In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Frans de Waal presents a fascinating history of the study of animal behavior and cognition. De Waal, who says his love of animals dates to his childhood, is a worldrenowned primatologist and ethologist and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. We asked him to shift gears and give us his take on the canine mind.

Bark: Konrad Lorenz (co-founder of your field) wrote Man Meets Dog in 1954. And while it is still one of the best, if slightly flawed, books on canine behavior, why did it take so long for ethologists, and other researchers, to to study dog behavior?

Frans de Waal: Dogs were (and are) considered imperfect subjects of study because they are “unnatural.” Many ethologists, including Lorenz, feel that natural behavior under naturalistic conditions is what we should focus on, and the dog is a product of artificial breeding. Lorenz liked all animals, however, and so couldn’t resist describing his dog stories, and we should all be grateful.

Clearly, the dog is a mammal with many typical mammalian tendencies, so now scientists are finally seeing that the fact that they are domesticated also has advantages. For example, they are eager to work with us, they are generally not dangerous, they are smart, they have empathy. Lots of great things can be done with them. And they are easier to work with than other large mammals, such as apes and dolphins.

Bk: Can you give an example of how other species, including dogs, demonstrate empathy?

FdW: American psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler sought to determine at what age children begin to comfort family members who sobbed or cried “ouch.” It turns out that children do so at one year of age. In the same study, Zahn-Waxler accidentally discovered that household dogs react similarly. Appearing as upset as the children by the distress-faking family members, the dogs hovered over them, putting their heads in their laps with what looked like great concern. This work has recently been repeated in different studies, more focused on the dogs themselves, and it is clear that these animals show empathic concern for humans.

The ancestor of the dog, the wolf, probably behaves the same. If “man is wolf to man,” as Thomas Hobbes liked to say, we should take this in the best possible way, including a tendency to comfort the whimpering and help the needy. This insight, of course, would undermine much of political philosophy based on Hobbes’ dog-eat-dog view of nature.

Bk: Do you think human bias has played a part in some of the canine cognitive studies?

FdW: At first, dogs were rated as more intelligent than even apes and wolves because they followed the direction of human pointing (at a bucket with food), whereas apes and wolves ignored human directions. Then it was found that wolves raised in a human home will act more like dogs, following human pointing, suggesting that the earlier failures with wolves were probably due to lack of bonding and attention. The same probably applies to the apes. Now, dogs are seen not just as smart but rather, as finely in tune with the species that bred them.

They have a special bond with us, as also reflected in the oxytocin studies, which show that human-dog contact increases this “cuddle” hormone in both. The dog is perhaps the only animal that performs at its peak when tested by humans, whereas many other animals are not so into us, hence need to be tested in different ways. This is yet more proof that cognitive testing of animals always needs to take into account what kind of animal we are dealing with: we need to find the most species-appropriate way.

Bk: In contrast to behaviorism’s reward/ punishment model, ethology views animals as “seeking, wanting and striving.” Why do you feel the latter is a more productive way to look at animals?

FdW: The behaviorists (followers of B. F. Skinner) totally overlooked natural animal tendencies. Trying to explain all behavior on the basis of reward and punishment, they could not explain why you can train a dog to fetch, but not a rabbit or a goat.

Predators are obsessed with small moving objects, which we see every day in our dogs as well as cats. Their interest sets up a learning situation where they are going to absorb many lessons about how to catch these moving objects, how to trick them, how to outsmart them. Dogs eagerly learn all of those things.

Reward and punishment are only small parts of the story; their natural hunting instinct is, in fact, the driver of the process. This is where behaviorism failed. It had some good ideas, many of them applicable to animal training, but its perspective was far too narrow as it lacked attention to natural tendencies and the evolution of behavior.

Bk: Why do you think Darwin used dogs to illustrate emotional continuity?

FdW: Darwin was a dog lover, and he knew that to get his message across about the continuity between human and animal emotions, the dog would be the easiest way to communicate. Darwin mostly worked on the expression of emotions (it’s hard to know what animals feel, but we can at least document how they signal various states, such as fear, submission, anger, affection). Of course, the dog is very expressive with its postures, facial expressions, tail-wagging, growling and so on. Darwin knew that most people could relate to all of this, and would have more trouble if he described other species that people have less exposure to.

