What Dogs Do How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind by Stanley Coren Review by: Clive D. L.

Wynne The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 118, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 660-666 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30039094 . Accessed: 07/06/2012 11:01
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Journal of Psychology.

http://www.jstor.org

660

AMERICANJOURNALOF PSYCHOLOGY,WINTER 2005

I have already stated that my bias is toward the belief that animals (at least most mammals) have conscious thinking ability to some extent, although generally less than that of humans. I also believe that if you find one behavior that cannot be the case has been proven, whereas explained in the absence of consciousness, Wynne seems to have set for himself the nearly impossible task of asserting the negative. Nonetheless, despite the different conclusions that we reach (based in

part on the different datasets we consider), it is still true that this book is worth reading and considering seriously. It does provide a good picture of certain aspects of animal behavior that are not well known, and it offers a number of cautions and questions that should be considered in the analysis of animal cognition. Perhaps the final word on the controversy should be left to Wynne himself, who notes, "It's not their like-us-ness that makes animals important; It's their not-like-us-ness that is the better reason to cherish them. You may disagree. I respect that. Thoughtful people can in good faith reach different conclusions on these problems.... Go peacefully-and may your dog go with you" (p. 244). Stanley Coren
Department of Psychology University of British Columbia 2136 West Mall Vancouve BC, Canada V6T 1Z4

E-mail: [email protected] References

Coren, S. (2000). How to speakdog:Masteringthe art of dog-human communication.New York: Free Press. Darwin, C. (1890). Thedescentof man. London:J. Murray. Gagnon, S., & Dorn, F. Y. (1994). Cross-sectional study of object permanence in domestic puppies (Canisfamiliaris). Journal of Comparative Psychology,108, 220-232. Lockwood, M. (1989). Mind, brain, and the quantum: The compound "I."New York: Blackwell. Mitchell, R. W., & Thompson, N. S. (1993). Familiarity and the rarity of deception: Two theories and their relevance to play between dogs (Canisfamiliaris) and humans (Homo 107, 291-300. sapiens).Journal of Comparative Psychology, Premack, D. (1986). Gavagai!or thefuturehistoryof the animal language controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Slabbert, J. M., & Rasa, O. A. E. (1997). Observational learning of an acquired maternal behaviour pattern by working dog pups: An alternative training method? AppliedAnimal BehaviorScience,53, 309-316.

What Dogs Do
How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind

By Stanley Coren. New York: Free Press, 2004. 351 pp. Cloth, $26.00. The first scientific paper on dog behavior was published in 1884 by Charles Darwin's neighbor, Sir John Lubbock. Lubbock, governor of the Bank of England and inventor of British public holidays, was a keen amateur contributor to several

BOOK REVIEWS

661

branches of science. Lubbock thought that the standard method of training dogs to understand human commands underestimated dogs' communicative abilities because it offered no line of communication from dog to human. He had an original idea to get over this problem. He wrote the names of things he thought his poodle, Van, might like on large cards, which he then spread out on the ground. Whatever Van selected he received, and whatever Van received he accepted with delight. Lubbock was greatly impressed by the frequency with which Van learned to bring him the card with "FOOD" written on it: "No one who sees him can doubt that he understands the act of bringing the card with the word 'Food' on it as a request for something to eat" (Lubbock, 1884, p. 216). Lubbock clearly believed that he had made a great breakthrough in understanding dog minds. Modern readers, especially those trained in psychology, will readily recognize the fallacy of Lubbock's reasoning. Van's behavior can be more parsimoniously accounted for as the expression of Edward Thorndike's (1911) Law of Effect, the principle that actions that produce desired consequences will be repeated. Van was rewarded by food whenever he brought the card with that word written on it; consequently, the action of bringing that card was reinforced and came to be repeated in the future. There is no need to suppose that Van was communicating any "thoughts," and with parsimony being a basic principle of science, we should not assume that he was.

Skepticism versus enthusiasm

Cases such as that of SirJohn Lubbock may have been on Thorndike's mind when he wrote of the frustrations of studying animal minds in Animal Intelligence (1911, p. 24): "One has to deal not merely with ignorant or inaccurate testimony, but also with prejudiced testimony. Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals. They like to. And when the animal observed is a pet belonging to them or their friends, or when the story is one that has been told as a story to entertain, further complications are introduced. Nor is this all. Besides commonly misstating what facts they report, they report only such facts as show the animal at his best. Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately becomes a circulating anecdote." Skepticism and enthusiasm about animal mental powers remain in a continuous dialectic to this day. Skepticism is generally viewed as part of a scientist's toolkit, derived from the writings of William of Occam, Francis Bacon, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, and contemporary behaviorists. Skepticism may have a long pedigree as the attitude of science, but that does not mean it cannot be proven wrong. Animals are sometimes found to have abilities that skeptics denied them. Dogs certainly have proved skeptics wrong on several recent occasions. Thorndike, for one, believed on the basis of experiments with cats in puzzle boxes that animals were not capable of learning by imitation. True imitation learning (as opposed to social facilitation and other phenomena that can be mistaken for imitation) was very difficult to demonstrate under controlled conditions. Not until Eberhard Curio's (Curio, Ernst, & Vieth, 1978) experiments with European blackbirds in the late 1970s was there unambiguous evidence of animal imitation in the scientific literature.

