The Dog's Mind

Bruce Fogle

Description

"Quite simply this is an excellent book. It is well-written, with snatches of dry humour. It should be mandatory reading for anybody who keeps a dog or has intentions of so doing."
-R. W. F. Poole, Daily Telegraph

How do dogs perceive the world about them? How do they see, hear, learn, relate to their owners? How large are their brains, what is their emotional makeup? Why do they suffer from stress and how can it be coped with? Over the last few years a substantial body of knowledge has been built up about the psychology of dog behavior. Combining more than twenty years of practical experience as a veterinary clinician with a personal knowledge and understanding of the latest international research, Dr. Bruce Fogle has written the most inclusive and relevant book on how the canine mind works.

Sujets

• Veterinary Medicine
• Medical
• Médecine
• Bruce Fogle

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 1992
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620457894
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE DOG'S MIND
Also by Bruce Fogle
Interrelations Between People and Pets
Pets and Their People
Games Pets Play
Paws Across London
Know Your Dog
Know Your Cat
The Complete Dog Care Manual
The Complete Dog Training Manual
The Cat's Mind
101 Questions Your Dog Would Ask its Vet
101 Questions Your Cat Would Ask its Vet
First Aid for Dogs
First Aid for Cats
The Secret Life of Dog Owners
The Secret Life of Cat Owners
Encyclopedia of the Dog
THE DOG'S MIND
Understanding Your Dog's Behavior
Bruce Fogle, D.V.M., M.R.C.V.S.
Illustrations by Anne B. Wilson
HOWELL BOOK HOUSE -->
For Jules and her good buddies

Copyright 1990 by Dr Bruce Fogle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Howell Book House Wiley Publishing, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fogle, Bruce.
The dog's mind: understanding your dog's behavior/Bruce Fogle.-1st pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87-605513-7
1. Dogs-Behavior. 2. Dogs-Psychology. 1. Title
[SF433.F64 1992]
636.7-dc20
91-33711
CIP
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com .
First paperback edition 1992
8
Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: The Anatomy and Physiology of the Dog's Mind Chapter One The Genetics of the Mind Chapter Two The Brain Chapter Three The Senses Chapter Four Hormones and the Mind Chapter Five Communication PART TWO: The Psychology of the Dog's Mind Chapter Six Early Learning - Maternal and Peer Imprinting Chapter Seven Later Learning - Our Influence on the Developing Mind Chapter Eight Social Behaviour - Aggression Chapter Nine Social Behaviour - Eating, Exploring, Eliminating Chapter Ten Social Behaviour - Fears, Phobias, Excitement Chapter Eleven Social Behaviour - Pack, Sex, Maternal Activity Chapter Twelve Breed Differences in Behaviour Chapter Thirteen The Mind of the Ill and the Elderly Appendix Bibliography
Acknowledgements

A personal thank you to my head nurse and people-minder, Jenny Berry. I had worried that an intermittent absence from my veterinary clinic while researching and then writing this book might have had a deleterious effect on the practice. I should have known better. Thanks too, to Roger Abrantes in Denmark for sending me a copy of his book Hundesprog and for his permission for Anne Wilson to use his illustrations as inspiration for some of the marvellous sketches that follow.
Introduction

