The day after Kirby died, Owen taped a picture to the headboard of his bed. It was a photo of him as a baby, dressed as Santa Claus, held up to look as if he were riding Kirby, who was looking sheepish in a pair of foam antlers. The picture was our Christmas card the year Owen was born. On the edge of the photo, Owen had written, “My best friend.” As I looked at this photo, the ideas of Skinner, Pavlov, and Descartes began to feel too one-dimensional to account for all that richness.
There was more. Every night after Kirby’s death, Owen pleaded with me to pray that God might give him a dream of his dog, to take him one more time into an encounter with his best friend. It wasn’t just the lack of a dog that Owen was feeling. This had to go deeper. I was sure of it.
In the preceding chapter, we asked a simple question: Does the behaviorist model (stimulus begets response) explain what Owen and dog lovers everywhere interpret as affection and relationship? Remember, we’re on a quest to identify the spiritual or higher capacity of the dogs we love, if that capacity exists.
Our answer so far is a qualified yes. But, it’s also no, I don’t think so. Yes, our dogs are predictably motivated by the food and attention we provide. But also no, because there’s more going on. A whole, other world is going on, in fact, a world of feelings, memories, behaviors, and meanings for both dog and owner.
In this chapter, I want to show you research that has helped scientists see past the furry canine machine model and find in dogs’ responses to humans a fascinating affinity, and a visceral and unfailing preference, that’s not to be found in any other animal.
A Smackdown for Behaviorism
Over the last half century in the scientific community, Skinner and behaviorism have taken it in the teeth. In 1959, against the backdrop of Colonial-era houses and winding cobblestone streets in Princeton, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky was asked to write a review of Skinner’s 1957 book, Verbal Behavior. Chomsky’s crippling assessment argued that certain core realities, such as language in human beings, could not be explained by behavioral stimuli. The idea of creatures as mindless operating systems, he stated, simply couldn’t explain human realities such as creativity, language, empathy, bonding, and play. This review launched Chomsky’s now-legendary career in linguistic studies, and exposed behaviorism as being inadequate for explaining human beings. Language alone reveals that we are far too mindful.
More adequate theories on animal behavior have been proposed.
Chomsky’s ideas were limited to human beings, but in animal studies, a perspective born from odd old Konrad Lorenz called cognitive ethology asserted that, in opposition to behaviorism, an ability for complex thought does exist in animals such as elephants, dolphins, and apes. Popular dog writer John Homans says nicely, “Their minds…solve problems, map landscapes, [and] distinguish friends from enemies.”1 For example, we now know that dolphins have a sense of the individual self as separate from others. Elephants grieve the death of a member of the herd. Animals may have minds very different from ours—no spider monkey has ever written a book on his species’ spiritual connection to bananas—but research in cognitive ethology has discovered that animals nevertheless do have minds and cannot be understood as merely dim-witted, stimuli-response mechanisms.
The “cognitive” commitment in cognitive ethology contends that understanding animals’ minds may help us not only appreciate them more but also better comprehend the origins and structure of our own minds. The “ethology” commitment in cognitive ethology asserts that because they have minds and are more than a collection of instincts, animals must be observed in their own natural surroundings.
This leads to this important insight: When it comes to our dogs, this natural environment is, uniquely, the human household. Yes, there are millions of dogs in the world whose natural environment is not the human household; feral dogs roam the streets all over the world, and strictly working dogs know only kennels. Yet the natural habitat of dogs who have friendships with eight-year-olds, the dogs I wanted to know about, is the human home.
If dogs are indeed more than a bundle of learned responses, then understanding their deeper capacities will happen only through observing them in their natural surroundings: our backyards, our couches, and the backseats of our cars.
When Oreo Went to Emory
In just the last decade and a half, breathtaking discoveries have been made by cognitive ethologists studying the dogs who live with us. Take Brian Hare of Duke University. He cut his scientific teeth in the late 1990s studying under a renowned scholar named Michael Tomasello, his professor at Emory University. Hare was captivated by Tomasello’s search for the evolutionary link to human language. He believed that if this link could be spotted, we would know more about the evolution not only of our own minds, but animals’ minds as well.
At the time Hare met Tomasello, the professor was running experiments with great apes, to see how they responded to human gestures, seeking to determine whether language might have sprung from the ability to read one another’s movements as communication. Tomasello was discovering that apes (our closest living evolutionary relatives) did quite poorly at recognizing human gestures.2 Researchers could use behavioral techniques to teach apes to understand gestures such as pointing, but left to their own devices, the apes seemed uninterested in reading one another’s communicative movements, let alone the gestures of humans.
