Jonah Goldberg writes about one of his favorite subjects today (no, not that one) — dogs:
Charles Darwin, a true secular saint of the modern age if ever there was one, loved dogs unreservedly. And, in The Descent of Man, he marveled at the ability of dogs to love back. He noted how even “in the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master.”
But even Darwin was a sucker, apparently. Eric Zorn, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently mocked a local woman, Jess Craigie, who dove into near-freezing waters to save her dog from drowning. Zorn wrote, “Note to Jess Craigie: Your dog still doesn’t love you.”
Zorn’s source for this dog slander is Jon Katz, who despite his name has written mostly wonderful stuff about dogs. Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “Dogs develop very strong, instinctive attachments to the people who feed and care for them,” Katz told Zorn. “Over 15,000 years of domestication, they’ve learned to trick us into thinking that they love us.” (In his book Soul of a Dog, Katz is far more nuanced about the nature of canine affection, suggesting a quid pro quo of food for love. Here, Katz is out of the bag.)
Emphasis mine.
It seems like the age-old hubris that man is so unique that other animals can’t think, or have emotions, or even feel pain (Descartes believed that the obvious distress of the animals that he was vivisecting was just reflexes, and had nothing to do with actual sensation). Of course, some take this to the absurd length of believing that human infants are insensate as well, and used this to justify surgery without anesthesia on them even in in recent decades.
But ultimately, we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head, be it a dog, a baby, or even our closest loved ones. We have to make assumptions based on external behavior. The brilliant computer programming pioneer Alan Turing understood this, and decided to assume that if someone, or something, acted as though it was intelligent, and self aware, that it probably was. Thus he came up with the famous Turing test to judge whether or not a machine entity had achieved sentience and even sapience. Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.
I would say that the old saying about ducks contains multitudes of wisdom, and if it walks and quacks like a loving dog, Occam would suggest that we assume that Fido (or in his case, Cosmo) loves us, in his own dog-like way. And while I’m sure that Jonah would be appalled at the notion, I’m sure it applies to cats as well (again, in their own way). Jessica sleeps on us, she nuzzles us, she gently taps my cheek when she wants to be fed, she never deliberately scratches me, even when I’m doing something she doesn’t like (like giving her a bath). While she spends much of the day ignoring us and doing other things, and doesn’t need the constant reassurance and attention that a dog does, she is the most affectionate and adoring cat I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that she has a sense of comfort and completeness when we’re around, and if it’s not love, what is it? I don’t think she’s faking it.
I think that where Katz and his fellow deniers get off track is that the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us. That would be a lot of work, evolutionarily speaking, it seems to me. It would require the ability to deliberately deceive, which is a higher cognitive function, and one that apes have but that I’ve never seen cats or dogs exhibit (unless Katz’ theory is true, of course). It makes a lot more sense to think that we have simply bred them over the millennia to love us, selecting the friendlier ones for breeding, and discarding those without affection for us. Just as telling the truth is easier than telling a lie, because you don’t have to keep your stories straight, the easiest way for something with less intelligence to appear to love is to actually love — no act required.
So when someone says that animals don’t love us, they only pretend to, I don’t know what that even means. It sort of reminds me of the old joke that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but another ancient Greek poet of the same name. They have evolved to love us, and we have co-evolved to love them, and why question it any further?
And isn’t the love humans have for other humans also evolved, in the same sense?
Sure.
I agree. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t think that the occasional reports I see of humans getting themselves killed trying to rescue their dogs, despite the fact that they have families dependent on them, betrays a lack of a sense of proportion in those people.
Or to put it another way; Sure, your dog is worthy of respect. But if you kill yourself trying to rescue it, and leave your wife and kids behind, then you deserve contempt and not respect.
Not so sure about the food thing.
I always thought that my late dog-in-law (my wife’s brother’s pooch) named Attila the Hound had a place in her heart for me. And I never, ever had offered Attila anything to eat, although I would freshen the dog’s water dish whenever I could.
When my wife and I would drive up for a visit, Attila would sniff the car from bumper to bumper (mmm, cow pasture, eewww, paper making plant, hmmm, gas station). The dog was always a glutton for affection, rolling over into a behavioral submission posture, but getting anxious and wimpery if you didn’t go over and give her a pat on the tummy.
