A dog's mind

There's a really good article on Slate about how dogs think. It questions the assumption most people make that dogs think even remotely similarly to humans, pointing out that dogs are existential beings. It tells the story of a woman who went back to work after being at home for several years, and the troubles she experienced when her dog started destroying her home after she went back to work.

"Everybody says the dog was reacting to her going back to work," I suggested.

"Everybody is probably wrong," was his blunt comeback. "It's 'theory of mind.' This is what often happens when humans assume that dogs think the way we do."

His analysis: "Being angry at the human and behaving punitively--that's not a thought sequence even remotely possible, given a dog's brain. The likely scenario is that the dog is simply frightened." When Heather was home, she was there to explain and enforce the rules. With her gone, the dog literally didn't know how to behave. The dog should have been acclimated to a crate or room and confined more, not less, until she got used to her new independence.

Lots of dogs get nervous when they don't know what's expected of them, and when they get anxious, they can also grow restless. Blue hadn't had to occupy time alone before. Dogs can get unnerved by this. They bark, chew, scratch, destroy. Getting yelled at and punished later doesn't help: The dog probably knows it's doing something wrong, but it has no idea what. Since there's nobody around to correct behaviors when the dog is alone, how could the dog know which behavior is the problem? Which action was wrong?

He made sense to me. Dogs are not aware of time, even as a concept, so Blue couldn't know whether she was being left for five minutes or five hours, or how that compared to being left for a movie two weeks earlier. Since she had no conscious notion that Heather's work life had changed, how could she get angry, let alone plot vengeance?

The rest of the article can be found here.

I think the recently-beginning shift in the way we think about our pets is an important one. So many animals are needlessly subjected to punishments that are simply inappropriate, because they're based on assumptions that dogs have a much more complex understanding of time and motivation than they actually do. It's not to say that dogs are stupid, or incapable of reason--far from it--just that they don't experience time the way we do, and are much more likely to respond to immediate operant or classical conditioning than to training that nebulously rewards good behaviors and punishes bad ones.

It's something I have a lot of strong feelings and opinions about.