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

greatly informed our understanding of human psychology.
    But the rats themselves are intrinsically interesting as well. People who work with rats in laboratories sometimes describe their animals' "depression" or their exuberant natures. Some rats seem lazy, some are cheery; some pessimistic, some optimistic. The researchers took two of these characterizations—pessimism and optimism—and gave them operational definitions: definitions in terms of behavior that allow us to determine whether real differences in the rats can be seen. Instead of simply extrapolating from how humans look when pessimistic, we can ask how a pessimistic rat might be distinguished by its behavior from an optimistic one.
    Thus, the rats' behavior was examined not as a mirror to our own but as indicating something about … rats: about rat preference and rat emotions. Their subjects were placed in tightly restricted environments: some were "unpredictable" environments, where the bedding, cage mates, and the light and dark schedule were always changing; others were stable, predictable environments. The experimental design took advantage of the fact that, hanging out in their cages with little to do, rats quickly learn to associate new events with simultaneously occurring phenomena. In this case, a particular pitch was played over speakers into the cages of the rats. It was a prompt to press a lever: the lever triggered the arrival of a pellet of food. When a different pitch was played and the rats pressed the lever, they were greeted with an unpleasant sound and no food. These rats, reliably like lab rats before them, quickly learned the association. They raced over to the food-dispensing lever only when the good-harbinger sound appeared, like young children rallied by the jingle of an ice-cream truck. All of the rats learned this easily. But when the rats were played a new sound, one between the two learned pitches, what the researchers found was that the rats' environment mattered. Those who had been housed in a predictable environment interpreted the new sound to mean food; those in unstable environments did not.
    These rats had learned optimism or pessimism about the world. To watch the rats in the predictable environments jump with alacrity at every new sound is to see optimism in action. Small changes in the environment were enough to prompt a large change in outlook. Rat lab workers' intuitions about the mood of their charges may be spot-on.
    We can subject our intuitions about dogs to the same kind of analysis. For any anthropomorphism we use to describe our dogs, we can ask two questions: One, is there a natural behavior this action might have evolved from? And two, what would that anthropomorphic claim amount to if we deconstructed it?

    DOG KISSES

    Licks are Pump's way of making contact, her hand outstretched for me. She greets me home with licks at my face as I bend to pet her; I get waking licks on my hand as I nap in a chair; she licks my legs thoroughly clean of salt after a run; sitting beside me, she pins my hand with her front leg and pushes open my fist to lick the soft warm flesh of my palm. I adore her licks.
    I frequently hear dog owners verify their dogs' love of them through the kisses delivered upon them when they return home. These "kisses" are licks: slobbery licks to the face; focused, exhaustive licking of the hand; solemn tongue-polishing of a limb. I confess that I treat Pump's licks as a sign of affection. "Affection" and "love" are not just the recent constructs of a society that treats pets as little people, to be shod in shoes in bad weather, dressed up for Halloween, and indulged with spa days. Before there was any such thing as a doggy day care, Charles Darwin (who I feel confident never dressed up his pup as a witch or goblin) wrote of receiving lick-kisses from his dogs. He was certain of their meaning: dogs have, he wrote, a "striking way of exhibiting their affection, namely, by licking the hands or faces of