Can we ever understand dogs?
What is it like to walk on four legs, to experience the world through the nose, to hear a whole range of sounds and to have a monochromatic vision? Does it matter that our tools for understanding that will never be enough?
Limits of understanding
I’m going to state the obvious- despite the fact that humans and dogs co-evolved, dogs are a very different species. How can we go about understanding them and making sure that we give them the best life possible?
Speaking about bats, Thomas Nagel (1974) wrote:
“In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question.
I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat”.
In his research, Nagel (1974) explored the limits of what can be known about the experience of another (especially if the otherness is created by a species border). There are many excellent sources of information that help to appreciate the experience of a dog (such as Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, 2012). However, even if we understand how the vomeronasal organ works and how dogs coordinate four limbs when jumping over a bar, how they roll their tongues to drink, we can still only understand a dog in parts. And being a dog is greater than a sum of these parts.
This applies to understanding any other human being. Imagining what is it like to walk in someone else’s shoes is always by knowing what is it like to walk in your own shoes- it is hard to imagine things without a reference to what we know. The only way to understand a dog is by translating their experience to ours, to the way we see, smell, and sense the world, to the way we are in the world in our bold, bipedal, colour-focused bodies and figuring out how it might be different for them. And because our bodies are so different, they are not the best frame of reference when trying to forge this kind of trans-species understanding.
Anthropomorphism
A lot of dog owners know their dogs without thinking how this is possible. People who live with dogs feel like they know what the dog is thinking, feeling and why it’s doing the things they’re doing. Because of anthropomorphism- projecting human experiences, sensations, feelings on a dog- dog owners can ‘speak for’ their dogs. They can imaginatively put themselves in the perspective of their dogs, interpret what their dogs are doing and articulate their dog’s subjective experience (Arluke & Sanders 1996:64), often acting as their advocates. Arluke and Sanders (1996) take this anthropomorphic projection a bit further. They argue that speaking for a dog is a process of co-production- both a dog and a person is chipping in- dog contributes the behaviour and human adds an interpretation that makes sense to other humans. In this process they create another entity all together- dog-human pair.
Companionship
Donna Haraway is a a philosopher and a dog-agility enthusiast. Perhaps not surprisingly, having a lot of experience in human-dog sport, she approaches the idea of understanding dogs in a similar way. She says that to start to understand what is it like to be a dog it is crucial to go back to the origins of dogs and their ecology- understand the science behind them. But Haraway adds another layer of understanding dogs. For Haraway, dogs, as a companion species, have never exist apart from humans — the two were always a product of their relationship: “partners [who do not] precede their relating” (Haraway, 1998:17). She argues that this co-production is often tangible. Pet dogs and humans literally share their bacterial flora and microbiome. Lineages of dogs are a product of human breeding and selection programs and we constantly hear of people who were saved by their dogs- effectively producing lineages of people whose presence in the world is down to existence of dogs. Therefore, humans are also companion species, as it always takes at two. A relation is a two-way, physical process — a dog bite can leave a permanent scar and cropped ears and tails (a result of a particular kind of a relationship with a dog) don’t grow back. Haraway asks to stop thinking about dogs across the species barrier and start thinking about them through the prism of this co-produced relationship and their breakdowns, where both parties can influence one another and where both change as a result of this relationship, their behaviours, things that they do together. She calls to understand:
“humans [and dogs] together in situated histories, situate naturecultures, in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritage both before and lateral to this encounter. All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact” (Haraway, 1998: 19).
Case for dehumanising
I was recently at the ISAZ conference in Sydney and learnt of a third way of thinking about dogs and understanding them. Dr Plante researchers furries and therian communities. Therians identify with animals so strongly that they feel that their identity is not entirely human. They dehumanise themselves- think of themselves as human animals rather than distinct speacies. And as a result they declare higher empathy for animals. Courtney and his team found that the higher empathy towards animals is not just declared, but also sub-conscious. They designed an Implicit Association Test (like the one for uncovering implicit racism) to understand animal biases. In the classic example of this test, a person is shown pictures of a white and non-white person paired with words, like good or bad. People with stronger implicit race-biases take longer to pair an image of non-white person with a positive adjective than people with weaker biases. In the pro-animal-bias versions of this tests, people were shown images of animals or people paired with value-laden words. People who identified with animals more strongly paired animals with positive words quicker than people with weaker identifications. People with stronger animal biases, identified with animals more strongly and were more likely to act on these identifications- e.g. by signing up to help a local animal-focused charity. A third way of understanding dogs is therefore by trying to understand ourselves as less human, and more animal-like beings. The idea behind developing empathy in this way is different to anthropomorphism, but eventually the barriers are the same- the reference point is still human body, with is human biology, even if the perception of this body is different to a person which doesn’t dehumanise themselves in the same way.
Implications
Does it matter how we come to understand dogs? Probably. Trying to understand a dog just through anthropomorphic lens — i.e. just by relating to what we know and how we feel and trying to imagine this from dogs perspective can make us more empathetic to dogs. By relating to our own experience, we can go a long way to help them- rescuing them from fires, adopting from shelters and going through a long and difficult rehabilitation process with a dog, because we know that it had a hard start in life. It may, however, also lead to unrealistic expectations and unjust frustration. A prime example of this is arguing that dogs know they’ve done something wrong because they have a guilty look and punishing them for whatever they’ve done. In reality, dogs don’t feel guilt and in these situations respond to our body language. The guilt on their faces is a sign of fear, frustration, anxiety but by projecting our emotions onto them we may see it as something done out of spite. Marian Stamp Dawkins argues that anthropomorphism can be dangerous and shouldn’t be the only reason for striving to improve dog or more broadly, animal welfare (drive to improve animal welfare should be driven by scientific understanding of animals needs). Anthropomorphism is not perfect, but it’s a starting point to research, which through closer approximations of what is it like to be an animal, can help to figure out how to care for them and give them the best life possible.
The second way helps to see dogs as more equal to us, suffering from the same ills, frustrations and problems, joys and pleasures. It encourages empathy- not because we are humans and therefore can understand dogs, but because we are animals that can relate to dog by virtue of being biological entities. It encourages seeing dog behaviour as behaviour of animals, which stems from their biology and instincts, not vices and bad intentions. It can be problematic, if the science between the biological explanation isn’t right. I’ve heard hundreds of dog owners explaining to me that they punish their dog, eat before their dog, go through the doors ahead of their dog because they believe that all behavioural problems are due to dog trying to compete for a position in a human-dog hierarchy. A dog is trying to dominate them so they are responding in a dog-way to this challenge. These dog owners try to understand dogs as animals and respond to them as they believe other animals would. Unfortunately, the science behind dominance hierarchies is uncertain at best, and mostly really flawed, so the biological approaches are not helpful.
Finally, Haraway’s (1998) approach of meeting half way between science and anthropomorphism appeals to me. Her formulation asks to understand a dog within its biological and social context that is largely formed through interactions with us and other people in dog’s life. She calls for openly acknowledging that our understanding of dogs is always anthropomorphic, because this is the only lens that we will ever know. She also insists on knowing as much as possible of how dogs work, i.e. learning ‘the science’ of dogs to at least try to understand the limits of our own imagination, the known unknowns. Understanding dogs through the prism of companionship protects empathy needed for living with dogs, but also gives them a fair chance to be dogs, at least sometimes.
References:
Arluke, A., Sanders, C. (1996) Regarding Animals. Temple University Press: Philadelphia.
Haraway, D. (1998) Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago.
Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83 (4): 435–450
FurScience: http://furscience.com/
