How A Dog Is Honest Toward's His Woner
Honesty Of Dog ! Watch a couple of dogs play, and you’ll probably see seemingly random gestures, lots of frenetic activity and a whole lot of energy being expended. But decades of research suggest that beneath this apparently frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality.
Take those two dogs. That yogalike pose is known as a “play bow,” and in the language of play it’s one of the most commonly used words. It’s an instigation and a clarification, a warning and an apology. Dogs often adopt this stance as an invitation to play right before they lunge at another dog; they also bow before they nip (“I’m going to bite you, but I’m just fooling around”) or after some particularly aggressive roughhousing (“Sorry I knocked you over; I didn’t mean it.”).
All of this suggests that dogs have a kind of moral code one long hidden to humans until a cognitive ethologist named Marc Bekoff began to crack it.
Even morality hints at something deeper, however. To enforce moral conduct, dogs must be able to experience a spectrum of emotions, from joy to indignation, guilt to jealousy. They must also be able to read these emotions in others, distinguishing accident from intent, honesty from deceit. And indeed, recent studies by other scientists have shown evidence of these abilities (confirming what many dog owners already feel about their pets).
Scientists have found, for example, that dogs trained to shake hands with humans will stop shaking if they notice that they aren’t being rewarded for the trick although a nearby dog is a sign, the researchers suggested, that dogs can sense inequity.
Other studies have revealed that dogs yawn when they see humans yawning and that they nuzzle and lick people who are crying; scientists consider both behaviors displays of empathy, a rarely documented trait in the animal kingdom. Dogs have even been shown to be pessimistic: When a group of canines in one study learned that a bowl placed on one side of the room contained a treat and a bowl on the other side contained nothing, some of the dogs just sat there when the empty bowl was placed in the center of the room; they figured it was empty and didn’t waste their time. These same dogs evinced what researchers said was a similar pessimistic attitude when their masters left for work: They were more likely to howl and tear up the couch when their owner disappeared, possibly because they didn’t believe their master would return.
Interestingly, dogs even outsmart chimpanzees on some theory-of-mind tests. When a researcher points at one of two cups, for example, dogs almost always run to the cup that is pointed to, a sign that they have intuited what the scientist was thinking — i.e., that the researcher was trying to show the dog something. Chimps, by contrast, have no idea what we mean when we point at something.
“Dogs have an amazing relationship with us, and Marc [Bekoff] has done a beautiful job helping us understand them,” says Brian Hare, a biological anthropologist at Duke University and one of the world’s foremost experts on canine cognition. “Play gives us a peek inside their heads and helps us understand how they became the species they are today.”
Hare, one of the first scientists to show that dogs could understand human pointing while chimpanzees could not, says that Bekoff’s studies add a new dimension to the canine personality: Dogs aren’t just smart, they’re also emotionally complex. “That’s why we can have such a deep relationship with them,” says Hare.
It’s also why studying dog play is so important, Bekoff says. It reveals far more than just the emotional lives of the animals involved. It could ultimately shed light on the evolution of human emotions and how we came to build a civilization based on laws and cooperation, empathy and altruism.
Play may seem a frivolous activity, but because it is not simply a survival reflex, it provides the best opportunity to explore who the animal really is, to peer perhaps into her soul. “When we study play in dogs,” Bekoff says, “we study ourselves.”
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