Drawing on this research, Tomasello concluded that the ability to read gestures was a uniquely human capacity, the capacity that had produced our distinctive penchant for language. Hare, Tomasello’s high-spirited undergraduate assistant, disagreed.
Hare pointed to his family dog, Oreo. He thought Oreo was able to read gestures quite well. Tomasello, who had millions of dollars in grant money and pens full of chimps and great apes, thought this absurd. Why would an average house dog be able to solve a mental problem that his vaunted primates couldn’t? Still, Hare was convinced that Oreo could.3
You see, when Hare was young, he spent hours in his big backyard throwing baseballs, with Oreo serving as his partner and retriever. Hare told Tomasello that he could signal his dog to start running with a motion of his finger. A mere twitch of the foot or elbow, even just a glance in the direction of the ball, was enough to launch Oreo across the yard.
Tomasello remained skeptical. So Hare began constructing an experiment that he would continue to adapt throughout his career, to prove that dogs indeed understand gestures. He placed two cups about two meters apart, pretending to put a treat under one and actually putting a treat under the other. Then he would stand back and point to the cup hiding the food. Each time Hare did this, Oreo—and eventually the many other dogs Hare would come to test—followed the pointed finger. Hare then blindfolded the dogs to keep them from watching as he put the treat under a cup, giving them no visual cue as to which cup hid the food. He would then take the blindfold off the dog and point. Nearly every time, the dog gave its attention fully to the face of the researcher, awaiting a signal, ready like a sponge to soak up the researcher’s gesture—and then responded to the pointing.
As Hare continued ramping up his experiment, he had to control for smell, lucky guessing, his own body language, and other possible explanations for the dog’s success. Yet at nearly perfect rates, all the dogs studied the point of the researcher, and did so right from the beginning. There was no sense, as there was with the chimpanzees, that following gestures was a learned behavior.
Hare explains: “Maybe during many interactions with me, Oreo had learned to inflexibly use a few signals. If this was true, he should show improvement during the tests and would have trouble reading cues he had not seen before. But Oreo [and the other dogs] almost always chose correctly on the first trial and did not show improvement…because he was nearly perfect from the start.”4
Hare and Tomasello then experimented with chimpanzees who had learned to read a gesture like a finger point. Still, even though they had been trained to understand pointing, the primates, unlike dogs, seemed to have no ability to understand new impromptu gestures. Even more, Hare found that puppies did as well at his experiment as grown dogs. The reason began to come clear. The scientists realized that they weren’t testing the learned behavior of dogs, or their readiness to read physical gestures, but something else: an innate attraction.
Hare had discovered something big: Dogs have an inborn mind for human connection. From a very young age, they express this attraction by where they look.
And where they look is to the human face.
The Difference a Gaze Makes
Like no other animal, dogs seemed to be innately wired to look to the face of human beings for direction and connection. Dogs were the only animals tested who responded like human infants, seeking cooperation by attending to the human face. In fact, Hare even discovered that if the person pointed his or her head in the direction of the correct cup, while not looking directly at it (that is, while gazing beyond it, giving it no direct attention), the dog would read his or her intention and respond instead to the finger pointed at the other cup.5 With almost spooky sophistication, the dog could tell where the researcher was putting their attention and what part of their body was communicating. Reading that the researcher’s face was looking beyond the cup, and therefore providing no information, the dog would take clues from the pointed finger.
To measure whether perhaps gesture reading came from dogs’ pack animal nature, Hare also tested dogs’ closest relatives, wolves. The wolves, however, failed the test.6 Instead of acting like domestic dogs, they acted just like chimps, giving little to no attention to human beings, ignoring the human gestures and having no concern for the human face.7
Other cognitive ethologists were corroborating Hare’s results. A group in Hungary did an interesting study in which they put a piece of raw meat inside a metal box. Making sure the wolf or dog knew that the meat was in the box and could smell it, they allowed the animal to try to retrieve and eat it. The trick of the study was that the animal was not able to get to the meat on its own.
When the wolf performed the experiment, it would walk over to the box, sniff, and then dig, seeking to free the meat. When digging didn’t work, the wolf was smart enough to look for other options to free the savory snack on its own, such as knocking over the box or getting at it from other angles. Yet, the wolf never did what dogs do naturally. When the dog performed the experiment, it first went to the box and dug hard for the snack—but when the snack wasn’t released after a few seconds, the dog sat next to the box and turned its attention to the researcher. The dog gazed directly at the researcher, as though asking for help.