I kinda figure dogs are primarily scent driven, and from scent they derive family relationships — that my brother-in-law was blood related to my wife and that I was marriage related to my wife and that I was part of the clan.
My other brother-in-law had this “cow dog” named Max with a reputation, lets just say I was told not to go over and just give Max a pat on the head, if I wanted to keep all five fingers on my hand that is. On the other hand, Attila was doing the rolling over for attention routine and I was patting Attila on the tummy, and ol’ Max muscled in and wanted attention from me too. So I guess Max decided I was OK as well.
On the other hand, there was this one time that Attila had this wood tick on her face and Attila was not going to let me remove it . . . at all. I got my brother-in-law to come over, and Attila got real submissive and was able to remove the tick.
So I think that as humans we are “plugging in” to the canine social instincts and substituting ourselves into their social network, and the affection dogs have for us is for real.
Evolutionarily, I think it’s a bit more complex. The arguments which I have heard, and which I think make a lot of sense, hold that animals at the level of dogs and cats have farily complex social interactions with their peers which are fundamentally like those humans have — i.e., they have likes and dislikes for various other members, which are analogous to the affectionate behavior between parents and offspring. Humans, in domesticating dogs, or semi-domesticating cats, as the case has been, essentially inserted themselves in the peer relationships the animals had been evolved to respond to. A proper training of a dog places the human in the alpha position and the dog in the subordinate positions. This elicits behavior from the dog that we interpret as love. A poorly trained dog is one that is led to believe it is in the alpha position, and which them tries to “train” the human to assume the inferior position, which with a neurotic enough human, will happen.
It’s not that we evolved the behavior in the animals, it’s that we inserted ourselves into an already-existing pattern and took advantage of it. Is it love? I think the Turing-test answer is sensible. It’s certainly true that an animal that has a bond with a particular human will miss him or her when separated, even though they may have another human who feeds and interacts with them.
I haven’t tried the Turing test, but I’m convinced that at least one of my dogs is/was self aware. I have also seen them deliberately deceive other dogs to gain advantage, which requires forethought. What I saw, several times was that, when I gave all of the dogs treats, one dog would gulp their treat down, then rush to the front window and bark as if there was something there, then while the other dogs rush to the window and bark, the first dog fades back and collects one or both of the other treats. I now feed the trickster dog her treat last.
A good insight to how dogs think is to play hide and seek with them. Usually this requires at least two people (kids love this:-). One person tells the dog to stay and reinforces it as necessary. The other person shows the dog the treat and then goes and hides. After the hider is ready, release the dog and tell it to “go find”. Make it easy the first time and they will pick up on it quickly. Different dogs will have different strategies. Some use their noses, some their eyes, some their memory, and some will adapt as necessary.
None of our dogs have the concept of size. They will all look in places that we can not possibly fit or hide behind. It is hard to keep quiet when the dog is looking for you in flowerpots, under chairs, or in wastebaskets :-). Be patient. If they are having trouble, make a small noise.
Don’t forget to reward them profusely and give them the treat.
Have fun.
Stan
Dogs and Cats have sacrificed their own lives for their masters time and time again. This is not an evolutionary advantageous behavior, it is pure love, plain and simple.
This issue seems kind of city-folk heavy. Many dogs are not simply fed by humans. A hunter assisted by dogs, pointing flushing and retrieving, is the most efficient fast-food machine since the Pleistocene. Dogs have “evolved” to find meaning in working with man, hunting, herding, protecting, in part because that pack cooperation is hard-wired, but in much bigger part because they are no dummies, and respect us for our ability to launch projectiles and pluck the feathers out.
Next week, man’s other co-evolutionaries: horses and rats.
I don’t know if I’d say that my dog “loves” me or not. Love is a human emotion.
But I do know that my little Boxer dog(Miss Samantha) is my friend. She knows my moods, and will go out of her way to cheer me up when I’ve had a bad day. And she will do the same for my wife.
And Miss Sam is not a foodie. She eats a can of dog food every day, and munches on the constantly available dry as she chooses. She’ll eat dog treats if I offer them, but is the only dog I ever had who doesn’t remind me that 20:00 is “Dog Treat” time. She doesn’t care about food that much.
But she’s a faithful friend, and you can’t do much better that that in this life, except maybe for the selection of a wife. And I got a good one of those, too.