There are millions of species of life that exist on earth today but of all of these the dog is almost certainly the animal that is closest to our hearts. Dogs are, of course, a fact of life in certain cultures, primarily European, American and Japanese. In these cultures we have lived with them for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. We have allowed them to share our dens, our food, our companionship. Of all the hundreds of millions of species that have ever existed on this earth, surely the dog has become the one we should understand the best.
Yet we have a problem for there is something about dogs that makes us irrational. Ask a cat owner what he enjoys about his cat and more likely than not he'll tell you that he enjoys observing the natural quality of its behaviour. Cat owners - cat LOVERS - are observers and draw a clear line between themselves and their pets. In fact we do so with all species of animals yet, for some reason, we blur it with dogs. 'She's my best friend', I'm told almost daily in veterinary practice. 'I love her as much as my children', pet owners will confide. 'He's part of the family', I universally hear. And let me lay MY cards on the table now. I'm also one of the 89 per cent who talk to their dogs and think of them as members of the family, but in doing so, in creating little furry people out of our canine companions, we lose the ability to understand them as they really are. We think of their behaviour in human terms.
Just as often as I'm told of the love and devotion my clients have for their pets, so too do I hear of the fidelity, love and everlasting affection that my patients have for their owners. And it's not just average pet owners who think this way either. 'Every dog that ever followed its master (gives) an immeasureable sum of love and fidelity,' wrote the Nobel prize winning ethologist Professor Konrad Lorenz in his book Man and his Dog.
Konrad Lorenz, in attributing the feeling of 'love' to dogs, was talking about how they feel - about what goes on in a dog's mind, but exactly what is the mind? Can a dog really think? Do dogs have a culture? What is canine intelligence and how should it be defined? These are quite basic questions that I feel I should try to explain now so that you will know what terms of reference I'm using.
First of all, I should explain that I have quite intentionally not called this book, 'The Dog's Brain' or 'The Dog's Behaviour'. It's called 'The Dog's Mind' for several reasons. The brain is simply one of the body's organs - a brilliant and poorly understood organ. In each brain there are billions of cells all with specific functions. In my dog's brain there are more cells than there have ever been dogs! These cells produce their own drugs such as the endorphins, the body's natural pain killers, and these drugs, in turn, affect the 'mind'. The word 'brainy' also denotes intelligence and we naturally assume that we are superior to all other animals because we're the 'brainiest' animals around. That's one of our little conceits. Our brains are certainly different to other animals and have allowed us to become the dominant species on earth, but to argue that our brains are superior is the same as arguing that a cow's intestines are superior to ours because they can digest cellulose fibre.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote an article called, What is it like to be a bat? in which he discussed the philosophical problems of imagining what it is like to be what you are not.
He depicted the bat's ability to echo locate, something that is so alien to our abilities that it's almost impossible to understand, and described how difficult it is for us to imagine that another animal is actually BETTER than we are at something. Nagel's argument applies to the dog too. The dog's brain has an ability to interpret scents and smells that is infinitely different to ours. You could say 'superior' but that is simply a value judgement. They simply can't be compared.
I've avoided the word 'behaviour' in the title for similar reasons although I will in fact use it a great deal in what I describe in the forthcoming chapters. 'Behaviour' brings to mind rats in Skinner boxes, conditioned to press buttons to get food rewards. When the Russian Pavlov conducted his original experiments on dogs, the experiments where, for example, he discovered that a dog could be made to salivate at the sound of a ringing bell if that dog had been trained to associate the sound of the bell with food, he too had a problem in describing what was going on in what part of the dog's body. Other languages don't necessarily have words that are synonymous with the English word 'mind'. In French, 't te', 'intelligence' or 'esprit' only come close. Pavlov initially used the Russian word 'ym' but later changed this to a phrase which in translation means 'higher nervous activity'.
A further problem with using the word 'mind' is its association in Christian culture with the soul. A few years ago, I conducted a survey of British veterinarians concerning their attitude to pet death. One out of five practising veterinarians believed that a dog has a soul and an afterlife. (Two out of five believed that humans have souls and an afterlife.) When the same survey was applied a year later to practising veterinarians in Japan (where the Buddhist and Shintoist traditions allow for an afterlife for all living things), every single veterinarian surveyed believed that dogs have souls and an afterlife!
I've avoided all of this and used the word 'mind' intentionally. To me, the dog's mind is a function of its brain, of evolution, of genetics, of the senses, of hormones and of learning and I will discuss each influence in its own chapter. Because learned behaviour is what we have most control over I will devote several chapters to this influence on the dog's mind.
The mind can feel elation or depression, anger, sadness, thirst or hunger, pain or exhilaration. Dogs are sentient beings, aware of their own personalities. They have minds as much as we have and that's why I've used the word, even if its use waves like a red flag at some people. This isn't a dictionary definition but is rather my own definition and is based on the difference between objectivity and subjectivity which I feel also needs an explanation.
In 1953, on Koshima Island in Japan, a monkey named Imo discovered that she could rub the mud off the sweet potatoes she had been given if she washed them underwater. This behaviour, potato washing, soon spread to her playmates, her mother and aunts and later to her own infants who also copied her. By the 1960s, over half of the entire troop of Koshima monkeys washed their potatoes before eating them.
Imo's activities were, of course, observed by scientists who were interested in monkey behaviour but when they published their observations, they were severely criticized by Western animal behaviourists for being too anthropomorphic, for attributing too much human behaviour to their monkeys.
Classically, the objective scientist has