Bk: In terms of an evolutionary advantage, how important is it for a species to have self-awareness, or theory of mind?

FdW: These capacities require large brains. In terms of recognizing oneself in the mirror or understanding what others know, the champion species are apes, dolphins, elephants and perhaps also the corvids (crow family). This doesn’t mean that dogs lack them. They probably have similar understanding, but not as fully expressed.

The more complex the societies of a species, the more demands there are on cognition, and perhaps canines do not need social understanding at the level of an ape or dolphin. I feel we need to judge animals on what they are good at and what they need to know to survive. In this regard, canines have lots of specialized skills, often related to their sense of smell, their pursuit of prey, their need for tight cooperation and so on. This is where we should test them out, and probably find remarkable skills.

Bk: Clearly, emotions are important to the understanding of behavior; how do they relate to and inform one another?

FdW: In my book, I left emotions out on purpose because I felt it would muddle things. But there can be no studies of cognition without attention to the emotions, and vice versa. The two go hand in hand. In our famous capuchin monkey experiment with the grape and the cucumber, for example, you can see not only that the monkeys judge what they get relative to what others get, but also their strong emotional response. You cannot study the one and ignore the other.

Watching dogs play is very exciting, and there has been a lot empirical research on how and why dogs (and other animals) engage in this activity with boundless zeal. A number of people have asked me to comment about dog play after reading this section in a new book by Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein called How Dogs Work. So, I decided to do so.

The authors begin their chapter 9 on play by claiming, “Hundreds of scientific papers have been written on the subject of ‘play’ behavior—an activity for which dogs are, of course, famous.” Recognizing that there is a solid and growing literature on play—there’s really no reason to put the word play in square quotes—I assumed that what followed would be a detailed review of this research, but rather, what I discovered was a disjointed discussion of play and not an in-depth review of the scientific literature. Instead, the authors offer their own unpublished observations and the results of unpublished student projects, all of which are impossible to assess. 

Do dogs and other animals actually play? Coppinger and Feinstein write that they put the word play in scare quotes because “in spite of the fact that people feel like they know it when they see it, it’s not at all obvious that play is a unitary ‘thing-in-itself’ that can easily be characterized, let alone explained in evolutionary terms.” No one I know who has spent years studying play would argue that play is a “unitary ‘thing-in-itself’,” nor would they agree that play cannot be explained “in evolutionary terms.” Indeed, some of the references the authors include show there are a number of highly plausible evolutionary explanations (and the University of Tennessee’s Gordon Burghardt, who has studied comparative aspects of play for many years and wrote The Genesis of Animal Play, provided the Foreword for Coppinger and Feinstein’s book). 

Why do animals play? Briefly, various theories have been offered about why animals play, and there’s no one explanation that fits all examples of animal play. Detailed comparative data show play is important in social development, physical development, and cognitive development. And, neurobiological research strongly suggests play can be pleasurable and fun and animals may simply play because it feels good, “for the hell of it.” Indeed, many researchers are taking fun seriously, and the 25th anniversary issue of the journal Current Biology was devoted to the biology of fun with many play researchers weighing in on the topic. Coppinger and Feinstein write, “We agree that there is good reason to believe that animals derive pleasure from play - indeed they do from all of their motor activities.” (my emphasis) While animals might derive pleasure from play, eating, and sex, it’s difficult to argue they feel good running from competitors or predators, but the necessary research has not been done. 

Based on an extensive review of available literature, my colleagues Marek Spinka, Ruth Newberry, and I proposed that that play functions as training for the unexpected by increasing the versatility of movements and the ability to recover from sudden shocks, such as the loss of balance and falling over, and to enhance the ability of animals to cope emotionally with unexpected stressful situations. To obtain this training, we suggested that animals actively seek and create unexpected situations in play and actively put themselves into disadvantageous positions and situations.

