Inside of a Dog

I just read this book about canine senses, cognition and behavior by a Columbia University cognitive scientist and dog lover. She covers what researchers know about the canine umwelt, and is reassuring about current research methods (and mercifully brief about those of the past). She's a lively writer and scatters little drawings of dogs throughout -- you don't find out until the end that they're her drawings of her dogs. It's a very thoughtful and lovable book.

Here's a passage, from page 181, about why dogs, due to flawed experimental design that attracts their attention to the experimenter, often "fail" intelligence tests that less intelligent species succeed at:

By standard intelligence tests, the dogs have failed at the puzzle. I believe, by contrast, that they have succeeded magnificently. The have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool. Dogs have learned this -- and they see us as fine general-purpose tools, too: useful for protection, acquiring food, providing companionship. . . . In the folk psychology of dogs, we humans are brilliant enough to extract hopelessly tangled leashes from around trees; we can magically transport them to higher or lower heights as needed; we can conjure up an endless bounty of foodstuffs that things to chew. How savvy we are in dogs' eyes. It's a clever strategy to turn to us after all.

I'm convinced that a significant part of Fu's thunder phobia (when we're around -- we have some evidence that he's calmer when we're not) is his conviction that we could make the noise stop if he only showed us his distress in just the right way.