~ Review by Pamela S. Hogle

A #1 New York Times bestseller, Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz clearly has mainstream appeal; it is thoroughly enough referenced and indexed to appeal to canine professionals as well. The author, a psychologist and animal behaviorist, is no stranger to scientific research, and is a lifelong dog owner and dog lover.

The book is informative and entertaining, and it offers insights that will promote greater human understanding of dogs. It concludes with a strong chapter that suggests ways humans can relate better to the dogs in their households. The book also does an outstanding job of describing dogs’ sensory experience of the world, devoting nearly 100 pages to the subject. 

But in its claim to present the canine perspective, the book gets a mixed review. Horowitz does decode some situations according to a canine point of view — her discussion of doggy raincoats and the way that their tight embrace might make dogs feel “subdued” rather than protected is an amusing example. But in other examples, a strong anthropomorphic bias comes through. For instance, after lengthy and well-done sections describing dogs’ vision and how it differs from humans’ and explaining that smell is dogs’ primary source of information, Horowitz attributes her dog’s hesitance to enter an elevator to age-related deterioration of her vision or difficulty adjusting to low light after being outside. These are both reasons a human might hesitate. Possible reasons that consider dogs' experience of the world — that the crevice between the floor and the elevator harbors many strange smells or an unpleasant memory of the moving floor (though this is unlikely in the case of Horowitz’s apartment-dwelling dog) — are not mentioned. 

Horowitz displays her scientist roots in her reliance on research studies to draw conclusions, even when the studies are poorly designed, and even when real-life experience points to different conclusions. A study of dogs’ reactions to “emergency” situations is instructive. In this study, humans set up a highly contrived scenario, first having owners introduce their dogs to a “friendly stranger” and then having the owners feign an emergency — a heart attack, for example. None of the dogs tested did what the humans wanted them to do (seek help from the “stranger”). Calling this a “clever” experiment, Horowitz draws the conclusion that dogs “simply do not naturally recognize or react to an emergency situation.” A more obvious conclusion, and one that gives more credit to the dogs’ intelligence, is that the dogs could tell that the people were faking — none of the scents and signals that indicate true alarm or physical dysfunction would have been present in the “actors.” Some dogs do, in fact, react to emergency situations, even when they have not been specifically trained to do so.

Horowitz relies exclusively on some studies that dogs “failed,” such as the mirror test for self-awareness and a test of whether dogs felt “guilt” if they “stole” a treat, in arriving at her limited conclusions about doggy consciousness and self-awareness. She fails to acknowledge (or notice?) that the tests cited are anthropocentric in design — that is, they test things that are relevant to people but not to dogs — and were conducted in unfamiliar, contrived environments where the dogs’ behavior would be far from natural. Other research showing strong evidence of dog self-awareness is not mentioned. Finally, and despite a section at the beginning of the book chiding scientists’ tendency to see one animal as representative of a species, she makes many broad statements about dog behavior that are seemingly based on her observations of her one dog.

Overall, the book provides a good description of dogs’ sensory perceptions of the world and a wonderful guide to improving our treatment of dogs, but I think that its conclusions about dog behavior, consciousness, and self-awareness are questionable.

EXCERPT

Chapter 1: Umwelt: from the dog's point of nose

This morning I was awakened by Pump coming over to the bed and sniffing emphatically at me, millimeters away, her whiskers grazing my lips, to see if I was awake or alive or me. She punctuates her rousing with an exclamatory sneeze directly in my face. I open my eyes and she is gazing at me, smiling, panting a hello.

Go look at a dog. Go on, look--maybe at one lying near you right now, curled around his folded legs on a dog bed, or sprawled on his side on the tile floor, paws flitting through the pasture of a dream. Take a good look--and now forget everything you know about this or any dog.

