do it because you love and respect them. Whatever the reason, understanding how animals teach us may benefit them and us as individuals and a species as much if not more than learning about how we teach them.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.