Whatever. I’ve had other Doggie friends, but this one is serious about it, and it’s not about the groceries with her. She’s bonded into our pack, and she (and we) like it that way.
Dogs feel, and they do think, if a bit slowly. The only things I need to survive in this world are my weapons, a fire, and a dog. But the dog is the one thing I would miss first. Associate, companion, and happy partner in crime, and all the while innocent of any ulterior motives.
Who could ask for more that a good dog?
The people who advocate pacifism are often in denial that humans are a type of animal.
The more hilarious ones I have seen, showed sympathy for the thugs, even equating gun owner ship with racism. Think that’s silly, take a look at this:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2009/05/09/gun-control-is-a-reproductive-justice-issue-some-thoughts-mothers-day?page=1
Funny, Rand, I was browsing just that site via the link from Instapundit, and I had the same thought. Indeed I was about ready to skip down to the posting block and type the words “canine Turing test”… but you said it much more eloquently than I would have.
My wife and have a Jack Russell, Dogbert, who is very much fonder of me than her, despite the fact that she is the one who gives him his food and water every day, and despite the fact that I am a “cat person”. Go figure. Zorn must think Dogbert has a defective gene….
BBB
I don’t know if I’d say that my dog “loves” me or not. Love is a human emotion.
But I do know that my little Boxer dog(Miss Samantha) is my friend.
And “love” is a human emotion but being “a friend” is not, because…?
Our Canine American is devoted to husband number one, showing signs of severe depression if he’s out of her sight for more than a few minutes. Naturally, he responds by taking her nearly everywhere he goes. We both feed her, and she’s ultra-obedient when I’m the one telling her what to do.
Her Royal Catness is my constant companion, won’t eat if h#1 feeds her. I can’t vouch for her feelings. A warm lap, catnip sprigs, opened cupboards to explore, wiggly games, brushing and neck scritches, papers to lie on and objects to bat to the floor, a doorman–these are the things that are important to her, and because she sticks to me, she gets them.
Somebody had a book out a while back, the title of which escapes me, to the effect that the animals that got domesticated were the ones capable of making good economic decisions regarding human beings, decisions that were actually rather deliberate. So there are now thousands of times as many dogs in the world as there are wolves, for example. Certainly several orders of magnitude more cats than their desert ancestors. On the other hand, the selective pressures have not necessarily produced greater intelligence, particularly in cats, whose brains are something like half the size they were 20,000 years ago. Hanging around people solved a lot of problems for them. Are they affectionate? Sure, just not in the same way that primates in general and humans in particular are.
“””we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head”””
Yes, we can. Not with a high degree of specificity, but with a certain amount of certainty.
Google “Functional MRI”.
“””
Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.
“””
Or you’ve worked Computer Help Desk.
Love isn’t really an emotion per se, it’s an emotionally charged bond. No one can deny that pets bond with their humans — nor, I think, can anyone deny that animals display emotion. Do they develop emotionally charged bonds with those humans with whom they enjoy interacting?
Duh.
“Sure, your dog is worthy of respect. But if you kill yourself trying to rescue it, and leave your wife and kids behind, then you deserve contempt and not respect.”
Well that’s a nice, sweeping statement. So if you have a family and a pet, and the pet ends up in a situation that needs rescue, you should refuse to do so on the off chance that you might get killed and thus “deserve contempt and not respect”? That just makes no sense. For one thing, a pet in a family is usually a family pet. Therefore the choice to rescue a pet from danger is usually made because the entire family wants the pet rescued, not just the rescuer. Also, a person rescuing a pet does not intend to get killed instead; saying he would deserve “contempt” for having this occur is like blaming someone for dying in a traffic accident — and death via traffic accidents occur at a much higher rate than death via pet-rescue.
The only way your scenario could be true would be a situation where the rescuer of the pet had a preferential attachment to his pet versus that to his family, like those millionaires who leave all their estates to their cats in their will while ignoring his own children. But the selfishness would have existed long before the death-by-pet-rescue. Are you saying that everyone who loves their pet is somehow taking love away from their family? Love doesn’t work that way — it isn’t a pie that you can distribute so many slices of before it is gone.
