My dog skeptic theologian colleague had a point. I thought of those pictures of “dog shaming” that are popular on social media. You know the ones. In the photos, a dog looks at the camera with sheer guilt on his face, wearing a sign stating his offense: “I Ate Two Sticks of Butter and Smeared the Third on the Couch.” Or, “On Walks, I Roll in Dead Stuff and Then Jump into Mommy’s Bed When We Get Home.” Or, one of my favorites: “I Sneak into the House of Our Buddhist Neighbor and Eat Their Food Offering to Buddha.”
Of course, what makes these pictures so funny is that we all know dogs who routinely commit such weird, gross, destructive crimes against their owners. There they are: caught, guilty as charged, incorrigible, actually, and with all their dopey lovability intact. This completely reinforces the professor’s point: dogs are con artists.
Had Kirby merely duped us into loving and feeding him? If he had, my own grief would be a little bit pitiable and maybe even silly, on the order of burying a stuffed animal or retiring an old, beloved car to the backyard. But if I was going to go anywhere with this project, I had to address the assumption that dogs operate on instinct alone. To know what might be happening from the dog’s side of the relationship, I had to start with the mind of the dog.
The Rational Soul
Knowingly or not, my theologian friend was following the thinking of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, chief philosophical architect of the Enlightenment. As a young boy, Descartes watched Europe burn as Catholics and Protestants fought and killed one another during the Thirty Years’ War. A particularly clever young man, he sought to make war obsolete by finding some common ground of religious or moral ideology that all people could agree on.
Descartes’s studies led him to conclude that nearly everything a person might know or believe, including our own consciousness, could be doubted. You might believe you’re reading this book right now, holding it in your hands (maybe) as you sit in a comfortable chair. On the other hand, you could be just dreaming, sliding into a hallucinatory state. The only certainty, according to Descartes, is our own existence. When you doubt the reality of your book or your chair, you can at least be sure that you are the one doing the doubting. Doubting itself is proof of your existence. This led to Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am.” You are because you have a mind that enters into such deep, rational contemplation that you are able to doubt everything.
Descartes believed he had done more than discover a solid foundation on which both Catholics and Protestants could agree—more than that, he had discovered the shape of the soul itself. The soul, to Descartes, is this conscious ability to reason, and it is uniquely human. Because it seemed clear that animals were unable to do this doubting and reasoning, Descartes assumed that they are soulless, able to perceive and sense, but essentially machines made of muscle and fur.
When I think of Descartes’s view of animals, I remember the classic Seinfeld episode in which Kramer starts taking the same medication as a dog he meets in the park. Kramer distrusts doctors in general, but because he and the dog have the same cough, Kramer borrows the dog and takes him to the vet in order to obtain the meds the veterinarian prescribes for the dog. As the episode continues, Kramer begins to act more and more like a dog, exhibiting increasingly absurd, hilarious behavior.
In 1989, the first year Seinfeld aired, Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer, played a character named Stanley Spadowski in the movie UHF. Spadowski is slow and dumb, getting laughs through his inability to keep up. Later on, when Richards was cast as Cosmo Kramer, he initially played him just as he had Spadowski: slow, dumb, and easily duped. By the second season, though, Richards says he realized that Kramer was nothing like the mindless Spadowski. Spadowski is a step (or six) behind everyone else, and that’s what made him funny and lovable. Kramer, though lacking in self-awareness, is actually a step ahead of everyone else. He is as brilliant and resourceful as he is odd, and in the end he always proves loyal to his friends. Kramer comes across as dumb because he is so unconventionally mindful. That’s what makes him such an iconic character.
It could be that dogs are like Spadowski, dull creatures programmed to beg and wag a tail to survive. Or they might be more like Kramer, unconventionally and peculiarly mindful, reacting to us at times before we are even aware of our own actions.
I was stuck with an either/or dilemma. If forced to choose between dogs being Spadowskis or Kramers, I would have to say that the history of philosophy and the assumptions of religious thought would be on the side of the mindless Spadowski. Descartes believed that without a mind that could reason, there was no soul. Animals would then be less like human beings and more like biological apparatuses. Descartes believed this so fully that he went so far as to argue that the howl of a dog is no different from the screech of the brakes on a carriage.
By this line of reasoning, dogs may seem to respond to us, but this is only because they have been programmed to do so by their innate need to survive. To say you know your dog loves you because he’s happy to see you when you return home is as logical as saying your iPhone loves you because it knows what time to wake you up. Your phone has no thoughts or feelings for you; it simply performs the functions it has been programmed to do.
