How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (29 page)

The results from the Dog Project, however, support a much simpler theory. Because wolves were predators, they were already well evolved for intuiting the behavior of other animals, which meant that wolves had a high level of interspecies social cognition, perhaps even a theory of mind. For wolves used to hunting, it would have been a trivial mental feat to learn the habits of humans. If humans fed them, it would have been simply because they liked having them around, not because wolves provided any survival function. Anthropologists have long known about the universal human tendency to take in animals as pets. Everything from reptiles to birds to mammals. In almost all cases, pets provide no useful function other than it makes humans feel good.

It is not hard to imagine a nomadic tribe of Ice Age humans running into a pack of wolves. A friendlier and more curious wolf might approach the tribe, tentatively at first. A friendly and curious human might leave some food on the perimeter. It wouldn’t take long for the two individuals to get close enough to achieve physical contact. Initially, the wolf would probably split its time between the pack and the humans. However, when either the humans or the wolves moved on, the wolf would have to make a choice of whom to follow. It is easy to imagine an exceptionally social wolf, probably a juvenile male, choosing the humans. The human, also probably a child, would see
that the wolf was following her and continue to divert food to the wolf.

This scenario, however, would not result in any physical changes in the wolf, at least not for a long time. It is unlikely that an individual group of humans could have supported more than one wolf. As a result, there would have been no opportunity for the wolf to breed with other like-minded wolves. I suspect these “one-off” domestication events happened sporadically throughout the period from twenty-seven thousand years ago until about fifteen thousand years ago. Only when humans stopped being nomadic and stayed in one place long enough to span the reproductive cycle of the wolf did physical evolution start to take off, and the wolf morphed into the dog. The remaining wolves—those who wanted nothing to do with humans—gave rise to the wolves we know today. Modern wolves must represent the opposite end of the canid spectrum from dogs.

The defining trait of dogs, therefore, is their interspecies social intelligence, an ability to intuit what humans and other animals are thinking. Wolves do this to hunt prey. But dogs evolved their social intelligence into living
with
other species instead of eating them. Dogs’ great social intelligence means that they probably also have a high capacity for empathy. More than intuiting what we think, dogs may also feel what we feel. Dogs have emotional intelligence. Just like people, if dogs can be happy, then surely they can be sad and lonely.

Throughout the Dog Project, I had been struck by how perfectly dogs and humans complemented each other. Humans, even with our powerful brains and capacity for abstract thought, are still slaves to our emotions, which dogs will pick up on and resonate with. And the most powerful emotion of all is love. Despite the complexities of human relationships, the fundamental attribute of love is empathy. To love, and be loved, is to feel what another feels and have that returned. It really is that simple. If people do this with each other, it seems perfectly natural for us to do it with animals. People become
intensely attached to their pets. Every day, on my way to work, I pass a professional building with a sign advertising grief counseling for pet loss. It is not an exaggeration to say that for many people, their pets are their primary relationships and that they love their cats and dogs more than people. This is why it hurts so much when we lose them.

We were not a one-dog household. The grief at Lyra’s passing had been profound, but the emptiness had been worse. Eventually, the entire family, including Callie, once again took a trip to the animal shelter. This time, Callie was there to help pick a new dog to join the family.

Walking down row after row of barking dogs, Callie look-alikes were everywhere. It seemed that every cage held a gaunt village dog. Black fur, white chest, tail in a C. And every single one had the breed listed as pit bull terrier mix. A feist by any other name. The temptation was strong to get a twin for Callie, but Helen insisted on a puppy. Something soft and cuddly—like Lyra, but different.

We zeroed in on a fluffy brindle puppy. He had a long snout and droopy lips and floppy ears that were too big for his head. No doubt about this one. He was a hound. Unlike his neighbors, he wasn’t barking. I crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it in the corner of his pen. He bounded over to it and brought it back to me. This was supposedly the single best test of puppy temperament. A puppy that retrieved an object indicated a predisposition to work with humans. I was sold.

Callie gave him a good sniffing and wagged her tail. It was unanimous.

Continuing our tradition of literary names, Helen and Maddy called him Cato, after the character from Suzanne Collins’s
The Hunger Games.
Never mind that Cato was the most dangerous enemy to
Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the novel. At least he was bold and single-minded of purpose.

Our Cato, though, was a goofball. Gangly and awkward, he ran around the house, tripping over his feet and doing somersaults. Because of his penchant for putting everything in his mouth, he was dubbed the “fur ball with teeth.”

By the time Cato was six months old, his personality had begun to emerge. He seemed to move through the teething stage without too much destruction, although he had an obsession with the tags on clothing. He also liked to unravel toilet paper rolls and drag a trail of paper out of the bathroom.

Kat noted the eerie similarity to Newton.

“I think Cato is Newton reincarnated,” she said. “Those are the exact same things Newton used to do.” She was right. Even though Cato had been, in some way, a replacement for Lyra, he was closer to being a new Newton.

Helen, now thirteen years old, wanted to be primarily responsible for raising Cato.

“Do you know what that means?” I asked.

“I will have to let him out at night until he is housebroken.”

“Yes.”

“And I will have to train Cato to sit and stay and walk.” Cato heard his name and jumped into Helen’s lap. He started licking her face.

“You will feed him?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“And you will pick up his poops on walks?”

Helen hesitated and thought about it. “Umm, I don’t know about that.”