Comparative data from a wide range of species support this hypothesis. And, while it is difficult to test these ideas in the field, a study of mountain goat kids by Rachel Théoret-Gosselin, Sandra Hamel, and Steeve D. Côté called “The role of maternal behavior and offspring development in the survival of mountain goat kids“ showed that “play behaviors could enhance the emotional resilience to stress not only for unpredicted events but also in stressful group situations because play could reduce aggressiveness in gregarious species.” More field data are needed and this study is an excellent example of what needs to be done.

The play bow: Are dogs really confused when they play and what does this mean?

The authors also dismiss the detailed work that has been conducted on the play bow, a highly ritualized and stereotyped action by which animals signal their intention to play (please see accompanying image). When dogs and other animals bow they crouch on their forelimbs, raise their hind end, and occasionally wag their tail and bark. Coppinger and Feinstein write, “But we wonder if the so-called play bow in fact really has any adaptive, let alone cognitive, significance.” A good deal of very detailed research has been conducted on the bow by my research group and also by Barbara Smuts and her students that clearly supports the claim that bows are adaptive and have cognitive significance (please also see along with Mechtild Käufer’s excellent book called Canine Play Behavior: The Science of Dogs at Play and a comprehensive review essay by Elisabetta Palagi and eight other play experts called “Rough-and-tumble play as a window on animal communication“). The abstract for this excellent evidence-based and extremely significant up-to-date essay reads: Rough-and-tumble play (RT) is a widespread phenomenon in mammals. Since it involves competition, whereby one animal attempts to gain advantage over another, RT runs the risk of escalation to serious fighting. Competition is typically curtailed by some degree of cooperation and different signals help negotiate potential mishaps during RT. This review provides a framework for such signals, showing that they range along two dimensions: one from signals borrowed from other functional contexts to those that are unique to play, and the other from purely emotional expressions to highly cognitive (intentional) constructions. Some animal taxa have exaggerated the emotional and cognitive interplay aspects of play signals, yielding admixtures of communication that have led to complex forms of RT. This complexity has been further exaggerated in some lineages by the development of specific novel gestures that can be used to negotiate playful mood and entice reluctant partners. Play-derived gestures may provide new mechanisms by which more sophisticated communication forms can evolve. Therefore, RT and playful communication provide a window into the study of social cognition, emotional regulation and the evolution of communication systems.

The so-called play bow. Based on an unpublished student project in which “Border collies were confronted with normal and drugged roosters”,  Coppinger and Feinstein believe that the “so-called play bow” is a posture assumed by an animal confused by its next move. They write, “... the play bow occurs when an animal is in a temporarily indeterminate state ... In short, the ‘playing’ animal is in conflict about its next move - and the play bow in fact looks just like a combination of multiple conflicting behavioral shapes.” The authors ignore detailed research that shows how play bows are extremely stereotyped (they are what ethologists call a modal action pattern), they vary in shape and duration depending on where they are performed in a play bout, and they allow a dog to perform a wide variety of movements from this posture. There are no data that support their belief and the student’s data are impossible to assess. And, it’s not clear at all why they refer to the “so-called play bow,” when many researchers have studied it and concluded, based on substantial data, that it is indeed used almost exclusively in the context of play both as a play invitation signal and also to maintain the play mood. 

Let’s briefly think about what it means when a dog or other animal is confused, because every definition I can find indicates that there have to be cognitive and emotional underpinnings. In the case of dog-dog play, a simple view would be that Harry (a dog) wants to play with Mary (another dog) and that Harry isn’t sure what to do so he carefully pays attention to what Mary has done and is doing, and tries to factor this information into what she is likely to do in the future. In essence, Harry is pondering if he chooses to do “X” or “Y,” what will Mary do (and, of course, vice versa). Because play is indeed a hodge-podge of various actions, a kaleidoscopic behavior, on the authors’ view, Harry is confused, and to overcome his confusion he performs play bows.

There are no data that support the belief that dogs are confused when they play, however, there are data that show that there is a good deal of rapid of thinking and feeling on-the-run based on what Harry thinks and feels Mary is likely to do during the on-going interaction (and vice versa). These sorts of interactions make it clear that play is also a good place to observe and to study what researchers call a “theory of mind,“ because Harry and Mary need to pay very close attention to what each has done and is doing, and how that will influence what she or he is likely to do in the future (for further discussion please see Alexandra Horowitz’s essay called “Attention to attention in domestic dog (Canis familiaris) dyadic play“). There is a good deal of mind-reading going on here as Harry and Mary make careful and rapid assessments and predictions of what their play partner is likely to do. 

