and circles and geometric figures all over the floor of the lab. In certain studies, dogs and people need to be at certain fixed places. Marking up the floor eliminates a variable. The green tape is for the predictions study, the yellow tape is for the inhibitory control study, the worn-out blue tape is for a completed attention study, and the red tape is for the trust study.
The red tape is where we find Alice and Duane Putnam, who have driven for two hours to get here from Warren County, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. (Staffers here tell me that they get calls from dog lovers all over the world who want to bring their dogs to the lab to be part of the research. The lab tries to limit participants to no more than a three-hour drive, so the dog won’t be discombobulated by travel.) The Putnams are here with their dog, Tri, who looks like he’s part Rottweiler, part German shepherd, and a bit of something else. They believe he is the reincarnation of two of their previous dogs, thus the name. (Two plus himself equals three. Tri sounds better than Three.)
The Putnams are fascinated with their dog. They say he’s too smart for his own good. When no one is looking, he opens peanut butter jars and Vaseline jars by screwing off their lids. Then he eats the contents.
Today Tri the Vaseline thief is taking part in the study about trust. He has been here before because his “dog parents,” as they call them at the cognition center, like the idea that they’re contributing to the better understanding of dogs. Besides, it gets them off their ten acres in the rural corner of the state.
Researcher Jingzhi Tan, aka “Hippo,” has devised a study that investigates how trust is established and whether dogs differentiate between owners, a very friendly new acquaintance, and a complete stranger. His goal is actually to find out how humans become friendly and trusting, and he says a good way to study this is through dogs. Many of the studies at the center could end up with significant findings about people as well as dogs.
When I start observing (via a video monitor, so I don’t interfere with the goings-on), Tri is being lovingly petted by a new acquaintance—someone who works at the center. She is on the floor with him, making friends like this for about twenty minutes. The Putnams are thrilled Tri is letting a stranger handle him without balking. He’s usually not quite as social with people he doesn’t know.
Following the petting session, this new friend and a complete stranger will enter the room and take turns sitting next to bowls with food—one bowl will be near the person, one will be near an empty chair. If the dog thinks a person is risky, the idea is that he’d try to avoid that person, and would pick the food that’s farther away. Mary, an intern who helps coordinate dog visits here, is the stranger today. But Tri doesn’t seem to mind going near her. He is fine with his new friend, too. In other variations of this study, the new friend and stranger take turns pointing to food bowls and researchers see if the dog trusts one more than the other.
The study, and others like it, could eventually have implications for military dogs and how they come to trust their handlers, but that would be years down the road. What counts now in this room is that Tri, dog number 54 for this study, is done and that he has trusted more people than the Putnams would have thought. They proudly stroke his head and tell him, “You did good!”
Alice Putnam exhorts him: “Kissy Mama!” He doesn’t. “He’s not much of a kisser,” she explains. She says she knows her dog well.
But how well does her dog know her? Chances are, much better than she would suspect.
35
THE SMELL OF FEAR REVISITED
Alexandra Horowitz likens dogs to anthropologists: They study us. They observe us. They smell changes in our very chemistry. They learn to predict us. “They know us in ways our human partners sometimes do not,” she says.
I’ve heard a similar refrain dozens of times from handlers, particularly those who have deployed and spent almost every hour for months with their dogs: Their dogs know them better than their spouses or parents do.
Nearly every handler I interviewed, for instance, said that his dog can tell when he’s having a bad day. Most civilian dog lovers would say the same thing. But how can it be that a dog—who doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t know about problems with your bills or your boss or your in-laws—can somehow sense when things are amiss in your life?
It’s a phenomenon many military working dog handlers and instructors refer to as “dumping down the leash.” How you’re feeling and acting is observed by a dog, who will react to this information in different ways. A tense handler is likely to make a dog more tense. Likewise, if a handler is confident and not fearful, even after a loud explosion nearby, the idea is that a dog who is not already gun-shy will figure there’s nothing to worry about, with an instinctual logic along the lines of “My handler’s OK with it, and he’s the leader here, so it must be OK.”
Dogs are very sensitive to body language, so the least little tense movement—a change of gait, a slight hunching of shoulders—can be observed and interpreted as something being amiss. When we’re upset, our voices can go up slightly in frequency as well. Dogs get these nuances in ways most people don’t.
Masking strong feelings by acting like things are OK may not always work, either: It’s quite likely that dogs can smell fear, anxiety, even sadness, says Horowitz. The flight-or-fight hormone, adrenaline, is undetectable by our noses, but dogs can apparently smell it. In addition, fear or anxiety is often accompanied by increased heart rate and blood flow, which sends telltale body chemicals more quickly to the skin surface.
It makes for a trifecta of revelations to a dog: a bouquet of visual, auditory, and olfactory cues that makes dogs incredibly tuned in to how we’re feeling.
It’s comforting to think dogs have empathy and want to see the people they care about feel better when things are not quite right. This sort of action adds to their reputation as man’s best friend. But most scientists who study dog behavior say it’s more likely that dogs who seem to be acting in comforting, helpful ways simply want to restore order to their pack.
John Bradshaw explained it to me this way: “People are more important to dogs than anything else, and they rely on us to provide them with a stable and predictable social environment. If they sense that anything unusual is going on, that people are behaving in ways they don’t usually behave, they will do anything they can to restore the situation.
“Initially they’ll do things that have worked in similar situations in the past. They’re not trying to comfort anyone else, they’re trying to comfort themselves, but often one leads to the other. The dog picks up a toy and uses it to get someone’s attention, usually the person who’s behaving oddly (as far as the dog is concerned), but not necessarily. The dog is just craving attention—but if it does this in a “cute” way, then the effect may well be to calm that person down. That is in itself rewarding for the dog, so the next time a similar situation presents itself, the dog wheels out the same strategy. It doesn’t know why its behavior has the desired effect, it just knows that it works.”
It makes sense. And I’ve heard this from a few different dog experts. But I prefer my own interpretation of Jake’s actions when I’m having a rare bad day. He follows me around significantly more, making an extra effort to visit me at my writing desk. He usually leaves me alone here: This is my turf, distraction-free as possible, which is handy on tight deadlines. But on a tough day, Jake will inevitably scratch on my door for admittance. Happy to see a friendly face, I let him in and pet him for awhile. That alone makes me feel better. Then he usually curls up under my desk, falling asleep at my feet.
It may not be scientific, but it feels pretty good to think Jake has empathy. Sometimes he even seems to pick up on my likes and dislikes, favoring the people I enjoy but getting downright testy with one rude man we see sometimes at the park. Whenever we encounter him, this man snarls at me: “Better clean up after your dog, lady.” Apparently he does this to all people with dogs. I don’t take it personally, but it’s annoying.
The first couple of times this happened, I assured him of my poop-scooping vigilance, but now I just try to avoid him when I see him. But sometimes our paths will cross. When they do, Jake does something he doesn’t do with 99.9 percent of the people we meet on our walks. He barks. Just a few good deep bellows, followed by a long stare as if to say, “Leave us alone or else.” I don’t bother telling him to stop. He’ll join up with me within moments, and I quietly cheer him on with a “Good boy!” He may not be wearing one, but my feelings have clearly dumped down the leash.
Of course, Gunny Knight could have told you all about dogs’ senses long ago without any studies. “I don’t need all that scientific stuff. The best lab is right out here with the dogs, and especially over on deployment. That’s
