What’s Going on in Your Dog’s Head?
Can we really know what dogs are thinking? The Dog Trainer challenges conventional beliefs about canine cognition.
Jolanta Benal, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA
In his best-selling new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman rips into tiny little shreds any idea you might have had that humans make decisions rationally and on the basis of the best evidence.
He calls one of our cognitive, ah, difficulties “what you see is all there is” – WYSIATI, for short. Humans, Kahneman explains, draw conclusions and make decisions with the information most readily available to us, and we usually ignore the high probability that we don’t know all the relevant facts. In short, we jump to conclusions.
What’s that got to do with you and your dog? Everything! How many times have you heard somebody say that their dog did X because of Y, where Y is some motive that makes sense to human beings? “Dogalini peed on the floor to spite me.” Or “Zippy always puts on the brakes when I want to walk down Main Street. He’s just being stubborn.”
So here’s a project for any beautiful day. Take your dog someplace outdoors where you can both hang out comfortably, preferably where you can sit at eye level with him. And spend 5 or 10 minutes doing nothing but watching his body language. When does he flick his ears back and forth? When do his eyes go wide? When does he close his mouth and look intently in some direction? When does he open his mouth and take fast, regular huffs of air? When does he stand up, sit, lie down? When does his tail tighten over his back and when does he relax it?
And here’s the kicker: Can you always tell what he’s smelling, or hearing, or otherwise responding to? I bet you can’t. Dogs live in a world of sensory inputs that just don’t exist for us. “WYSIATI,” but what you see (and hear, and smell) overlaps only somewhat with what Dogalini sees, and hears, and smells.
We can learn a lot about what’s going on with our dogs if we pay close attention to them, but it’s a good idea to remember that what we see isn’t all there is. And that anybody who claims to know everything about the insides of dogs’ heads is Just. Plain. Wrong.
Jolanta Benal is the author of The Dog Trainer’s Complete Guide to a Happy, Well-Behaved Pet.
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Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).