The cognitive and emotional underpinnings of “being confused” are rather rich, and do not lend themselves to simple mechanistic explanations that are favored by the authors. Available and ample data for a number of different species show there are predictable rules of play that cross species lines, namely, ask first, be honest, follow the rules, and admit you’re wrong. This is why play is so exciting to engage in and also so much fun to watch and to study. And, this is also why play among young and old dogs only rarely escalates into injurious aggression, although the authors recall an instance when play among four-week-old Border collie littermates was fatal and use this observation to claim that play “can itself cause significant harm” (p. 165). Indeed, Shyan, Fortune, and King (2003) reported that fewer than 0.5% of play fights in dogs developed into conflict, and only half of these were clearly aggressive encounters. Their data agree with our own observations on wild coyotes and free-running dogs at play.

Behavioral variability. Another example of a claim that is countered by available data centers on behavioral variability in young dogs and wolves. Coppinger and Feinstein write, “When we observe wolves, we see a similar picture. Wolf puppies are often noticeably more robust and varied in their play routines than dogs of the same size and age. This means, according to our hypothesis, that they should have more available motor patterns than the dogs do. That is in fact the case.“ (my emphasis) However, they offer no data. 

Along these lines, years ago Robert Fagen, another play expert and author of the classic book Animal Play Behavior, analyzed the sequential variability of play and aggression in young dogs (beagles), wolves, and coyotes using data my students and I collected, and discovered that social play in the beagles was more variable than social play in wolves and coyotes of the same age (and coyote play was more variable than wolf play). These data were published in an essay I wrote with John Byers (“A critical reanalysis of the ontogeny of mammalian social and locomotor play: An ethological hornet’s nest,” in K. Immelmann, G. W. Barlow, L. Petrinovich, and M. Main, Eds., Behavioral Development, The Bielefeld Interdisciplinary Project. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 296-337, 1981) that the authors list in their reference section. And, we also found that young beagles and wolves shared the same basic ethogram and number of motor patterns. Perhaps working dogs such as Border collies are different from beagles and other dogs, but we really don’t know if this is the case. 

The way in which the authors routinely dismiss a wealth of detailed research on animal play is characteristic of much of their book, that is essentially a tapestry of criticism using stories and unpublished projects in lieu of published data. It’s easy to see how one might walk away feeling that just about everyone else is wrong about dog behavior, cognition, emotions, and consciousness, and much of the research that has been done can be tossed into the garbage because it’s merely debris. 

All in all, the one-sided assault on the ever-growing literature in the growing field called cognitive ethology (the study of animal minds) fails. How Dogs Work does not really tell us how dogs work, but rather provides an extremely narrow view of mainly working dogs as machines. I find the topic to be of great interest and am always eager to learn more about why some people favor reductionist and mechanistic accounts to explain the behavior of complex sentient beings (see, for example, Sara Shettleworth’s book, Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition). However, How Dogs Work doesn’t convince me that the authors’ over-arching views are tenable. Beliefs don’t substitute for data that have been reviewed by peers, and there are plenty of data that are readily available. 

All in all, we really know far more than the authors offer, and for numerous wide-ranging and critical discussions of many different aspects of dog behavior I suggest  Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior: The Scientific Study of Canis familiaris edited by Alexandra Horowitz, Adam Miklosi’s Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition, The Social Dog: Behavior and Cognition edited by Juliane Kaminski and Sarah Marshall-Pescini, and Mechtild Käufer’s Canine Play Behavior: The Science of Dogs at Play. For more on play I highly recommend the excellent and comprehensive review article by Elisabetta Palagi and her colleagues called “Rough-and-tumble play as a window on animal communication“ and (in addition to the references above) Sergio Pellis and Vivien Pellis’ The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience.

