Don't underestimate your dog

Well-behaved, well-behaved dogs

For years, dogs, and animals in general, were denied any intelligence or feeling. Cartesianism, dear to the hearts of French-speaking peoples, believed that animals were nothing more than machines. It was worn down to the bone, then sent, without scruples, to the knacker's yard. Behaviorism has taken over in a softer way.

The pain

Since animals can't talk, scientists have been saying for years that they don't feel pain. And some still do, even though we know that anatomically and physiologically, animals - especially mammals - are very close to us. You only have to dissect a cat or a dog, or a human being, to realize this. I've seen it for myself. Not so long ago, animal experimentation was still carried out in the raw, without anesthesia. Students were told that the manifestation of pain in dogs, for example, was merely a reflex.
Babies, who can't speak either, weren't supposed to feel pain until recently. Doctors didn't give painkillers to young children suffering from a serious illness or after surgery, because they didn't complain! The same was true of veterinary medicine.
Nowadays, practically everyone admits that dogs and other animals can suffer, but intelligence and feelings are another matter. Many people are anti-evolutionists and still think that human beings are the final product, the ultimate creation, at the top of a pyramid or tower!
Of course, Man has no desire to see other creatures join him on his perch, or even come close!
But, as Boris Cyrulnik, psychiatrist, ethologist and psychoanalyst, says: “Dogs have the capacity to think and to experience; there is no break between man and animal.”

Behaviour and its study

Dr. Bruce Fogle says that the reason it's so hard to understand dogs is that they're so similar to us. We're both social animals.
Stephen Jay Gould, who has worked extensively on neotony, has written that man is a “neotonized” ape, i.e. an ape that, in adulthood, has retained juvenile characteristics, whether physical or psychic. According to Gould, this has saved our species over the years. Most dogs exhibit neotonic characteristics too: short muzzle, floppy ears, adult playfulness, territory exploration and obedience to a leader. Dogs express their neotonia by playing ball or knotted rope. And for us, it's soccer, cycling, pétanque, etc. I almost forgot Agility!
Whether it's a question of psyche or intelligence, behaviorists (synonym: behaviourists) are largely responsible for the underestimation of animals. But what is behaviorism?
Behaviorism and its “ancestors
- Pavlov: Classical Pavlovian Conditioning
This refers to the work of the well-known Russian physiologist Pavlov (1849-1936), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research into the functioning of the digestive glands. In the course of this work, he became interested in so-called psychic secretion. His basic concept was that of the reflex, which he defined as follows: “All activity of the organism is a response, governed by laws, to the action of a determined agent in the external world”. Today, we speak of “reaction”.
Pavlov studied the salivary reaction in dogs, of which the following is a brief summary: the dog salivates when meat powder is placed in its mouth. One second later, a buzzer is activated. Finally, when the buzzer alone is activated, the dog salivates. The ringing action replaces that of the meat powder. This is classic Pavlovian conditioning.
- John B. Watson & Burrhus F. Skinner: Instrumental Conditioning These two psychologists had predecessors such as Thorndike, who did training, and Miller & Konorski, who discovered in 1928 that an animal's motor reaction tends to be repeated if it leads to satisfaction and, on the contrary, it tends to be avoided if it leads to a situation that is painful or unpleasant for the organism. It's a La Palice truth!
The most talked-about is Skinner (b. 1904), but every introductory book on psychology describes Watson's (1878-1958) experiment with the young child and the white rabbit. Watson placed a white rabbit with a 2-3-year-old child, who stroked it. Each time the child touched the rabbit, he associated it with a loud noise, which frightened him. Finally, the sight of the animal alone terrorized the child, who developed a phobia of white rabbits, and then of other “furry” animals. He was eventually deconditioned! Watson is at the origin of behaviourism.

Skinner: Instrumental Conditioning

To promote psychology as an objective science, Skinner assigned it a biological model, and behavior as the object of study. According to behaviourists, all types of behaviour can be reduced to elementary Stimulus ½ Response relationships.
Skinner's well-known experiment is to put a starving rat in a box isolated from outside stimuli. Inside the box, there's a lever that can actuate the arrival of food in a feeder in the wall of the box. At first, the rat knows nothing, but as it explores its environment, it accidentally presses the lever and receives food. So there's positive reinforcement. Eventually, the rat purposely presses the lever again and again to receive the pellets. The reaction is conditioned.
The difference between the two conditionings is that in instrumental conditioning, reinforcement depends on the execution of the response, whereas in classical Pavlovian conditioning, reinforcement is given in all cases. Of course, the animal's state of hunger or satiety plays a role in instrumental conditioning.

