Retrieving, Thinking and Philosophy of Mind

Quite a long time ago I read a philosopher's paper which I do not remember well. I think it was Dennett, and I think it was on decision-making, but what I do remember vividly is that he wrote about throwing two tennis balls for his Labrador. The dog would race back and forth between the two for quite some time, then choose one apparently at random when he was tired enough.

Now, what is surprising here is that I didn't try this on one of my own dogs sooner. I think this must be a paper from when my husband was in graduate school, when we had a dog who didn't care to fetch, or from my undergraduate program, when the dog was at home with my parents and school had nothing to do with my retreats there. However, Dennett was recently brought back to my attention by a secondhand social contact, and I tried to recall if this was his story.

Then I formed a hypothesis. Not all dogs are Labradors, bred to take directions. Some breeds, particularly herders, are required to make snap decisions on their own, and the German Shepherd Dog is one of those breeds. I expected that one object would bounce more or further, and that my dog would go after that one. Then, of course, I whistled for Dustin.

His current obsession is magnolia cones. They bounce and skitter tolerably well, and saved me the trouble of finding two reasonably well-matched balls in this chaotic household. Also, it's not too hard to fit two in one hand to throw together. And it turned out I was right: one cone always activated the naughty-sheep protocol by bouncing further, and he chose that one without hesitation every time. At first he would bring it to the less-traveled cone, good herding dog that he is, intending to bring both, but then he would switch to retrieve protocol on realizing only one would fit in his mouth. Then, of course, he brought the bouncier one.

I suppose the moral of the story is that before one generalizes about the simpleness or complexity of canis lupus familiaris minds, one must first examine multiple breeds. Labradors, as my friend Mary is wont to say, were bred to do what they were told, however it might be conveyed, by men who went to the training field with a six-pack and a gun. Those who stayed in the gene pool were the ones who could figure out how to what they were told, not those who made up new ways to do things. Herders, on the other hand, have to make snap decisions on controlling the individual sheep (or ducks, cows, reindeer, what-have-you) to conform to the large-scale directions given by their handler. Two or more lambs (see previous parenthetical) may take off in different directions at once, and the herding dog has to have a plan for that or devise one on the fly.

Of course, that does lead to an inventive streak the rest of the time. Sunny took to doing her obedience exercises with flair, and I suppose that the AKC guidelines don't say the dog can't walk from front to finish on her hind legs while whooping to the ceiling. At least, they didn't before she came along. I haven't checked the handbook lately. Dustin, asked to herd ducks, decided it would be more fun to push them into a group if he could then excite them into standing tall and quacking wildly, then do a sort of Evel Knievel routine over them. He seems to feel that it's rude to boss around such small and harmless creatures -- give him a good big rude sheep any day.

Or, of course, a naughty magnolia cone.

Dogs, Mirrors, and Intelligence

I've been told various solid facts about dogs and mirrors: dogs aren't visual enough to notice reflections, they don't understand reflections, they lose interest as soon as they realize they can't smell the other dog, and so on.

Here's your solid fact from me: it depends on the dog.

Tasha, our longcoat shepherd, will ride in the back of the car and look at us in the rearview. She likes to check in that way. There is definite eye contact, and if we smile at her, she will thump her tail. This is supposed to be beyond canine comprehension, as though we'd found her programming the DVR to record "Good Dog U." for later. She seems to find it quite natural.

Wanda, now five and a half months old, has been experimenting with the bedroom in the mirror. The other night, I was sitting on the bed, and she decided to have a good gawk at my reflection. I waved at her reflection. She wagged a little and turned to look straight at me. Then she got up, walked around the dresser, and peered at where my reflection would have seemed to her to be located. Then she went back to the mirror and watched me in it again. She went back and forth to make sure there was only one of me a couple of times. When I laughed, she cocked her head and pondered, apparently, that she only heard one of me. She seems now to have a pretty good idea of how a mirror works -- but she was experimenting to find out. To me, both the experimenting and the apparent comprehension suggest a good deal of intelligence.

