Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Read Online Free PDF

come and lie on this special bed, the non-forbidden bed. The dog typically will do so, reluctantly. And thus one might feel satisfied: another dog-human interaction successful!
    But is it so? Many days I returned home to find a warm, rumpled pile of sheets on my bed where either the wagging dog who greeted me at the door, or some unseen sleepy intruder, recently lay. We have no trouble seeing the meaning of the beds to the human: the very names of the objects make the situation clear. The big bed is for people; the dog bed is for dogs. Human beds represent relaxation, may be expensively outfitted with specially chosen sheets, and display all manner of fluffed pillows; the dog bed is a place we would never think to sit, is (relatively) inexpensive, and is more likely to be adorned with chew toys than with pillows. What about to the dog? Initially, there's not much difference between the beds—except, perhaps, that our bed is infinitely more desirable. Our beds smell like us, while the dog bed smells like whatever material the dog bed manufacturer had lying around (or, worse, cedar chips—overwhelming perfume to a dog but pleasant to us). And our beds are where we are: where we spend idle time, maybe shedding crumbs and clothes. The dog's preference? Indisputably our bed. The dog does not know all the things about the bed that make it such a glaringly different object to us. He may, indeed, come to learn that there is something different about the bed—by getting repeatedly scolded for lying on it. Even then, what the dog knows is less "human bed" versus "dog bed" but "thing one gets yelled at for being on" versus "thing one does not get yelled at for being on."
    In the dog umwelt beds have no special functional tone. Dogs sleep and rest where they can, not on objects designated by people for those purposes. There may be a functional tone for places to sleep: dogs prefer places that allow them to lie down fully, where the temperature is desirable, where there are other members of their troop or family around, and where they are safe. Any flattish surface in your home satisfies these conditions. Make one fit these criteria, and your dog will probably find it just as desirable as your big, comfy human bed.

ASKING DOGS

    To bolster our claims about the experience or mind of a dog, we will learn how to ask the dog if we're right. The trouble, of course, with asking a dog if he is happy or depressed is not that the question makes no sense. It's that we are very poor at understanding his response. We're made terribly lazy by language. I might guess at the reasons behind my friend's recalcitrant, standoffish behavior for weeks, forming elaborate, psychologically complex descriptions of what her actions indicate about what she thinks I meant on some fraught occasion. But my best strategy by leaps is to simply ask her. She'll tell me. Dogs, on the other hand, never answer in the way we'd hope: by replying in sentences, well punctuated and with italicized emphases. Still, if we look, they have plainly answered.
    For instance, is a dog who watches you with a sigh as you prepare to leave for work depressed? Are dogs left at home all day pessimistic? Bored? Or just exhaling idly, preparing for a nap?
    Looking at behavior to learn about an animal's mental experience is precisely the idea behind some cleverly designed recent experiments. The researchers used not dogs, but that shopworn research subject, the laboratory rat. The behavior of rats in cages may be the single largest contributor to the corpus of psychological knowledge. In most cases, the rat itself is not of interest: the research isn't about rats per se. Surprisingly, it's about humans. The notion is that rats learn and remember by using some of the same mechanisms that humans use—but rats are easier to keep in tiny boxes and subject to restricted stimuli in the hopes of getting a response. And the millions of responses by millions of laboratory rats, Rattus norvegicus, have