The error is in making the assuming that with regard to the affectionate behaviors in question “real” love is somehow at odds with that behavior also being an evolutionary strategy (which by definition is governed by self-interest, or at least genetic self-interest)
My genes have arrived in my body as a result of surviving millions of years of the ruthless genetic logic of natural selection. These little units that work in tandem to build me (and you) have survived solely on the basis of their being more suited to reproducing and making it into the next generation than the available competitors. Their behavior is entirely amoral. So much so that the term “behavior” is a misnomer as natural selection is really a logical necessity demanded by the physical and chemical environment of our world. Yet despite the mechanistically Machiavellian actions of our genes our emotions are real. I know that I am built to love my family as doing so is in the best interest of the survival of the genes that I (and they) carry. And yet that fact does not make my love any less real. While my genes may have built me in the particular way that they did for “selfish” reasons, that does not conflict with my feelings being genuine. Regardless of the logic for why they were installed I know that they are genuine, I feel them every day!
All that being said I don’t know why the same logic would not be applied to dogs. My dog may love me for reasons of genetic self-interest (or so he thinks- we got him fixed), but the love he has seems likely to be real. And so while ultimately the joke may be on him (and us) in that we are built to feel things based on the needs of our DNA, we actually do feel those things. This is why I truly believe that my dog is a good boy, even as I know that his genes are manipulating me.
When a scientist says that animals don’t love us, does he mean that, or has he only been socialized to say so in exchange for attention & further grant-seeking opportunities?
Well…
I rescued my yorkie, Little Orphan Andy, from our local vets office after someone had abandoned him there. Yorkie’s can be extremely loyal dogs but they are also fickle as to who they will trust and own up to. They are extremely energetic as well by usually preferring a game of toss over a head scratch. First day we got him he was more preoccupied with sniffing and scrounging. The next day I came home from work and saw him in the corner of the back yard. I stepped out and called, “Where’s that little rat dog at?” He stopped and stared for a moment, then cocked his ears back and came barreling at me with a huge smile on his face. He literally crashed into my feet and rub up against me and rolled around on the ground in a frenzy. He was certainly rewarded with a scruffy scratch behind the ears.
Since that very day he has been practically shackled to my foot wherever I go in the house. He can be fast asleep while I am on the couch and I will get up to go the computer room and he lazily gets up and dutifully follows me wherever. He knows when I leave for work in the morning and he just sits and stares at the door with his nose down and droopy eyes up. He also never eats unless I am eating. As soon as I start prepping food or sitting down to try and eat something I hear *clang clang* as he kicks his food bowl around the kitchen. He’s also figured out how to close the sliding screen door on the back porch with his snout. He’s just a little 8 pound dog and he muscles this enormous screen door close with a loud *bang*, “Hmm, guess someone wants to come in…” Begs the question who is really trained Pavlovian.
I’ve had dogs fret and go despondet when one of us went on a trip and seemingly “died”, go gonzo when they found a new fun game, play practical jokes on us (and almost vibrate with the strain of not giving it away, strut like a arrogent fool when it scared off a wimp of a huge great dane, and come over to curl up with a sick family member. Zoo keepers report similar stories about other mamila and advanced animals. So if you can be a scientist who studies this stuff professionally and not realize were no more the only creture with complex emotions, then we are the only one with fingers, someone should be studying you for emotional shortcomings.
Ms. Harris; The issue is the extent of risk. I live in a seaside town, and when the Irish Sea gets rough it gets seriously dangerous.
There have been several cases over the last few years in which someone’s dog has gone over my town’s seawall in a force 7 gale with 5 or 6-foot waves running and water temp of maybe 10 deg C, and the owner has gone in after it and got himself killed – despite presumably knowing that his wife and young family are waiting for him at home. Stupid and selfish. And lacking in a sense of proportion.
> .. There have been several cases over the last few years in which someone’s dog has
> gone over my town’s seawall in a force 7 gale with 5 or 6-foot waves running and water
> temp of maybe 10 deg C, and the owner has gone in after it and got himself killed – despite
> presumably knowing that his wife and young family are waiting for him at home. Stupid
> and selfish. And lacking in a sense of proportion.
Course folks have been equally chastised as stupid for going after children or friends in similar situation.
My family acquired a cocker spaniel. About a year later, my father had a stroke, resulting in him not being able to walk.