What’s so incredibly exciting about the study of play behavior and the cognitive and emotional lives of dogs and other animals is how much we’re learning about how individuals negotiate challenging and complex social and non-social situations by carefully analyzing what’s happening and by using hard-wired actions when needed (for example, when they need to do the right thing instantaneously or the first time they are faced with a specific situation and there’s no room for error), along with behavior patterns that require careful thought and flexibility motivated by what individuals are feeling about the situation in which they find themselves.

Please stay tuned for more on dog behavior, cognition, and emotions, because there is a lot of research being done by research groups around the world, and we still have a lot to learn. Dogs are amazing sentient beings who challenge us in many different ways.

I thank a number of people for help with this essay.

Note: In a number of email messages I've been asked if I knew what happened to the 1000’s of sled dogs dogs for whom Dr. Coppinger was responsible. On page 25 we’re told, “Some four thousand dogs ‘went through the yard’” when “Ray spent fifteen years breeding and training dogs that pull sleds.” I have no idea what happened to these dogs, but according to some people I consulted, this is an incredibly large number of dogs, an average of around 267 a year. 

AT TWO WEDDINGS, darling ring bearers paraded down the aisle proudly holding the prized objects. They couldn’t have been more than six. When they suddenly stopped—as six-year-olds tend to do—to look at something on the ground, guests leaned into the aisle and pointed toward the beaming faces ahead. Smiles filled the crowd as they continued on their way.

At one wedding, the ring bearer was a little boy, and at the other, a dog.

If we’ve spent any time with companion dogs, we aren’t surprised when a dog stops to check out the ground. It also shouldn’t surprise us that a dog might go where we point. Pointing is about social communication, and it often feels like dogs are right there with us, sometimes even more than members of our own species.

In the last 20 years, dogs’ attention to our communicative gestures—particularly this thing we do with our arm and finger—has attracted enormous attention from researchers around the globe. In fact, the pointing gesture is so fundamental that seemingly no article on the canine mind is complete without a sentence such as “dogs read our gestures, like pointing, more flexibly than any other animal” (New York Times), or—more boldly in Time—“While chimps and even wolves lack an innate ability to understand what pointing means, dogs come by the knowledge naturally.”

These statements tend to produce any number of reactions in dog owners, from “Obviously,” sometimes accompanied with a side of, “Why do they bother to do this research anyway?” to the flip side: “My dog doesn’t do that … what are they talking about?” Or even the more nihilistic view: “Sure they do, but who cares?”

Here’s why we care: this one little gesture, in all its complexity, could be a core feature of the intimate bond we share with dogs.

Since the late 1990s, researchers have tried to uncover why and how dogs pick up on our cues. Initially, key questions focused on whether their ability to follow the pointing gesture arose from our long-standing co-evolutionary history or, alternatively, if they learned the behavior over the course of their individual lives.

Pointing Is About Us

Pointing is something we humans do as part of our social communication, and it is useful only because we all agree on how it should be interpreted. Imagine if your point were perceived as, “Hey! Check out my fingertip. No dirt under my nail. Wonderful, huh?” Not exactly useful for communication. Fortunately, we understand that pointing creates a shared experience beyond our fingertips; pointing draws someone’s attention past our outstretched index finger to something out there in the world.

This cooperative gesture serves us well. Yelling, “Look out!” is only somewhat informative, but yelling, “Look out!” and pointing can help a fellow human locate and respond to a Frisbee sailing in at head level or Godzilla rampaging down Fifth Avenue. Communication achieved.

Despite our mothers’ reminders that pointing is rude, it has a function: it reflects our ability to hold shared attention with others, which could also indicate that someone else is aware of the same thing that we are. Pretty meta. Joint attention can thus be associated with an ability to infer others’ mental states, which is considered an important social capability in humans.

At about six months, children start following the gaze and gestures of others. We start pointing around our first birthday and become increasingly point-savvy as we age. When toddlers see something of interest and point at it, they become excited when we also look. They will also point when seeking something or to provide information (I want that. You dropped something). Regardless of how it’s used or understood at any given age or moment, pointing intrinsically aids our communication with one another.

Do Dogs Get the Point?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that much of the academic interest in the canine mind that blossomed in the late 1990s was actually largely about us, investigating to what extent dogs responded to our communicative gestures— notably, our pointing. In research labs around the world, it has been a pointing party ever since.