As you might guess, a wolf has a larger brain than a dog, and is smarter at finding its own solutions to problems. Yet the wolf has no mind for us.8 Psychologist and dog theorist Alexandra Horowitz explains the difference this way: “Dogs look at our eyes. If this behavior is unsurprising, it is because it is so human: we look. Dogs look, too. Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.”9
At our house, we know what Horowitz is talking about. (Maybe you do, too.) Kirby had what Kara always called his “question mark” eyes. He’d sit still as a statue, staring at, say, my face as hard as he could, eyes as wide as saucers. Once he had my attention, he’d take his eyes from my face and move them to a tennis ball, and then return them again to my face, and then back to the ball. Kirby was soundlessly screaming at me to throw the ball, to come on and play with him, to be with him.
Like infants, dogs are able to read the gestures of people, and to gesture back, forming a bond of cooperative communication. Dogs will stand at the door if they need to go out, or sit in front of you when they’re ready for dinner. When it seems the right time of day for a walk, a dog might even bring you his leash or pounce on you and lick your face to compel you to recognize that her routine is calling.10
It’s not uncommon to see a dog owner stop in the middle of scolding his pet and physically turn the dog’s head back to make eye contact. Why? “We want dogs to look at us when we are talking to them,” Horowitz writes, “just as we use gaze in human conversation, in which listeners look at the face of the speaker more than the reverse. [That’s why] we call their names before speaking to them.”11
Research on human connection bears this out. As I write this, there’s a video going viral on the Internet that I’m sure, soon enough (like tomorrow), will be replaced by another Chewbacca-masked mother or something of that sort. But for these twenty-four hours, it’s making people cry all over their keyboards. It’s shot in an empty warehouse. Pairs of strangers, one of them a refugee, enter the room. They are directed to sit across from each other and, in silence, to look at each other’s faces for four minutes. The video is a social experiment based on the psychological research of Arthur Aron, who argues that “four minutes of eye contact brings people closer to each other than everything else.” And the video proves it. Face-to-face encounter within minutes brings tears, laughter, joy, and shared pain. These four minutes see children become friends, and two people find attraction and loving connection. The power for face-to-face connection brings an encounter of spirit.
This is why it’s not surprising when you hear, as I have, a hardened outdoorsman confessing something like “I’ve cried only twice in the last thirty years: when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer and when my hunting dog needed to be put down.” The hunter mourns the death of his dog because a deep connection is now lost—a visceral relationship that began, like a close human relationship, in long and careful attention to the face of the other.
I Only Have Eyes for You
Before we move on in our canine soul search, I want to make an important distinction: the kind of attentiveness, or depth of communication, we’ve been talking about in dogs is not primarily dog to dog, or dog to any other species, but dog to human.
This fact is truly remarkable.
Dogs, like many other mammals, become attached to one another, forming packs. Dogs are even known to make friends with cats, turtles, and birds. Yet what their hearts long for most is to connect with people.12 Scientist Vilmos Csányi states, “With well-designed experiments we can even show that puppies are attracted more powerfully to humans than to their own species.”13
In one study done at a shelter, it was discovered that, on average, it took several days for a dog to attach to another dog. Yet, in comparison, it took just hours for a shelter dog to connect to a human being, and this connection with a human being was almost always stronger, and preferred by the dog. Nearly every time, given an option, the dog chose to be with a human over a fellow dog. “It’s a trivial and obvious point,” noted Tomasello after seeing Hare’s study, “but dogs aren’t doing this with other dogs. They’re doing this with us.”14
I couldn’t help but see deep theological possibilities in this fact. Dogs are unique because of their ability to be drawn to our faces, and Christianity and Judaism are faiths in which the human face holds great importance. For example, one of the central benedictions in Protestant churches is taken from Numbers 6:25, “The Lord make His FACE shine on you, and be gracious to you.” And the Psalms are filled with verses such as “Do not hide your FACE from me in the day of my distress” (Psalm 102). In 1 Peter 3:12, in the New Testament, we read, “For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and His ears attend to their prayer, but the FACE of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
All throughout the Christian scriptures, we read that God has fully revealed Godself in the face of a first-century Jew, and that what God wants from us is that we turn our face toward him and toward one another. To live the Christian life is to be always attentive to others, seeing the face of Jesus in the face of your neighbor, as Jesus says in Matthew 25. And here was science, saying that dogs, these beautiful butt-sniffers, are uniquely shaped to do for us exactly what we’re called to do for one another.
I began to wonder if Owen might be more right than the theologian.