662

AMERICANJOURNALOF PSYCHOLOGY,WINTER 2005

In How Dogs Think Coren revels in debunking the cynicism of skeptics with well-documented accounts of dog abilities that were previously dismissed as romantic anthropomorphism. Dogs do learn by imitation, for example. They also understand more of the intentions of people around them than they have been given credit for. Being proven wrong is the lot of the skeptic. However, it does not invalidate a skeptical attitude in science in general and with regard to animal minds in particular. The problem with lifting a prohibition on a skeptical attitude toward animal minds is not that skeptics are not sometimes (perhaps often) wrong; it is that excessive enthusiasm can never be proven wrong. If I insist that fairies dance in my garden at night after everyone is asleep and never leave a trace of their presence, I am never going to be proven wrong. My sanity may be doubted for believing something not supported by any evidence, but no amount of negative evidence regarding these immaterial spirits can ever contradict my assertion. This argument is not new; indeed, it is the one rehearsed by William of Occam in the 14th century when he concluded, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate," or "Plurality should not be posited without necessity."

Descartes versus Darwin

Modern attitudes toward animals are founded on the work of two great thinkers: Rene Descartes in the 17th century and Charles Darwin in the 19th. Coren rehearses what became in the late 20th century the received version of the debate between them. Descartes denied animals the soul that sparks the mind. Consequently, all nonhumans were machinelike, devoid of soul and conscious thoughts and feelings. Darwin, this story goes, liberated animals from this nonconscious darkness by postulating a continuity between humans and animals. Animals could now possess consciousness, albeit it in a diluted form. This received wisdom distorts Descartes's position on animals and exaggerates the disagreement between him and Darwin. Descartes clearly denied that animals have thoughts in the conscious verbal sense: "There are none so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same" (Descartes, 1637/1976, p. 61). However, he did not deny that animals might have feelings. When he commented on the communicative abilities of talking parrots and other performing animals, he ascribed several feelings to these animals, including the "hope of eating," "fear... hope or... joy" (Descartes, 1646/1980, p. 207). Furthermore, Descartes did not say that animals were mere machines and people were without any machinelike aspect. The fundamental biological functions of people, including reflexes-as shown by the oft-copied illustration of a child pulling his hand out of a fire-were to Descartes just as machinelike in people as the same functions in animals. This attitude of treating the human body as a machine is now so accepted in our culture that we forget it came to us from Descartes. Where Descartes and Darwin differed was in the possibility that animals might have conscious verbal thoughts. In order to convince opponents of the fact that

BOOK REVIEWS

663

people are intimately related to other life forms, Darwin (1882) argued that all human mental powers differed only in degree, not in kind, from those of other species. It is interesting that Darwin chose to quote a reverend to support his point: "But man, as a highly competent judge, Archbishop Whately remarks, 'is not the only animal that can make use of language to express what is passing in his mind, and can understand, more or less, what is so expressed by another'" (Darwin, 1882, p. 84). When we look at the examples Darwin mustered, however, we see that they concern the expression of emotions, not thoughts. For example, Darwin mentioned cebus monkeys that can communicate emotions through the use of "at least six distinct sounds" and dogs that "bark in at least four or five distinct tones" (Darwin, 1882, p. 84). He went on to argue that human language could have evolved from the inarticulate emotional cries of other species. Most scientists now side with Darwin against Descartes in believing that linguistic thought must be the result of evolutionary processes rather than the direct intervention of a deity. Fewer commentators, I believe, would argue in support of Darwin's contention that "the lower animals differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas; and this obviously depends on the high development of his mental powers" (Darwin, 1882, pp. 85-86). In his desire to shore up as much evidence as possible in favor of mental continuity between human and animal, Darwin failed to see that emotional cries, which indeed people share with many other species, are not what makes language interesting. It is the decoupling of communication from emotion that has made human language so powerful and does indeed appear to be a uniquely human adaptation (Anderson, 2004; Wynne, 2004). Although my shrieks of distress as I am attacked by a dog probably would be as well understood by other dogs in the neighborhood as by my human neighbors, my verbal account of how the dog came to bite me would make sense only to my human friends. On this point Descartes was closer to the truth than Darwin. Although we know very little about Descartes's private life, there is at least one point of commonality between Descartes and Darwin: They were both fond of dogs. Descartes experimented on dogs, but he also had a pet dog, Monsieur Grat (Mister Scratch), of whom he was very fond (Watson, 2002). Darwin's love of dogs was famous, if not infamous. In his autobiography he quoted his father of him as a schoolboy, 'You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family" (Darwin, 1927, p. 7). Stanley Coren clearly shares with Descartes and Darwin a great love of dogs. HowDogs Thinkis full of happy anecdotes of the richness of life shared with canine companions. But what are we to make of this contentment that dogs can bring into a home? Could one animal have evolved solely for the well-being of another? There is a side of dog ownership that Coren chooses not to go into: the costs. In The TruthAboutDogs (2000) Stephen Budiansky wittily ponders the expense side of the dog-keeping ledger. He points out that if visitors from outer space observed members of one species cleaning up the poop of another they would surely make certain assumptions about which of these species was the dominant and which the subordinate. And yet we love them so. The solution to the apparent paradox of the costs of doggy companionship and our fondness for them lies in our shared evolutionary history. DNA evidence

