8 December

Dinner Table Talk: Do Animals Think?

by Jon Katz

Maria and I have been talking a lot lately about what animals think and how they think, and what they know and what they know.

I’ve been astonished and excited to see Maria grow into an animal communicator and observer in the past few years.

She is a born naturalist. We talk and argue all the time about animals and what they think, and that enriches our dinner table even more.

Since she has taken over our sheep and I – with no herding dogs – have retreated, she has been able to do things with the sheep that I never could do or even tried to do.

I’ve seen and written about her communications with the donkeys for years, and now, a new and exciting chapter with Maria and her sheep.

She will be writing about it on her blog, but our dinner talk tonight inspired me to write about what I think animals – especially dogs – really think.

If I am honest about it, the answer is I really don’t know.  Nobody knows, except some savvy (and rich) book writers who claim to know.  Cesar Milan thinks he knows.

I’m afraid I can’t fake it. There is very little that I know about this, for all that I have studied it.

I think I land on the slightly conservative side. Dogs are the animals I know best and have studied the most. I must have read 100 books about what dogs think, and I am watching my dogs all the time for clues and re-reading my books and studies.

I subscribed mostly to the mainstream biologists’ position about animals and thought. We are far from understanding the difference between instinct and intelligence. Dogs have astonishing instincts – sight, sound, smell so far beyond us – and people often confuse instincts with intellect.

(We do this with elephants too. There are a million stories about how elephants mourn their dead, but very few about how those instincts – not emotions –  help them survive.)

The biologists I like and trust all say the same thing. With dogs, we can only really know what we see – that is how their instincts and reactions work.

We have little understanding of what they feel, mostly because we can’t see it or really study it. And we have no language with which to hear their testimony.

How could we know?

The trend in science and biology is to conclude and observe that dogs are much smarter than we ever thought they were. Every year, I read that border collies are learning more words – we’re up to 1,500 words now.

In the years I’ve lived with my incredibly smart border collies, I’ve never figure out why they need to know that many words: “get the sheep, and that’ll do” or “get the hell over here” are all the words my border collies have needed to know.

In my view, there is a reluctance to accept dogs as dogs; to me, they are basically simple creatures.  They have no need to be brilliant in human terms or think like we do.

What is so wonderful about dogs is that they don’t think like humans, not that they do. They don’t pin labels on each other, argue on Facebook, or sue other dogs.

Zinnia is smart about what she needs to be smart about – hanging out with me, chasing balls and eating, eating, eating. She has no interest or intellectual acuity beyond that that I can see.

Rose, the smartest dog I have ever had, did some awfully dumb things, like try to herd giant plow trucks, thinking they were giant sheep.

Would any human do that?

I’m not entirely sure it’s healthy for dogs to be studied in so intense away.  Often, we are coming to see them as spiritualists, psychics, sickness spotters.

I’ve never seen a scientific study that concludes that dogs are dumber than we thought.

And I meet people almost every day who are quick to tell me what dogs are thinking, even when they do not think what people say and believe they think.

Almost every person who pets my dogs tells me their dogs will be jealous when they get home. But dogs are delighted when people bring home the smell of other dogs; it’s like breaking news to them, they imagine the dog from its smell, the farthest thing from envy.

And envy is a human emotion; dogs are too smart for it. We need them to be jealous, they don’t need to be jealous.

People are quick to tell me their dogs are aggressive because they almost certainly were abused. In many cases, these are assumptions.

Dogs can’t tell us how they were abused, let alone how they feel about it. And it’s a lot easier to write off behavioral problems as abuse rather than train the dog to grow out of them.

Maria is working on a different track. I’ve seen the remarkable things she has already accomplished with the sheep and the new lambs.

She is a born naturalist, calm and confident and clear around the sheep. She gets them to do almost everything Red got them to do. I had no idea. As she has grown in confidence, so has her ability to talk to animals.

For me, the dogs were a block to understanding sheep. Without that barrier, she is coming to understand them in a completely different way.

I argue that she is getting smarter, not them.

My training ideas have expanded and taken me more deeply into this issue of what dogs might be thinking. I know that they can’t possibly be thinking in our language because they don’t have our language.

Understanding their thought process requires a whole new way of thinking about them—step one. We don’t know squat about what they are thinking.

Step two. They don’t use our words or have our feelings; they have their own.

I hope you won’t try to tell me in your own words what your dog is thinking. Because the key to understanding them is accepting what we don’t know, not in pretending to know what we don’t.

Dogs are the animal world’s great manipulators – they trick us into thinking we love them madly, and in so doing, become the most cosseted, loved, and best-treated animals on the earth.

Darwin would claim that is an acquired survival instinct, not true love. I agree. Dogs know how to get into the house in winter. Raccoons have no idea. Dogs know how to play us.

Understanding them means understanding ourselves, and what it is we want and need from them. It also means learning about how tails move, how smells carry messages, how they can hear things ten times farther away than we can.

A dog on a trail sees 1,000 Netflix movies in color.

We can barely see the end of our noses.