This is admittedly a ridiculous exhortation: I don't really expect that you could easily forget even the name or favored food or unique profile of your dog, let alone everything about him. I think of the exercise as analogous to asking a newcomer to meditation to enter into satori, the highest state, on the first go: aim for it, and see how far you get. Science, aiming for objectivity, requires that one becomes aware of prior prejudices and personal perspective. What we'll find, in looking at dogs through a scientific lens, is that some of what we think we know about dogs is entirely borne out; other things which appear patently true are, on closer examination, more doubtful than we thought. And by looking at our dogs from another perspective--from the perspective of the dog--we can see new things that don't naturally occur to those of us encumbered with human brains. So the best way to begin understanding dogs is by forgetting what we think we know.

The first things to forget are anthropomorphisms. We see, talk about, and imagine dogs' behavior from a human-biased perspective, imposing our own emotions and thoughts on these furred creatures. Of course, we'll say, dogs love and desire; of course they dream and think; they also know and understand us, feel bored, get jealous, and get depressed. What could be a more natural explanation of a dog staring dolefully at you as you leave the house for the day than that he is depressed that you're going?

The answer is: an explanation based in what dogs actually have the capacity to feel, know, and understand. We use these words, these anthropomorphisms, to help us make sense of dogs' behavior. Naturally, we are intrinsically prejudiced toward human experiences, which leads us to understand animals' experiences only to the extent that they match our own. We remember stories that confirm our descriptions of animals and conveniently forget those that do not. And we do not hesitate to assert "facts" about apes or dogs or elephants or any animal without proper evidence. For many of us, our interaction with non-pet animals begins and ends with our staring at them at zoos or watching shows on cable TV. The amount of useful information we can get from this kind of eavesdropping is limited: such a passive encounter reveals even less than we get from glancing in a neighbor's window as we walk by. At least the neighbor is of our own species.

Anthropomorphisms are not inherently odious. They are born of attempts to understand the world, not to subvert it. Our human ancestors would have regularly anthropomorphized in an attempt to explain and predict the behavior of other animals, including those they might want to eat or which might want to eat them. Imagine encountering a strange, bright-eyed jaguar at dusk in the forest, and looking squarely in its eyes looking squarely into yours. At that moment, a little meditation on what you might be thinking "if you were the jaguar" would probably be due--and would lead to your high-tailing it away from the cat. Humans endured: the attribution was, if not true, at least true enough.

Typically, though, we are no longer in the position of needing to imagine the jaguar's desires in time to escape his clutches. Instead, we are bringing animals inside and asking them to become members of our families. For that purpose, anthropomorphisms fail to help us incorporate those animals into our homes, and have the smoothest, fullest relationships with them. This is not to say that we're always wrong with our attributions: it might be true that our dog is sad, jealous, inquisitive, depressed--or desiring a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But we are almost certainly not justified in claiming, say, depression from the evidence before us: the mournful eyes, the loud sigh. Our projections onto animals are often impoverished--or entirely off the mark. We might judge an animal to be happy when we see an upturn of the corners of his mouth; such a "smile", however, can be misleading. On dolphins, the smile is a fixed physiological feature, immutable like the creepily painted face of a clown. Among chimpanzees, a grin is a sign of fear or submission, the farthest thing from happiness. Similarly, a human might raise her eyebrows in surprise, but the eyebrow-raising capuchin monkey is not surprised. He is evincing neither skepticism nor alarm; instead, he is signaling to nearby monkeys that he has friendly designs. By contrast, among baboons a raised brow can be a deliberate threat (lesson: be careful toward which monkey you raise your eyebrows). The onus is on us to find a way to confirm or refute these claims we make of animals....

www.insideofadog.com

About the Author

Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years she shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and served on the staff of The New Yorker. She lives in New York City with her husband, infant son, and Finnegan, a dog of indeterminate parentage and determinate character.

Academic Page (Barnard College)

Dog Cognition L:aboratory

Psychology Today Blog

Recent news and writing

The New Yorker Magazine, Science Magazine, Smithsonian, Time Magazine, ABC's "Nature's Edge" (video features Finnegan), Foreword for Barbara Karant's '"Small Dog, Big Dog"

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