Could it be that our beloved dogs are no different?
All We Are Is Programming
Descartes’s perspective that animals could be thought of as mindless, programmable machines was bolstered by the findings of physiologist Ivan Pavlov. In 1901, Pavlov famously discovered that, with the right conditioning and stimuli, you could, quite literally, program a dog.
Pavlov got the idea for his best-known experiment when he noticed that his dogs drooled in anticipation whenever he brought them food. This seemed to be a preprogrammed response, in which the glands that produced saliva turned on like faucets when the dogs smelled and anticipated their dinner. When Pavlov began studying this phenomenon, however, he was surprised to learn that he could actually reprogram the dogs’ behavior by ringing a bell before the food arrived. He’d ring the bell, then start getting them their food, slowly increasing the time between the sound of the bell and the arrival of the food. Eventually, the dogs could be programmed to launch into eating mode just by hearing the sound of the bell. So, not only were dogs instinctive machines, Pavlov discovered, but their programmed instincts were malleable. With the right behavioral conditioning, their behavior could be rewritten.
In other words, Pavlov’s legacy was to prove that there was no mindfulness involved in dogs’ behavior. Behavior is produced by connecting positive stimuli or negative stimuli with acts you want to encourage or discourage. Almost all dog training works from this theory. Want a dog to learn to sit? Give it positive stimuli when it sits, and you will program it to sit when told. Want your dog to stop pulling on the leash during a walk? Produce negative stimuli (corrections), and you will reprogram it to stay near your heel.1
Pavlov seemed to have discovered that your dog isn’t a step ahead of you, like Kramer. More likely, your dog is a step behind you, like Spadowski—slow but trainable.
Picking up on Pavlov’s finding, the psychologist John B. Watson offered a perspective on animal behavior called behaviorism. Through Watson’s charismatic disciple B. F. Skinner, behaviorism became the primary way of thinking about animal conduct—and even human psychology.
B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist whose beliefs were shaped by intense experiences in his childhood. Skinner’s religious grandmother often spoke of the fires of hell. When Skinner was eighteen years old, his sixteen-year-old brother died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Skinner became an atheist when a Christian teacher tried to mitigate his fears that his brother had been sent to hell. Having come from this kind of background, it’s not difficult to see why behaviorism would have appealed to Skinner.
For Skinner, all animals and humans are is behavior. Any belief that a higher consciousness has to be at work is simply an illusion. Behaviors build on one another; each behavior connects with another behavior, LEGO style, to build a response system. It is the stimuli of reward and punishment that lead us to change, or to connect our behavior with the good of another.2
A dog, then, in Skinner’s view, is not much more than a furry TiVo with an appetite. Just as your TiVo connects your watching of Pawn Stars with a show you’ve never watched (e.g., American Pickers) because it has connected one behavior with another, so Pavlov’s dogs connect the stimuli of the bell with eating, and they behave by drooling. The more you use your TiVo, the more you program it with stimuli data and the more it will behave as you want, giving you the illusion that it actually has a mind. According to Skinner, our dogs work in the same way. When your dog is happy to see you at the end of the day, it’s not because he really cares about you. It’s because he’s hungry.
A Dead End?
Let’s just say that my research up to this point was not granting me glimpses of heaven in a hound. Descartes, Skinner, Pavlov, and the dreary dog skeptic theologian all agreed: dogs are food-motivated beasts who are shaped by base stimuli and responses.
Had I arrived at the end of the road for high-minded dog lovers? Was I nothing more than a deluded romantic, trying to read more into Kirby’s behavior than could reasonably be found there? If so, I would have to conclude that Kirby had no mind for Owen or Maisy or Kara or me. There was no spiritual two-way street between us and our pet dogs. All that we had experienced with Kirby—the companionship and play, the years-long bonding with our children, the sacredness of his send-off—were simply projections of our human longings.
Still, I wasn’t ready to concede. The stream of thought that the theologian pointed me to, the river that ran from Descartes to Pavlov to behaviorism, just didn’t satisfy. It gave me little insight into why it hurt so badly to lose Kirby, or why it seemed our family had entered into a shared reality not only with our dog, but with others who had lost dogs. It struck me as ultimately reductive.
I suppose great minds like Descartes or Skinner would have reminded me at this point that just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s true. Descartes would actually have encouraged me to doubt my feelings and turn to more rational explanations. Yet I couldn’t.
I couldn’t forget, for example, the memory of one Christmas we shared with Kirby, and the simple yet profound theology expressed then by another great mind: Owen.