I am moved to start writing about this again; I’ve got a great stack of new studies and books to pore through. I hope you’ll join me on this trip.

7 Comments

  1. Jon…
    This is a great subject; I will be looking for your updates.

    We haven’t had working dogs, but many house pets over (50) years. I don’t know what to call it, but they grasped an essential form of human-dog communication. Their actions told us when they were hungry, or when they needed to go to the yard. Our current pet dog knows when it’s time for her walk, and reminds me vigorously.

    She also knows when we want something from her. Almost of our pets became housebroken. I believe our current pet recognizes the sound of her name, and the sound of “NO”, although she doesn’t always heed it. I’m convinced that is some form of purposeful behavior, rather than ignorance.

    Sensory-wise, she has me beat. When we walk, she will detect nearby coyotes much sooner than I. I’m not sure what senses she is using. Even though she is older now, she still often detects someone at the door before I do.

    I don’t know whether any of this relates to intelligence. That seems more of a human definition issue. While we might relate intelligence to language, dogs seem to know what they need to know to survive. (They’ve been at it for a while.) I remember Frieda, who survived a winter in the woods.

  2. I could not agree more, Jon. For most of my seventy years I’ve been around dogs, both professionally, and as a person responsible for giving my own a good life. I have to honestly say there’s much I know, but there’s much more I don’t know about how they think. I observe their behavior all the time because I’ve always found it fascinating and at times unexplainable. When people see me with my Border Collie they always comment on how intelligent the breed is. Well I suppose they never had one because they can do some pretty stupid things! I’m not into all the tricks, baubles and bells the dog world has turned into. I call my approach to training dogs organic. I’ve read numerous books about dogs and yours are at the top of my list because of your honesty and humbleness and respect for these wonderful creatures we are blessed to be able to share our lives with. You’ve been a good mentor. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, much appreciated.

  3. I can’t wait to read what you write about this, Jon. My first exposure to you was your book about Orson. I’ve been a fan ever since. I get grind-y when I hear people anthropomorphize ANY animal. It’s a disservice to the animal but I get why they do it. People crave connection – and when they don’t have it with people, they need it from their animals. That’s not to say we cannot BE connected to animals, we certainly can. That connection is real. I just want the kind of connection that doesn’t demand them to be anything but what they are. This is how we mess up human connection; by demanding others to be something so WE can feel better. That’s true selfishness.

  4. I’m looking forward to your posts about dogs. I’ve lived with dogs most of my life and, especially during the pandemic, I can’t imagine living without at least one. My Airedale is my only companion most of the time and she helps keep me sane. But I definitely don’t think of her as having much in the way of brains in the same sense as humans do. She is motivated by tennis balls, food, rides in the car, and things to chew up. She came to me with a few manners already, thank goodness, and I have worked on training her so that she is pretty livable most of the time, but she can do some really dumb things! I marvel at her incredible sense of smell. If I do a bad throw of her tennis ball and it goes somewhere unexpected, she uses her nose to search for it and always finds it. I love watching her do a search pattern sniffing for it.

  5. This sounds crazy but here goes. My parents had three dogs in their later years. And each Christmas after my kids and the adults opened their presents the dogs were told it was okay to get theirs. They each went to the tree and got their labeled package and opened it. Please don’t call the men in white suits but this is true. My parents inherited my dog because I had to move to an apartment (difficult divorce). I lived hours from my folks but my Mom (an extremely smart and able woman) always claimed the dog would be at the window waiting for me an hour before I arrived. How did that dog know?

  6. Your thought provoking piece was one of reality. I have been reading all of your books ever since Julius and Stanley were a part of your life. I have always learned something from you because of your honest and open approach to how you have raised your dogs. I have had seven dogs in the last forty five years. Each has lived a relatively long life. My mixed breed Sheltie made it to 16 1/2. She was fun and smart as a whip. All of my dogs have been Shelties, except for my son’s Lab who came to live with us when he was about six. Each one of them had a distinct personality and unique behaviors. Three of the Shelties had Cushing’s Disease which became increasing more serious with each new Sheltie. Finally one of my vets suggested that I get no more Shelties because everyone that she saw had cases that were more difficult than the previous ones. I have used the same vets for over thirty years and I trust them explicitly. Although I hated giving up Shelties, I moved on to a small Labradoodle who is smart as a whip. He is an observer and never misses anything. Every time I leave the dinner table he is right behind me sneaking something like a paper napkin, some crumbs or today, going for my toast. It isn’t that he doesn’t know that is not the thing to do; it is that he watches and waits. My twelve year old Sheltie (the last one I shall have) has inoperable bladder cancer, but at this point is doing okay. He and the “doodle” get along which is nice to see. Oliver, the Labradoodle, was sitting on the sofa with me one evening and I was quite upset about something. All of a sudden he moved over to me and put his head on my lap.
    It is as if he knew. I don’t know why dogs do what they do. I never tried to analyze. I do think, however, they are observers and creatures of habit. Whatever they are, they are wonderful and I couldn’t live my life without one.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Email SignupFree Email Signup