Not Only a Dog–Penetrating Their Inner World

I woke up this morning two hours ahead of my alarm. 

It was still dark out as I lay there reading on my phone. After a while, Lola, who as usual had the side of her face pressed against mine, rolled over on her pillow. The light from my phone must have awakened her.

She stayed motionless on the pillow, eyes wide open. I didn’t know what was going on in her head, but it looked like deep thought. And contentment. She always wakes up happy. That’s when I took the photo above.

Soon after she came to live with me a couple years ago, she formed a strong bond with me that gets stronger as the days pass. It’s not just the trust we share that causes me to marvel. When we’re alone, she’s always calm and relaxed. Otherwise she’s anxious and hypervigilant, the result of bad homes and her breed as an Australian Cattle Dog.

As I wondered what was going on in her head, I kept thinking of the words I’ve heard many times: She’s only a dog.

Sometimes people say this to ask for tolerance of a dog’s shortcomings. Don’t expect too much from her. She’s only a dog. 

Other times they say it to caution you not to put your dog on too high a pedestal. They want you to recognize the inferior position of dogs in the animal kingdom. They are way below us noble human animals.

I reject both interpretations. Each one misses the point.

At least based on my own experience, they are lower than we are in some respects. But they are higher than us in many other ways. And more noble.

As time goes on I learn more about their behavior. I find more depth in their cognition and understanding.

No doubt, their dognition is very different than human cognition, and not as powerful in many ways. Yet when I say something or do something, it looks like Lola usually understands me.

In my research into dog behavior, I came across an Australian researcher named John Bradshaw. He’s an anthrozoologist–a person who studies the relationships between human and non-human animals. Anthrozoology is sometimes called Human Animal Studies (HAS).

Each of his books reveals a world most people know nothing about. I recommend them highly.  Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet is a good place to start. 

It’s taken us a while to start using scientific methods to advance beyond folk wisdom when it comes to understanding the animals we live and work with.

One of the biggest steps was made by American researcher Gregory Berns. He shows us what goes on in the brains of dogs. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, because it is so useful and so interesting.

Greg is a polymath with an undergraduate degree in physics and two doctor’s degrees–one in mechanical engineering and one in medicine. He works as a professor of both psychiatry and economics at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

He’s made exciting discoveries in a range of fields, but the one that grabs me is the one that lets us peer into the mysterious minds of dogs.

Here’s how he does it. He described it in detail in his 2013 book How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain. Reading this book was like exploring a new continent for the first time.

He started by training Callie, one of his pet dogs, to remain still in the confined, noisy environment of an MRI machine. It took six months.

Then he recorded the brain activity of Callie with an fMRI while she was awake and could respond to his voice. Previously dogs could only do the MRIs while sedated.

With the dog awake, he can record brain activity showing how dogs react in his experiments. This allows him to start answering important questions about our relationship with our dogs.

Does your dog love you or is he only in it for the food and treats? Turns out most dogs value praise for their owner as highly as treats. 

And some dogs value the praise more highly that the food. Their dopamine levels are higher and more areas of the brain light up in the fMRIs.

This short Facebook video shows how this experiment works. Do Dogs Love Us or do They Just Want Treats? 

This hard evidence is gratifying. But once you develop a sensitivity to the feelings of your canine best friend, you discover more details each day. Most dog owners rarely experience them, because they tune them out as anthropomorphic sentimentality (as some but not all of those feelings are).

Dogs experience a rich emotional life as do probably many other animals. Tuning into that life is richly rewarding and improves all your relationships. That’s why enlightened people who have the privilege to be advocates for and guardians of dogs recoil from the idea that their canine companions exist on some lower level, that they are “just dogs.”

John Manning