Watch any program covering research into the canine mind and you’re bound to hear mention of studies involving a dog, two cups and a pointing human. The experiment, commonly referred to as the object-choice task, follows some variation of this procedure: a dog first learns he can get a treat for approaching either of two identical cups. He then watches as a person points to one of the cups. Will the dog follow the point to the cup?

Human children are quite good at this task, and numerous studies confirm that dogs are, too. From an early age, dogs are highly responsive to this gesture. Dogs do well when a person points with a foot, or bows or nods. They’ll also respond to what’s commonly referred to as a “momentary” point, in which the person points and then lowers his or her arm before the dog makes a choice. They will follow the point even when a person stands by one cup and points at the other. Although we all know smell is a major player in the canine world, it doesn’t appear to factor greatly into dog performance; when food is hidden under one cup and nobody points, they don’t do so well. Some researchers describe their performance as “remarkable” and “outstandingly flexible.”

Not all species catch our communicative drift. A bee that flies into your car will never be aided by your outstretched arm pointing toward the open window. Given dogs’ long history with us, researchers wondered whether canine sensitivity arose through the domestication process—in which case, wolves, their closest relative, might be less adept in this task—or, on the other hand, whether it’s a product of learning and dogs’ individual life experiences. Or maybe the reality is not so black-and- white. What underlies their highly flexible ability?

Wolves do not follow our gestures as flexibly as dogs. Nor do chimpanzees, our closest relatives. This isn’t to say that wolves (or chimpanzees) can’t or don’t do it. Extensively socialized wolves and enculturated chimps—those highly familiarized with human behavior— can follow our points, but dogs generally respond more readily and easily, and wolves need more exposure to perform similarly. In 2002, Brian Hare of the Duke Canine Cognition Center pulled together then-current research on dogs, wolves and chimpanzees and, in an article in Science, concluded, “Dogs’ social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication.”

Both Nature & Nurture Point to Success

More immediate genetic influences, like artificial selection, could also influence dogs’ skills. Márta Gácsi and colleagues at the Family Dog Project in Budapest found that while all dogs tested followed the point better than chance would predict, dogs bred for cooperative work (like gun dogs) performed better than those bred for independent work (like guard dogs). All the dogs in the study were living as pets and none had received special training, implying that genetics plays a role at some level in enhancing dogs’ ability to follow our gestures.

At the same time, individual life experiences could also contribute to a dog’s responsiveness. For example, the reactions of shelter dogs to our pointing gestures vary widely, and a small group of intensively socialized lab-raised dogs did not fare well in the task.

Lucia Lazarowski of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Auburn University, one of the investigators in the lab-raised dog study, saw their challenges first-hand. But when she later adopted Captain, a study participant, and informally examined his responsiveness to pointing, she found he performed much better in her home: “He actually looked in the direction I pointed and sniffed in the area I was pointing to. During the test, however, he was one of the more non-responsive dogs. Now, we like to play a game where I toss small treats around the room for him to hunt, and if he can’t find them, sometimes I’ll point to them, so he probably has picked it up from that.” Captain’s transition to canine pointfollower highlights that learning and life experiences can factor into the skill.

The person behind the point can also affect dog performance. Amy Cook, CDBC, CPDT-KA, conducted a study on the topic at the University of California, Berkeley; reporting in Animal Cognition, Cook noted that when owners and strangers were pitted against one another (in what I hope was described as a “point-off”), dogs tended to follow their owners, even when they received no reward (i.e., the point did not lead to the dog getting food). As Cook explains, “Dogs make decisions by attending preferentially to social signals from humans with whom they have become more familiar.” Many of us think it’s all about us, and our dogs might agree.

If dogs respond to the pointing gesture based on whose finger is doing the work, then again, it looks like life experiences could be controlling the switches. But not so fast: Cook suggests that this unique spin on the issue— dogs being more attentive to a familiar person—could have been shaped by evolutionary pressures to bond with a caretaker. Attachment relationships between dogs and their humans are well documented and, as Cook says, going with your person could be “a successful strategy in the long term.”