664

WINTER 2005 AMERICANJOURNALOF PSYCHOLOGY,

suggests that modern dogs evolved from wolves more than 100,000 years ago (Vila et al., 1997), and some argue that people have been associating with dogs since those early times. If true, this means that dogs started associating with people when we were still Neanderthals. More certain is archeological evidence such as a burial site in Israel from 13,500 years ago that contains the bodies of an old woman with her puppy (Tacon & Pardoe, 2002), clear evidence of a very intense relationship.

Where do dogs come from?

Raymond and Lorna Coppinger argue in Dogs: A New Understandingof Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (2002) that the human-dog symbiosis could only have developed gradually. To this day many societies accept dogs as scavengers only very grudgingly. I remember on a childhood camping holiday in France being surprised that the French campers, far from encouraging the stray dogs that hung around the campgrounds, threw stones at them to push them away. Dogs probably existed in this marginal camp-follower status for many tens of thousands of years, as many millions of dogs continue to around the rubbish dumps of villages throughout the world. Coppinger and Coppinger are skeptical of the idea that people could have bred domestic dogs from the wild canines that hung around the shadows of their camp fires. Rather, the development of the ur-dog resulted from natural selection. Human villagers offered a new source of food to wolves. Those wolves that could better tolerate the proximity of human beings (which most wolves abhor) went on to have more offspring. Gradually, imperceptibly, dogs ingratiated themselves into human settlements. Reading the intentions of humans became a major selective force on domestic dogs. Which is how we end up with the animals we love so much. The ones that eat from our tables, sleep on our beds, whose poop we collect in little yellow bags, and yet who do absolutely nothing useful in return. If all the world's population of dogs were wiped out by some terrible virus to which only Canisfamiliaris was susceptible, humankind would be no worse off. Once the emotional pain had eased we might all be a little wealthier and have a little more free time on our hands. However, if Homo sapienswere wiped out by a virus, dogs would be lost. Without us they would have no shelter from the elements, no food. Those well adapted to the climates in which they live and with some hunting skills might be all right (although even they would find it hard competing in the hunt with wolves and foxes), but a great many breeds of short-legged, long-haired, and otherwise congenitally stunted domestic dogs would be doomed. This bit of evolutionary history helps to explain why dogs seem so good at reading people's minds. Coren outlines with fully justified relish the astonishing discoveries that have been made very recently about canine theory of mind. Where no other species-not even chimpanzees-has shown much understanding of human intentions, dogs have excelled. No other species understands what we mean when we point at something; not even chimpanzees show much appreciation that only somebody who is looking at you is likely to respond to your demands. A fascinating study too recent to have made it into Coren's book even shows that dogs' facility for understanding language exceeds in some regards that of the socalled language-trained apes. Juliane Kaminski and colleagues (Kaminski, Call,

BOOK REVIEWS

665

& Fischer, 2004) found a border collie, Rico, who knew the names of more than 200 objects. Rico could be ordered into a room to collect a named item from among nine other items with which he was also familiar. Rico must have been responding based just on the name of the item because owner and experimenter remained in one room while the dog went into the other to make his selection. More remarkable than just his vocabulary was Rico's ability to learn new words. As in the first test, the experimenters ordered Rico into the other room to collect an item. This time, however, they used a word that was not familiar to Rico and sent him into a room that contained eight items. Seven of these objects were familiar to the dog, but the eighth item was new to him. In 7 out of 10 tests with novel words Rico appropriately retrieved a different novel item each time.