With Dustin, I'm intending to set up an experiment. I want to put him in a sit-stay facing a mirror, then stand behind him and give him a "down" signal he can only see in the reflection. If he goes down, he sees the image and understands it's a representation of the real world. If he doesn't respond, then he's not processing enough visual information to mean much to him. If he looks over his shoulder to see if I mean it, then he is aware the reflection isn't real but doesn't quite get the connection to the real event. At least, that's how I'm inclined to interpret the possibilities -- but I haven't tried it yet.

Those readers with obedience-trained dogs -- try it! Leave me a comment letting me know how it turned out!

Instinctive Behaviors Also Take Practice

Lots of dogs have the instinct to trail after an interesting scent. Lots of dogs also have the instinct to push livestock from one place to another, or to retrieve. They still need practice, though, to follow their instincts well.

Need proof? For a male dog, lifting his hind leg to pee -- marking territory and indicating his great stature (or faking it) -- is instinctive. The more alpha his aspirations, the stronger the drive to do it. Bruce has now reached the hopeful age.

But does he get it right? Nope. Instead of the ballet-turnout leg hike, he simply picks his left hind foot up. His timing is often a bit off; he's been known to finish his business, walk a couple of steps, then pause to pick up the foot thoughtfully with an air of having forgotten something. Practice makes perfect. He has an older male to observe and other dogs' markings to ponder. I'm sure he'll get the hang of it all eventually. For now, though, he's entertaining me and giving himself something to think about.

Scent and the Aging Dog

As your dog gets older, he may lose some of his sensory abilities. You're probably used to thinking of him as getting hard of hearing, or maybe a little blind, but the nose can weaken too. His olfactory powers may not be what they used to be, or, as the Lady and the Tramp line would have it, "You mean you don't smell as good as you used to?"

This morning, we had a little evidence of this. I took the shepherds out to play ball, a perfectly ordinary morning activity. Tasha chased hers; McCoy (pictured in his favorite spot) danced out and looked back at me at exactly the wrong moment as usual. The ball bounced behind him, hit a tussock, and disappeared behind a tree.

And when I say disappeared, I mean disappeared. Half an hour of looking and we still haven't found it, though we all had a bit of exercise from trying. Usually I rely on the dogs' noses at least as much as on my sense of sight, but they couldn't find it either. Part of this is that Dustin and Tasha both figure McCoy's ball is his lookout and they aren't much help. Part of this is that he really doesn't have much sense of smell anymore. It's times like this that I really miss Sunny's help, as she was the only one willing to accept a possessive form in a sentence: she understood that "Find McCoy's ball," meant "I know that your toy is in my hand and you don't have to tell me about that one; look for the missing one."

Dustin, on the other hand, feels that if I have a ball in my hand, there's no need to go questing elsewhere for a different one. Tasha's feelings are less clear, but she's also less bonded to me, so the vibe I usually get from her is that if I can't find it myself I'm not good for much.

My best guess is that when Dustin looped behind the tree he came out the other side with McCoy's ball, then dropped it somewhere when I threw his own. Now, I thought his jaws were empty the whole time, but if they were, the aliens have beamed McCoy's ball away for DNA testing. I would quite sympathize if they want to replicate the German Shepherd on their own planet, and I'd much rather they beamed up the ball than the dog (and since he's neutered, the DNA may as well come from his saliva as anywhere), but since he never actually caught the thing today, those aliens are going to be working with some very stale spittle.

Most likely, though, it'll turn up by zinging across the yard next time we mow.

Animal Intelligence

There are researchers working on what animals know, how intelligent they are, and other such questions that are hard to measure in a laboratory. Some wonderful work has been done on primates. A few gray parrots have proven that linguistic abilities aren't the exclusive property of humans, and that they aren't just "parroting." Dogs -- well, we seem to feel as though we know them well enough. Some of them have bigger comprehended vocabularies than others, but there's remarkably little formal research done on the animal that lies on our feet while we type the reports.