Isn’t it nice when everyone can be right? Dog responsiveness to our communicative gestures could be a product of their evolutionary history plus their ability to learn rapidly once in a human environment. In a 2009 article in Behavioural Processes, Pamela Reid, CAAB and vice president of the ASPCA’s Anti-Cruelty Behavior Team, reflects on what’s behind canine responsiveness to our social cues: “Dogs are too skilled for it to be pure trial-and- error learning. Yet it is improbable that a versatile behavior like this would be largely innate.” She suggests that what we see in dogs is an adaptive specialization of learning. “In essence, they come with a built-in head start to learn the significance of people’s gestures, in much the same way that white-crowned sparrows acquire their species-typical song and ducklings imprint on their own kind.” This fits in well with what is understood of instinctual or innate behaviors. As Jack Hailman explained in his inf luential piece in Scientific American in 1969, “How an Instinct Is Learned,” species-specific behaviors require some amount of experience and development.

When Patricia McConnell, CAAB, mulled over the pointing research on her blog, “The Other End of the Leash,” she agreed that dogs could be “predisposed to learn to follow a pointing gesture.” McConnell also highlights something you might have seen yourself: present a very young puppy with an outstretched finger and that puppy is going to approach your fingertip, not follow it to a distant location. McConnell’s point is that point-following in puppies is not automatic, although they learn it very easily.

To this, Reid adds, “Just because a skill appears early in development does not preclude learning. It does, however, demand that puppies be highly attentive to the actions of humans, a tendency that has been confirmed in studies of dog-human attachment.”

What Do You Understand, Dog?

What do dogs think of all this? What does it mean to be a dog who “understands” our pointing gesture?

A 2013 article by Ádám Miklósi and József Topál of the Family Dog Project in Trends in Cognitive Sciences concludes by highlighting that “dog social competence [appears] sometimes ‘infant-like’ or ‘human-like,’ but, importantly, the underlying mental mechanisms may turn out to be quite different.”

It’s hard enough for us to figure out if, for example, our boss is merely suggesting that we do something or telling us to do it. The same is true for dogs and the pointing gesture. Do dogs see pointing as an imperative—“You. Go there.”—or as simply providing information or a helpful suggestion—“I recommend that you go there.”—a subtle yet meaningful difference. A 2011 article published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science by Helene Pettersson and colleagues found that, like children, dogs are more likely to follow a point when it is accompanied by a cooperative tone of voice as opposed to a prohibitive tone. At the same time, dogs sometimes follow the point to an empty container, leading some to wonder whether, under certain circumstances, dogs might perceive the gesture as a command.

Like humans, dogs seem to distinguish when communication is—or is not—intended for them, although they could be relying on a more limited set of cues. Numerous studies find that initiating eye contact and using high-pitched vocalizations help dogs understand that the communication is for them. Setting is also important. In a 2011 study reported in PLoS ONE, Linda Scheider and colleagues found that if a person points to a location where a dog has never experienced reinforcement, the dog is not as likely to follow as he would be if he had previously received reinforcement there (making me wonder whether the ring-bearer dog would spontaneously follow the point to the altar).

At some level, every pointing gesture suffers from a fundamental ambiguity: we might be pointing to a particular object, or we might be pointing to a specific space that happens to be inhabited by a particular object. Usually, we can figure it out without too much cognitive difficulty. Even nine-monthold infants understand when pointing refers to an object as opposed to the place where the object is located.

How about dogs? In a study recently published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology by Tibor Tauzin and colleagues, an experimenter pointed at one of two different toys on either side of him. Before the dog could approach, the experimenter switched the location of the objects in full view of the dog. The researchers wondered whether the dog would approach the object that had initially been pointed at but that was now in a new location, or to the original location of the point. The result? Dogs did not follow the object to its new location. Instead, they approached the old location, which seems to imply that, for the dog, pointing could be more about the location than the pointed-at object.

For those of us who live or work with dogs, much of the value of pointing studies lies in what we do with the results. Despite being unflashy, the pointing gesture is actually rich in dimensions and angles that we can explore with our dogs. As Reid recommends, “Take note of your body gestures. Does your dog attend to your gestures in all cases, or only in certain contexts? Dogs are often way more sensitive than we can grasp. They’re not trying to fool you or trick you, get one over on you or cheat the system. Attending to our gestures is just what dogs do. It’s who they are.”