For seven years, the dog’s favorite position was at his side, either on my father’s lap, or simply laying on the floor beside him. Others fed, walked, played with, and cared for the dog, but he obviously knew where he was needed without being told.
I truly pity anyone who cannot understand that the bonds are so much deeper than stimulus/response.
With a bag of treats and a week, you’d make my dog forget me? No, the best you would do is make a new friend; but I have no doubt in my mind that dog would remember his family.
“the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us… It would require the ability to deliberately deceive…”
It’s very difficult to discuss evolutionary adaptation without lapsing into language that implies non-existent agency. For instance, it’s said that men are attracted to women with big breasts and wide hips because such women are more fertile – which confuses some people, because the attraction exists in men who don’t want children, or to women who are known to be sterile. The answer, of course, is that sexual attraction didn’t develop from what men consciously want or consciously know about women – it was the result of selection across time. Men attracted to busty, hippy women were more likely to have offspring than others.
Pet animals don’t “pretend” to love us. They aren’t sentient and can’t think in those terms.
They have evolved (or been evolved, through millenia of selective breeding) to behave in ways that look like “love” to humans. What the animal actually is feeling may not be “love” as humans feel it. But then again, what is “love”?
Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “
Replace the references to canines, and the subject of that quote could be my ex-wife.
(It would not be an accurate description of my current wife — or of our two cats.)
Stan’s remarks about self-awareness are dead-on. An animal must be self-aware if it realizes that other creatures are self-aware and uses this knowledge to deceive them.
(Remember H. Beam Piper’s “Fuzzies and Other People,” in which members of an alien species are judged to be “people” if they are capable of lying?)
My wife’s parents once had a dachshund who loved to stand on the livingroom sofa and look out the front window. Alas, her mother wanted to keep the sofa clean, and forbade little Fritz from doing that — so of course he still did it whenever he could get away with it. One day the family was driving home and saw Fritz’s face peering out through the window at the street. They parked the car in the garage and opened the side door into the house … and there was Fritz in his dog bed, opening one bleary eye, strrrrretching his paws out in front of him, obviously just waking up … “Who, me? No, I’ve been here asleep! Must’ve been some other dog you saw!”
“I have no doubt in my mind that dog would remember his family.”
I had a cat like that once. She was a outside cat that hung out in the backyard mostly. Then, one day just disappeared, nowhere to be seen for several years. Then, one day she just suddenly returned, plus a few broken ribs. Someone evidently caught her with a kick. Glad it wasn’t more powerful than that. She obviously remembered a more gentler place and limped back to our home. She never strayed far after that.
I have plenty of Andy yorkie stories. I had just walked in the door from the store and looked out the back window. He had that crazed out wild look and was panting like 10,000 times a second. I walked away for a second and put some groceries up and then walked back by the window and out of nowhere a dead squirrel had appeared on the patio. He just stood there squinting at me like, “Here ‘ya go boss”. I scooped it up into a bag and felt it was still warm and jeez it was almost as big as he was. Guess he wanted to share the spoils of the hunt. When I was cleaning up the carcass I noticed he was fidgeting with something else behind a tree. Yep, another half eaten dead squirrel. He caught not one, but 2 squirrels — Squirrel Masta!
Animals definitely have individual personality and sometimes seem to have an amazing intelligence. A rancher friend of mine in SD has a dog then fends for itself. If he doesn’t catch it, he doesn’t eat; with one exception…
Every year they have a founders day dog race event. First prize is a trophy. Second prize is a big bag of dog food. That dog comes in second every year.
Good post. I admire the step of adding cats to the mix.
Thanks for the comment at Instapunk on our essay. It’s now updated to include confirmation of your feline data. There’s also a photo of Izzie the Bengal, for any of you who know and marvel at this extraordinary breed.
I should also tell you, Rand, I wrote in the early nineties a transcript of the first successful attempt at the Turing test by a computer personality — in conjunction with a critique of IQ testing which argued that human intelligence differed not by a factor of two but of thousands (or millions). The missing measure was volume of “mindspace”: Einstein could hold the universe in his head, in four dimensions, while some of us experience a serial stream of two-dimensional images. That’s hardly explained by an IQ scale that ranges from well below average to twice average. Something about nonlinear systems theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Well, think about it.