How does your dog's mind work?
watch closely, and you'll see the gears turning
Dogs are fascinating. They are one of the few animals that live inside our home in almost perfect harmony. They are the most domesticated animal on earth, a transformation that took roughly 15,000 years. If you compare the dog to other domesticated animals like the horse, the cat, chickens, or cows, there’s no contest in how well they’ve acclimated to living with humans.
Dogs are smart. Their intelligence is borne of a life lived through the senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, and scent; this is where they live, free of the vagaries and misunderstandings of spoken language. Think of arriving at a beautiful beach; you stand and breathe in the sea air, smile, look around, and remark to your companion on the beauty of the scene.
Your dog, arriving at the same beach breathes in the sea air and smells not just the salt, but a strip of seaweed rotting off to his left, another dog upwind, and perhaps a single french fry someone dropped in the sand several yards away.
All this without taking a step onto the beach and without making a single unnecessary remark to his master about how nice it all is. Instead, his experience is felt and expressed in his body.
Scientists are beginning to prove what we’ve known all along; dogs are thinking all the time. They just don’t rattle on about it the way we do.
Shelby, pictured below purposely leaves that spot for me on the couch. She makes it clear that the space is for me. I’m supposed to sit down, journal, and sip my coffee while she chews on her bone. It’s a morning ritual. She makes her idea known through a steady gaze and a mad thumping of her tail as I walk in with my coffee. She’s that first grader patting the lunch seat beside her the moment she spies her bestie. “Sit next to me!”
I take her up on her invitation. A ripple of happiness flows through her body from head to toe. She begins chewing on her bone and I sip my coffee and scribble in my journal.
She communicated her idea to me; I accepted.
All is right with our world. Of course, I can’t read Shelby’s mind, but by paying attention to her behavior and her body language, I get an idea of what’s going on inside her beautiful head.
Dogs are doers and thinkers, living large in their incredibly acute senses. Their ability to smell is 100,000 times more acute than our own. Much of what they think and feel is a mystery to us simply because we don’t have the same sensory input. But, by paying close attention, we can gain insight to what they might be thinking.
Science cautions us to avoid anthropomorphising our dog’s behavior, but that often puts a damper on relating to our dogs. Just as dogs live through their senses, we live through our bodies, our minds, and spoken language. We have no other way to define and order our world than through the way we think and feel as a human.
It follows then, that understanding our dogs relies on seeing them through our human experience. I like to think it’s okay to interpret Shelby’s world through my own human experience, especially if doing so helps me deepen the remarkable bond I share with her.
When I was in my early twenties, I frequently devoured stories in magazines like National Geographic about Jane Goodall and Dian Fosse, living with and observing the Chimpanzees and Gorillas. I mean, they were on the other side of the world, living with animals that we are so attuned to, within their natural habitat.
Then one day I realized that, by going down to the local shelter and adopting a homeless, mixed breed dog, and living with that dog in my habitat, observing and learning from him, and letting him learn from me—what I was doing really wasn’t much different from Goodall and Fosse, except in terms of a different species and habitat.
My adopted dogs over my lifetime (I’m 71 now) have been my best teachers about human nature, dog nature, intelligence, emotions, cognition, play—you name it. And all because of living with this “other species” in my home, rather like a foreign exchange student. It is a gift and an honor, and a sacred responsibility to take in teachers like that. Sure, they’re just” dogs, and sure, we’re “just”humans, but—like the chimps and gorillas, it’s SO much more than that.
“How Does Your Dog’s Mind Work?” Such a great piece to get us thinking and observing our funny little 4-leggers! Thank you very much, Karen Elizabeth!
Dogs aren’t just another domesticated species like cattle or chickens. Genetic evidence suggests they diverged from wolves a fair bit over 15,000 years ago, (likely around 20,000–40,000 years ago), and many researchers now describe their relationship with humans as a long process of co-evolution, which helps explain why dogs are so uniquely attuned to human social cues,but interpreting our gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and behaviour far better than mearly human dominated & domesticated animals.