Dog days

Our new dog, Jethro, is in the middle of a six-week puppy obedience class.

After three weeks of intensive training, he reliably knows the command "Sit."  That's about it.  The difficulty is he's the most chill dog I've ever met.  He's not motivated to do much of anything except whatever it takes to get a belly rub. 

Jethro in a typical position

Otherwise, whatever he's doing, he's perfectly content to keep doing it, especially if it doesn't require any extra effort.  In class a couple of weeks ago I finally got him to lie down when I said, "Down," but then he didn't want to get up again.  In fact, he flopped over on his side and refused to move even when I tried tempting him with a doggie treat.  After a few minutes, the instructor said, "Is your dog still alive?"

I assured him that he was, and that this was typical behavior.

After a few more futile attempts, I gave up, sat on the floor, and gave him a belly rub.

Jethro, not the instructor.

So after working with Jethro in class and at home, I've reached three conclusions:

1. He has an incredibly sweet, friendly disposition.
2. He's cute as a button.
3. He has the IQ of a PopTart.

When we give him a command, he looks at us with this cheerful expression, as if to say, "Those are words, aren't they?  I'm pretty sure those are words."  Then he thinks, "Maybe those words have something to do with belly rubs."  So he flops over on his back, and his lone functioning brain cell goes back to sleep, having accomplished its mission.

Jethro in a rare philosophical mood

I couldn't help but think of Jethro when I read a study out of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, which looked at how an electroencephalogram trace changes when dogs are told the names of things (rather than commands to do things), and it found that the parts of the brain that are involved in mental representations of objects activate in dogs -- just as they do in humans.  The upshot is that dogs seem to form mental images when they hear the names of the objects.

"Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words," said study lead author Marianna Boros, in an interview with Science Daily.  "They also don't just associate that word with an object based on temporal contiguity without really understanding the meaning of those words, but they activate a memory of an object when they hear its name."

Interestingly, this response seemed to be irrespective of a particular dog's vocabulary.  "It doesn't matter how many object words a dog understands," Boros said.  "Known words activate mental representations anyway, suggesting that this ability is generally present in dogs and not just in some exceptional individuals who know the names of many objects."

"Dogs are not merely learning a specific behavior to certain words, but they might actually understand the meaning of some individual words as humans do," said Lilla Magyari, who co-authored the study.  "Your dog understands more than he or she shows signs of."

Well, okay, maybe your dog does.  With Jethro, the best response he seems to be capable of is mild puzzlement.  I wish he'd been one of the test subjects, but my fear would be that when they'd say a word to him, the response on the EEG would be *soft static*, and the researchers would come to me with grave expressions and say, "I'm sorry to give you the bad news, Mr. Bonnet, but your dog appears not to have any higher brain function."

Of course, I have to admit that it's hard to discern between "I don't understand what you're saying" and "I don't give a damn about what you're saying."  Yesterday when my wife was trying to teach him to catch a foam rubber frisbee, and he repeatedly allowed the frisbee to bonk off of the top of his head, it might be that he knew perfectly well what she wanted him to do and just didn't want to do it.  So perhaps Lilla Magyari's right, and he's smarter than we think he is. 

Given how often he's persuaded us to give up on all the "Sit," "Down," and "Stay" bullshit and just give him a belly rub, maybe he's not the one who's a slow learner.

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Inside an animal's mind

There's a doggy intelligence test that most dogs can't pass -- for an interesting reason.

The test involves placing a treat on the floor, stepping ten feet or so away, and letting the dog into the room.  You point to the treat, and the dog has to use that information to find the treat (i.e., not just sniff around until they blunder on it).

It may seem simple, but success at this requires a remarkable degree of sophistication.  What the dog has to be able to do is to look at you, understand the concept of "pointing," and then think, "If I were where (s)he is, what direction would his/her finger appear to be pointing at?"  In other words, the dog has to realize that another individual is seeing things from a different perspective, and has different information about how the world looks.

Success at this test shows the rudiments of a theory of mind -- an understanding that all sentient individuals see what's around them from their own personal point of view.  Most dogs in this scenario will respond by coming up and sniffing the person's hand, or by becoming confused and simply wandering around because they don't have any idea what the owner is expecting them to do (and usually finding the treat accidentally, so in some sense, they win anyhow).

Only one of the many dogs I've known was able to pass the Theory of Mind Test.  She was a neurotic, hyperactive half border collie, half coonhound named Doolin.  Doolin is far and away the smartest dog I've ever known.  She figured out how to unlatch the slide bolts on our gates with her teeth -- simply from watching us do it.  She not only passed the Theory of Mind Test, she also had no problem with the Mirror Test -- when she saw her reflection, she knew it was her and not another dog.  The first time she saw her reflection in a full-length mirror, she barked -- once.  Then she sort of went, "Oh, ha-ha, that's me, I get it" and never did it again.

Doolin the Canine Genius.  Yes, she did always look this fretful.  I guess being that smart means you've got a lot on your mind.

On the other hand, one of our current dogs, Lena -- who, and I say this with all due affection, has the IQ of a lint ball -- spends hours entertaining herself by standing at the end of our dock and barking at her own reflection in the pond.  ("There's that damn water dog again!  She's a pretty wily one, that water dog, but I'll get her this time!")

Lena, whose perpetually happy expression communicates either "What, me worry?" or else, "Derp."

This comes up because of a cool study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called, "Great Apes Use Self-Experience to Anticipate an Agent’s Action in a False-Belief Test," by Fumihiro Kano, Satoshi Hirata, and Masaki Tomonaga (of Kyoto University), and Josep Call and Christopher Krupenye (of the University of St. Andrews).  What the researchers did was to show half of their ape test subjects a test box with an opaque barrier and half a box with a transparent barrier, then they were allowed to observe a human interacting with the barrier from a distance where it was impossible to tell whether the barrier was opaque or transparent.  In other words, they had to interpret the behavior of another individual not based on what they themselves were seeing, but what they could infer about what the individual himself saw.

And they did it flawlessly.  When the ape saw that an object had been moved behind an opaque barrier, they guessed that the human trying to look through the barrier wouldn't know it'd been moved -- and the ape's eyes tracked in the direction of where it expected the human to reach (i.e., where the object was before the barrier was lowered).  From these results, it's clear that apes understand that each individual -- ape or human or otherwise -- has his or her own perspective, and they're not all the same.  Like us humans, they recognize that we don't all have access to the same information.

What this immediately brings up for me is our treatment of non-human animals.  My Animal Physiology professor in college -- one of the only college teachers I had who was truly an asshole -- scoffed at the idea that animals had emotions or could experience pain in the same way a human did.  With the perspective of time, I now realize that he hadn't come to this conclusion based on any scientific evidence, but because it made it much easier for him to rationalize hurting animals "in the name of science" without it putting a ding in his conscience.  We now know that many species grieve the death of one of their fellow creatures, bond strongly to their owners, and remember both good and bad treatment (if you don't believe this last one, take a look at this short video of a lion who was reintroduced to the wild, and then a year later remembered the people who'd rescued him -- a video that never fails to bring me to tears).

So we need to throw out this silly dichotomy of "human versus animal."  First, humans are animals.  Second, all the things we think of as being quintessentially human -- emotions, bonding, logic/problem solving, and ability to take another's perspective -- are not either/or, "we've got 'em and you don't" characteristics.  They exist on a spectrum, and our determination to see ourselves as qualitatively different from the rest of the animal kingdom should be jettisoned as the wrong-headed nonsense it is.  Any difference between us and our non-human cousins is purely quantitative -- and the quantities involved are appearing to be, on the whole, exceedingly small.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]