Those of us with dogs, though, all collect our little anecdotes. One of the researches on primates is the ability to use symbols to indicate "same" and "different." I never thought to try to teach my dogs symbols in the sense of something they could use to communicate with me, but "same" and "different" is the basis of all scent work. Sunny and I started with "Find another one." For tracking, that meant finding each article, regardless of material, that smelled like the tracklayer. She was willing to extrapolate, however, and could do "Find another one" to mean a set of cadaver samples, shreds of a dollar bill hit by a lawnmower, and other things, ignoring my scent if it happened to be on the object. Technically, this meant she was willing to work in different conceptual categories: match the human scent or match the object's core scent. This turned out to give us trouble on the utility-dog exercise of retrieving the most recently handled scent article; she wanted to show me all the things that matched instead of bringing back the one that didn't -- the only one of the set I'd handled -- even though she was happy enough to fetch "My stick" in the yard.

I'm still experimenting on my dogs to see just what concepts underlie some of the things they consider perfectly ordinary behavior. Doing scent work with them helps; it means I have a better idea how they see the world, which helps me understand how they make decisions. Knowing roughly how little color vision they have helps too. They're not being foolish when they can't find a red toy in green grass from the windward side. They honestly can't see it. When they waltz off after the invisible, they're probably after something perfectly obvious to them, and they're usually nice enough to keep their thoughts to themselves when we don't realize what that obvious thing is. After watching a puppy trailing a single ant across concrete for several minutes, I've learned how amazing their perceptions and dedications can be if I don't rush to conclude, "Stupid puppy." The same puppy is now working up the food chain to cats and rabbits, though never for very far.

Another way to look at intelligence, of course, is to look at persistance. My husband's childhood dog watched the family opening doors and tried to work the knob himself. His paws and the knob weren't compatible, so he stopped trying. Likewise, Sunny once tried to steal my soda as we picnicked on the tailgate of my car. She'd already had some of my burger, freely given, and a few fries; she had her own cup of water, but the coke smelled more interesting. I looked over and she had her mouth on my straw. Since dogs cannot suck things up straws, of course, she didn't get any, and (sadly, since I didn't have a camera handy at that moment) she never bothered to try again. Things that did work, of course, she was happy to repeat.

Puppy Socialization and Exercise

We took the puppies to a pet-food shop, one of those nice places that lets you bring in non-people-eating dogs, yesterday. It was something of an adventure.

Bruce is bold about new places and things. He happily browsed toys, smelled the smells, helped Wanda dig a stray cookie out from under a display, and was all kinds of confident -- except with new people.

Wanda is a little shy about new places, worried about cars in the parking lot, and anxious about stairways. However, new people interest her, especially little new people. For whatever reason, our little Dingo-bat likes children entirely out of the goodness of her heart. This is a good thing.

Both of them back-trailed to the car -- through a door, across an underground lot, lots of cement, about 20 minutes after we'd gone in. I was impressed with their noses. This is variable-surface tracking waiting to happen. However, if Bruce wants to use that nose for a living, he's going to have to learn to like what he finds with it! I intend to take him lots of places and carry along a stick of cheese. "Here, will you offer this to my puppy?" If strangers equal cheese, and cheese tends to lead to friendship, then strangers will be potential new friends instead of scary, scary monsters. He liked the cashier who was feeding him goodies just fine.

Wanda demonstrated a new talent this morning. She jumped on the bed. That doesn't sound like much in a casual mention, but the height of the bed is roughly three times the height of her shoulder. It only took a little scrambling. I'm thinking that her ancestors probably include a Jack/Parson Russell Terrier or something equally springy. Since she's so springy and Bruce is so comfortable hanging out on the rocking ottoman, I'm inclined to say either one would be dandy at agility. I'm hoping to knock some basic equipment together soon so that they and Dustin can start using it with me. Great exercise for them, running up ramps and such, while I get to hold still once they're doing it right. I call that a plus.

Wanda has also made a great cognitive leap: she has learned to fib. My longest command is "No sticks in the house." I usually enforce it by closing the door in front of the puppy until the stick is dropped at the threshold. Bruce has figured this one out and leaves his twigs and things outdoors. Wanda, on the other hand, wanted to keep her stick a couple of days ago. She looked at the closed door, looked at me, and then stared ahead with an expression of concentration as she worked the twig entirely into her mouth. Then she looked up at me again with an innocent expression that said plainly, "Whut schtick?" I cracked up -- but didn't open the door. Eventually she realized she hadn't put one over on me and spat it out.