I signed up Helen and Cato for puppy class at CPT. Mark’s class was a gentle introduction to basic training for both puppies and owners and let the puppies socialize with other dogs in a safe environment.
Helen beamed in delight when she learned how to get Cato to sit and lie down. Like Callie, his love of hot dogs made training a breeze.

Of course, there was more to raising a puppy than basic training. If I had learned nothing else in the Dog Project, it was how to communicate better. Dogs come ready-made to soak up the social rules of the household. It was our human inconsistencies that made it difficult for them.

Humans emit a constant stream of signals. We talk constantly. Our bodies are in motion. We wave our hands in wild patterns in feeble attempts to communicate emotions. It isn’t at all clear how much of this verbal and physical chatter is actually necessary. I realized that Callie ignored most of the family’s gesticulations, instead reserving her attention to the signals that carried useful information. I respected her regal demeanor. What, two years ago, I had mistaken for aloofness, I now understood to be an economy of attention. She had revealed herself to be capable of great feats of mentalizing when working with me as part of the Dog Project. If she wasn’t interested in what I was saying, I realized that it was because I wasn’t being clear in what I wanted.

After spending hours staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Callie, we had achieved a level of communication that I don’t think I had ever had with a dog. Not even Newton. I had learned to read some of Callie’s body language, especially her eyes. Her flicks of attention telegraphed what caught her interest. The photographs and video footage from the Dog Project made it obvious that the dogs’ attention was focused on the humans. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but when I replayed the footage, it was impossible to ignore. The dogs were watching us, trying to figure out what we were thinking and how to shape their own behavior to fit in.

Consistency and clarity. That was the ticket. I resolved to be more consistent—with both dogs and humans alike.

After one of the puppy classes, Helen asked me, “Could Cato be in the Dog Project?”

“He’s too young,” I replied.

“How old does he have to be?”

“At least a year old.”

“But,” Helen opined, “he’s really smart. I bet he could hold his head still.”

“He probably could. But puppies’ brains aren’t fully grown. We wouldn’t know how to compare his brain to an adult brain like Callie’s.”

Helen took this in. “Could I start training him so that he’ll be ready by the time he’s one year old?”

“Sure,” I said. “But why do you want him to be in the Dog Project?”

Helen stroked Cato’s head. “So I can know what he’s thinking.”

I smiled. I knew exactly how she felt.

Epilogue

Two years and two dogs. Two dogs scanned and two dogs gone. The Dog Project started as an idea born from the grief of losing our pug Newton but blossomed into something bigger than any of us could have expected. Up until that point, I had kept my feelings toward dogs mostly to myself. But after we published the initial results with Callie and McKenzie, there was an outpouring of support from people all over the world. I was moved by how strongly people wanted to know what their dogs were thinking.

One of the first people I heard from was Jessie Lendennie, a poet and managing editor at the publisher Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Jessie was kind enough to send me an anthology of poems,
Dogs Singing
, that she had compiled from poets all over the world. It is a remarkable tribute to the powerful effect that dogs have on people. I found it inspiring as the Dog Project progressed beyond just two dogs.

Moving forward was a risky move. We still had no funding to speak of. The only reason we got as far as we did was through the volunteer efforts of Mark and Melissa and all the people in my lab, especially Andrew. Scanner time still cost $500 an hour, and there were no freebies in that department. I had paid for scan costs out of discretionary research funds that I had accumulated over the years, but at the end of the hot dog and smell experiments, we had to ask ourselves: What now?

We had the only dogs in the world that were trained to go into an MRI. We could keep dreaming up questions to ask about how the canine brain worked, but there were limits in what we could learn from just two subjects. If the Dog Project was to continue to decipher what our furry friends think about us, the path was clear: we needed more dogs. If we had more dogs, we could sort out the questions about how many of the differences between Callie and McKenzie were because of their genetics, their environment, or just random day-to-day fluctuations in their mood, which surely must happen, just like humans. We all wanted to know about the differences in breeds.

Even though I wasn’t sure how we would pay for all this, there was never any real question that I was going all in. I had always followed my passion and hunches in science rather than trying to fit my research program into whatever the funding agencies’ hot topic of the year was. I didn’t hesitate to commit all of my available resources to expand the Dog Project. I had faith that eventually people would soon realize that this wasn’t a frivolous endeavor, and that deciphering what goes on in dogs’ minds would tell us something about where humans came from and how we can live more harmoniously with these wonderful creatures.

The first order of business was to recruit the A-Team. Mark sent out an e-mail to everyone who had come through CPT in the past ten years. He put in calls to local veterinarians. We set a high bar. Callie and McKenzie had shown us what kind of dog could do this. Dogs had to be calm, good in novel environments, good with strangers, good with other dogs, inquisitive, unafraid of loud noises, able to wear earmuffs, and, above all, have a drive to learn new things.

We held tryouts. We tested the dog-human teams for their ability to learn new tasks, like going in the head coil and wearing earmuffs. We played recordings of the scanner noise, watching for any signs of anxiety. After hours of testing, we were still left with five new dogs and owners who were ready to commit to the project. Just as exciting, the dogs represented a cross section of breeds. We had Kady, a Lab-golden mix who had washed out of therapy training for being too sensitive. There was Rocky, the miniature poodle; Caylin, another border collie; and Huxley, a Brittany mix. And finally, rounding out the motley crew was Tigger, a funny Boston terrier who reminded me a lot of Newton.

Kady wearing earmuffs
(above)
. Tigger in the head coil
(below)
.
(Helen Berns)