References

Cook, A., et al. 2014. My owner right or wrong: the effect of familiarity on the domestic dog’s behavior in a food-choice task. Animal Cognition 17: 461–470.

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Among the many hotly debated topics related to the appearance of dogs in the lives of humans is how often and where it first occurred. In their landmark 1997 paper on dog origins, Robert K. Wayne, Carles Vilá, and their colleagues made the case for multiple origins, but many other students of dog evolution, including Peter Savolainen, a co-author on that paper, have repeatedly and strongly argued for a single place of origin.

In this week’s Science magazine (June 3, 2016) [the article is available here, gratis], Laurent Frantz of Oxford University’s ancient dog program, writing for more than a score of his colleagues from institutions around the world, presents the case for dual domestication of Paleolithic wolves in Western Eurasia and Eastern Asia. According to this hypothesis, a now extinct ancestral wolf split into at least two genetically distinct populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent where they encountered and joined forces with humans to become dogs.

Frantz and his coauthors pin much of their argument on analysis and comparison of the fully sequenced genome of a 4,800- year old dog unearthed at Newgrange, Ireland, to other ancient and modern dogs and modern wolves. They found it retained “a degree of ancestry” different from modern dogs or modern wolves. Using that and other evidence the researchers argue that the most comprehensive model for the appearance of the dog involves at least two domestication events 15,000 or more years ago. Frantz writes: “The eastern dog population then dispersed westward alongside humans at some point between 6,400 and 14,000 years ago, into Western Europe (10,11, 20), where they partially replaced an indigenous Paleolithic dog population. Our hypothesis reconciles previous studies that have suggested that domestic dogs originated either in East Asia (9, 19) or in Europe (7).”

I asked Greger Larson, co-director of the Oxford project and corresponding author on the paper, just what were the boundaries of “Western Eurasia,” comprised apparently of Europe and the Middle East, and “Eastern Asia?” He answered in an email that the boundaries were left deliberately vague because where wolves became dogs remains unknown, like the date itself.

In Science, Frantz writes: [W]e calculated the divergence time between two modern Russian wolves used in the study and the modern dogs to be 60,000 to 20,000 years ago.” The first number puts the dog in the time when Neanderthal was still the big kid on the European block, raising the possibility that Neanderthal had protodogs or that early modern humans came to Europe with dogs or soon allied with wolves. Either of the first two  prospects must have set off alarms in some circles for Frantz cautions that those dates should not be taken as “a time frame for domestication” because the wolves they used may not have been “closely related to the population(s) that gave rise to dogs.”

Fundamentally, this paper is at once a bold attempt to come up with a workable hypothesis to explain the appearance of the dog in human affairs and a tentative step into troubled waters. Left unanswered are virtually all outstanding questions regarding the who, what, when, where, and why of the transformation of wolves to dogs. Geographically all it does is exclude Central Asia. Whether it does so wrongly may depend on how you define Central  Asia geographically.  

What makes it bold and radical even is the suggestion that early humans and wolves could have gotten together wherever and whenever they met on the trail of the big game they were following.  There are many reasons for that including similar social and familial cultures, but humans and wolves could have joined forces to have become more successful hunters. We learn from Wolves on the Hunt: The Behavior of Wolves Hunting Prey by L. David Mech, Douglas W. Smith, and Daniel R. MacNulty (Chicago, 2016) that while wolves appear excellent at finding and trailing game, they are not very good at making the kill, succeeding perhaps half the time. It is dangerous work at which humans with their weapons excel.

Imagine the scene: Human hunters locate wolves on the hunt by watching ravens who are known to follow them. Human hunters move in for the kill and take as many animals as they can. If smart, they might share immediately with the wolves. If not, the wolves might consume what the humans do not carry off or follow them back to their encampment to take what they can.

The rest is a tale of accommodation through socialization—the ability to bond with another being—and all that entails. 

This article originally appeared in Psychology Today's Dog's Best Friend, used with permission.