If it quacks like a duck...

Coren uses recent scientific reports and some wonderful anecdotes to argue that dogs are conscious. To do this he enlists what he calls Turing's test for dogs, which he paraphrases as "'If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, flies like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then we might as well consider it a duck,' only here we must replace 'duck' with 'conscious mind'" (p. 293). Thus Coren argues that if dogs follow a point as consciously thinking human beings do, appreciate the implications of gaze direction as conscious humans do, or use feints in their play in ways that appear to human observers to be similar to the deception used in play by humans, then the dogs must be conscious. To believe otherwise, argues Coren, would be to indulge in the solipsism of those who believe that they themselves are the only conscious beings in the world. I do not share Coren's confidence in his test. For one thing, I do not believe that it captures the essence of Turing's test. Turing proposed a test modeled on the "imitation game." In this game, a man and a woman, identified to an interrogator only as A and B, are put in a separate room from the questioner. The interrogator's task is to identify which person is the man and which the woman by asking questions passed back and forth between the two rooms. Turing asked, "Whatwill happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?" (Turing, 1950, p. 433). I do not believe, as Coren evidently does, that the use of language and an interrogatory procedure are procedural irrelevancies here. I think Turing knew what he was doing when he focused on verbal behavior over all other aspects of human activity in deciding how one might determine whether another being were conscious. Turing did not say that we might have observers code how "consciousness-like" the machine's behavior might be in any other aspect than the answering of questions. Turing's demand that questions be posed and answered echoes Descartes's emphasis on coherent use of language as evidence for thought. Coren's book is lively and entertaining. I learned much I did not know about dogs, especially in regard to their sensory abilities. Coren recounts some compelling examples of dog behavior that outsmart what skeptics once thought possible, such as imitative learning, recognizing the intentions of others in points and gaze, and deceitful play. But as a paid-up skeptic, I live to be proven wrong. Once all simpler explanations have been exhausted, to acknowledge some unexpected

666

OF WINTER2005 AMERICAN JOURNAL PSYCHOLOGY,

ability in an animal is rather exciting and satisfying. However, each such incident does not shake my faith in skepticism as the proper method of science. I remain convinced that dogs do not act consciously, at least as we understand that term when we apply it to each other. They do not read our minds; rather, they read our behavior. Millennia of natural selection and a few centuries of artificial selection have led to animals that have an uncanny ability to understand what we are doing and predict where we are going next. They can also manipulate us to their designs. But they do not know they are doing this. They are not conscious. That does not mean we cannot love them. Sentimental it may be, but, asJames Serpell rightly pointed out in In the CompanyofAnimals (Serpell, 1996) many of our lives' richest moments are beset with sentimentality. And they are none the worse for that.
Clive D. L. Wynne Department ofPsychology University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611 E-mail: [email protected]

References
Anderson, S. (2004). DoctorDolittle'sdelusion:Animals and the uniqueness of human language. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Budiansky, S. (2000). The truthabout dogs.New York: Viking. Coppinger, R., & Coppinger, L. (2002). Dogs: A new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Curio, E., Ernst, E., & Vieth, W. (1978). Cultural transmission of enemy recognition: One function of mobbing. Science,202, 899-901. Darwin, C. (1882). Thedescentof man and selectionin relationto sex (2nd ed. revised and augmented). London: John Murray. Darwin, C. (1927). Theautobiography CharlesDarwin. London: Watts & Co. of Descartes, R. (1976). Animals are machines. In T. Regan & P. Singer (Eds.), Animal rights and human obligations(pp. 60-66). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Original work published 1637) Descartes, R. (1980). Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 23 Nov 1646. Reprinted in Descartes:Philosophical Letters(trans. A. Kenny) (p. 207). Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1646) Kaminsky,J., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for "fast mapping." Science,5677, 1682-1683. Lubbock,J. (1884). Teaching animals to converse. Nature, 29, 547-548. Serpell, J. (1996). In the companyof animals: A study of human-animal relationships(2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tacon, P. S. C., & Pardoe, C. (2002). Dogs make us human. Nature Australia, 27, 52. Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Animal intelligence: Experimentalstudies. New York: Macmillan. Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460. Vila, C., Savolainen, P., Maldonado,J. E., Amorim, I. R., Rice,J. E., Honeycutt, R. L., Crandall, K. A., Lundeberg,J., & Wayne, R. K. (1997). Multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dogs. Science,276, 1687-1689. Watson, R. (2002). Cogito,ergosum: The life ofRend Descartes.Jaffrey,NH: David Godine. Wynne, C. D. L. (2004). Do animals think?Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.