Karen Prior (“Don't Shoot the Dog”), who has worked with dolphins and other animals and put clicker training on the map, gives us these definitions:

“Positive reinforcement” is anything which, in conjunction with an action, tends to increase the likelihood of repetition of the action in question. Positive reinforcement” is something we want, such as food, verbal encouragement, a caress, etc. ‘Negative reinforcement’ is something we don't want.
“Negative reinforcement” is something you want to avoid. If the reinforcement comes too early or too late, it won't give the desired result.

Modern ethology

Konrad Lorenz is one of its founders. Born in 1903, he was a contemporary of Skinner, born in 1904. He was one of the founders, along with Nikko Tinbergen, a Dutchman. He and Tinbergen were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973. Lorenz developed the notion of imprinting and worked on the innate and acquired aspects of behavior. Unlike behaviorists, who remain in their laboratories, closed cabinets and chambers, ethologists study animals in their natural environment, without sending them electric shocks or pellets!
Konrad Lorenz wrote several books, including “Man meets Dog” and “King Solomon's Ring”, both published in French under the title “Il parlait avec les Mammifères, les Oiseaux et les Poissons”.
A renowned scientist, Lorenz was not afraid of sentiment. Bruce Fogle, the British veterinary-behaviorist, was once astonished that he attributed feelings, such as love, to dogs! He quotes Lorenz who, in his book, writes: “Any dog that has ever followed its master, gives him a quantity of love and loyalty impossible to measure.”
Western behaviourists have a non-judgmental approach to animals: they have never interpreted what an animal feels or thinks, and simply describe what happens. On the other hand, influenced by Lorenz's work, the Japanese study animals with a “Kyokan” approach, meaning that they feel empathy and understanding for them, hence the criticism of “anthropomorphism” from Westerners. From the 1970s onwards, many Western scientists sided with the Japanese, although this did not prevent criticism from their colleagues. For example, the primatologist Frans De Waal was accused of “anthropomorphism” because he spoke of “reconciliation” in relation to chimpanzees!
Even among the public, there is a fear of anthropomorphism! For example, I recently heard on the radio a horsewoman who does dance numbers with six horses. She was talking about a horse named “Rasputin”, whom she recently lost at the age of 18, and whom she loved above all else. To the journalist's question: “Did he love you too?”, she replied, a little embarrassed: “I don't like to anthropomorphize!”
And on learning that Freud and Princesse Marie Bonaparte had collaborated on a book about Bonaparte's dog (“Topsy, le chow-chow au poil d'or”), the journalist, who was talking about Marie Bonaparte, was very annoyed to talk about two psychoanalysts' interest in a dog. He was almost ashamed for Freud and Marie Bonaparte!
The height of incomprehension and lack of empathy in human beings concerns an authentic elephant story, which took place in a “Safari Park” in the middle of summer: a female elephant died suddenly and, fearing that the cause was a virus attacking the myocardium, it was decided to carry out an autopsy on the spot. The elephant weighed 3,000 kilos, with the head alone weighing 800 kilos. They performed the autopsy in the shed where she had died. As there were pieces everywhere, the park owner decided to ask the autopsied female's companion to transport them elsewhere. Among them was the head. The male did as he was asked, but according to the pathologist, he appeared to be in “great distress”. His trainer opened the door and he ran off into the wild, pressing his head to the ground and tricking. He didn't move again until his trainer went to talk to him and caressed him for a long time. Once again, this shows that human beings in general are incapable of imparting feelings to animals and, consequently, show them insensitivity.
Ethologist Michel Chanton notes that there's a lot of misunderstanding between dog and owner. In other words, the message isn't getting through! He deplores the fact that veterinary-behaviorists try to solve problems between a dog and its human family by systematically giving it psychotropic drugs. In his opinion, the owner should ask himself the question: “Has the dog understood the message?
This reminds me of my dog, who had to assume the prone position from a distance (she was sitting). I said: “Banzaï... Earth!” And right after her first name, she set off to come to heel. Her educator pointed out to me that too much time had elapsed between the first name and the “Terre”. This was rectified and she immediately put “Terre”. It's trivial, but it shows the mistakes you can make with your dog. And more often than not, we blame the dog instead of ourselves.

