For the Love of a Dog Read Online Free PDF

poor old Brandy here [the dog lying at her feet, in my office for a serious case of dog-dog aggression]. He’s never gotten over being attacked by that Black Lab at the dog park. You can see it right now in his eyes.”
    It was hard to see Brandy’s eyes, covered as they were by champagne-colored bangs, but what I could see looked pretty much like the eyes of a dog happily chewing on the bone I’d provided. I’m not saying Brandy couldn’t have been traumatized at the dog park. (We’ll talk later about how traumatic events can affect the behavior of a dog years after their occurrence, just as they can in humans.) But if I had to make my own guess about what
internal state Brandy’s eyes were expressing in my office, it would have been contentment, not trauma
.
WHAT ARE EMOTIONS, ANYWAY?
    It’s not surprising that people don’t always agree with others about what emotion their dog is feeling. Emotions are complicated things, and it’s worth taking a fresh look at them before we try to expand our understanding of our dogs’ emotional lives.
    Emotions may be primitive and primal, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to understand. Now that we’re finally getting around to studying them, emotions are turning out to be amazingly interesting and complicated biological processes. Most scientists agree that mammals such as dogs are capable of basic emotions like fear, anger, and happiness, but they don’t agree on how they actually experience them. Surely, on the one hand it’s a simple issue—if Luke saw an aggressive dog running toward him, why wouldn’t he be fearful in much the same way that I was?
    Ah, but on the other hand being scared is an emotional experience driven by the brain, and the only simple thing about the brain is the fact that we still haven’t begun to comprehend it. No wonder: there are about a hundred billion neurons in the human brain, all linked together by ten trillion connections. Because of this level of complexity, our understanding of the biology of emotions is primitive at best. This makes it especially challenging to compare emotions in people and dogs, but the last few decades of research have taught us so much about the biology of emotions that it’s more than reasonable to try. A good place to start is an examination of what we know about our own emotions.
    Surely we all know what we’re talking about when we’re discussing emotions, but what would you say if someone asked you to define them? Beyond the labels we give them—fear, anger, joy—what exactly are emotions, and how are they created inside you? If you struggle with a precise definition, don’t feel bad: you’re not alone. 3 According to Antonio Damasio, an internationally acclaimed expert on emotion and the brain, our feelings are the least understood of all mental phenomena. They are also the most ubiquitous and probably the most ancient, so it’s surprising that we’ve only recently attempted to sort them out. It took scientists like Damasio to dismiss the arguments of early behaviorists that we shouldn’t attempt to understand emotions because, as subjective internal processes, they were “beyond the bounds of science.” It turns out that’s not even close to true; Damasio and others have proven that the biology of emotion is as accessible as the biology of hearing, vision, or memory.
    This doesn’t mean that research on emotions is easy. Emotions are slippery things, in some ways as hard to separate from our bodies and minds as it is to separate egg yolks from egg whites once you’ve mixed them together. As the neurologist John Ratey says: “Emotion is messy, complicated, primitive, and undefined because it’s all over the place.” You can’t sit back and examine your own emotions as if in a petri dish, because they come along with you. We do know that emotions— like joy, fear, and anger affect the mind and body in predictable ways. An emotion like fear includes physiological changes in your body