Dog psychology: recent research

Intelligence is the ability to learn from past experience, in order to adapt to a new situation.
Many of our contemporaries still ask the question: are animals (including dogs) “intelligent”? And yet, scientists routinely talk about the “intelligence” of robots!
An article recently appeared in “Cerveau et Psychologie”, on “La Psychologie du Chien”. The author, biologist and science journalist Klaus Wilheim, draws on work in dog psychology by Hungarian, Swedish, German and American specialists, to challenge the idea of behaviorists that canine behavior is merely conditioning and not intelligence. According to recent discoveries, wolves were domesticated around 15,000 years ago, by the ancestors of the Chinese. The genetic make-up (mitochondrial DNA fragments) of a number of dogs and wolves has been studied. All changes in this DNA are due to random mutations. According to these studies, the entire canine population is descended from at least five wolves, and 95% of all our dogs are descended from three lines. Prehistoric man in China captured wolves and kept only the youngest and most intelligent offspring that could easily interact with them. So, dogs are said to have many intellectual and other qualities that wolves do not have, whether ecologists like it or not!
Vilmos Csanyi, a specialist in dog psychology at the University of Budapest, believes that every animal behaves intelligently in its own natural environment. The dog's natural habitat is that of man, not wolves. The dog's behavior reveals cognitive particularities that can only be explained by the fact that it has lived alongside man for thousands of years.
Dogs show their abilities when they can “dialogue” with their master. Dogs look man in the eye when they want to communicate with him, while wolves hardly ever do, even when they have been bred by humans for several generations. The same applies to rather complex gestures, which dogs understand easily, but wolves do not. Even chimpanzees and gorillas, our close relatives, don't pass any of the tests that dogs do (interpreting ocular or gestural signs). The dog has benefited from a domestication process lasting millennia, which could never be repeated in such a short time with the wolf.
The dog has benefited from a “parent-child” relationship with man. It passes the “Strange Situation Tests” used to measure the strength of the bond between a baby and its mother: mother and baby are placed in an unfamiliar environment; since it is with its mother, the baby will not show anxiety. If the mother leaves him alone, the child will cry out; it's the same for the dog: when his master leaves him, he'll bark and scratch at the door.
Before the “Strange Situation” test was put to the dog, it was thought that he wouldn't be as good a problem-solver as the wolf, and that he'd somehow regressed as a result of domestication. Not so, as the above-mentioned test explains. As Lorenz says, the dog generally performs poorly in laboratory tests because its master is not present. As soon as his human is there to encourage him, his score soars! The Hungarians also discovered that the closer the dog is to its owner, the more clumsy it is - it understands the problem, but waits for the owner to solve it for it! If the owner encourages the dog, it passes the test without any difficulty. Contrary to what behaviorists think, dogs can represent an object in their absence; in other words, they are capable of abstraction. We also know that dogs learn a great deal by observing their master. So, the more we read the results of all these tests, the more we realize that the dog hasn't been a wolf for very long!

Conclusion

Until Lorenz's work, which led him to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973 (ethology didn't exist!), Western scientists believed that animals were nothing more than machines to be exploited, in line with the three great religions of the Book.
Psychologists, on the other hand, had only one idea in mind: to promote psychology to the rank of objective science (this hasn't changed much) and, for them, all behavior can be reduced to Stimulus ½ Response relationships. Conditioning exists, whether in humans or animals: if we're hungry and smell a roast chicken, we salivate just as much as Pavlov's dog! But there's more to behavior than that.
When dealing with living beings, it's impossible to ignore feelings; psychoanalysis has understood this. Japanese Shinto researchers have also understood this, with their “Kyokan” (empathy, understanding). When they discovered that macaques, who wash potatoes from mother to child, had a culture, they were accused of “anthropomorphism” by their Western colleagues, admirers of Skinner.
It's thanks to all these pioneers who didn't or aren't afraid of ridicule, that the vision of the “Pavlovian” or “Skinnerian” dog has been called into question. Yes, dogs are intelligent, and they have feelings! And we finally know how the dog manages to drive us all crazy!

Frédérique J. Langenheim