CLIVE WYNNE has long been fascinated by other creatures’ minds. He studied the behaviour of pigeons, rats and marsupials, but came to realise that he was more interested in how people and other species interact with each other. So he shifted his focus to dogs, the animal we have the longest and most intimate relationship with.
At that time, the idea was emerging that what makes dogs unique is their ability to read human gestures. It began with a simple experiment: a piece of food is hidden under one of two cups, but the dog doesn’t know which. A human then points at the cup with the food and the dog follows their gesture to it. Simple enough, right? Yet experiments showed that other species, even chimps, couldn’t do it. Dogs, it seemed, were geniuses at social cognition.
Yet as Wynne dug into this idea, it started to fall apart. Instead, he began to think that what set dogs apart was something much more woolly: love. As his new book Dog is Love details, finding rigorous ways to test this idea wasn’t simple.
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TO’C: What made you suspicious of “dog genius” — the idea that dogs have a special kind of intelligence for understanding humans?
CW: I don’t deny that our dogs are exquisitely sensitive to the things that we do. Certainly, dogs that live with people and are completely dependent on people for the fulfilment of all of their needs are sensitive to everything that a person does. My point is that this isn’t something special about dogs. It is something that comes about in any animal that is brought up by human beings in a state of complete dependence.
Tests with wolves helped convince you of this.
When we went to Wolf Park [a research facility in Indiana that houses wolves socialised to humans] in 2007, we were flabbergasted by what we found. We did these simple pointing tests, tests of social cognition, and the wolves were every bit as good at it as dogs. We realised that wolves hand-raised by people show sensitivity to what people are doing. The same has been found with bats raised by people, , goats and dolphins.
You found a way to demonstrate the difference in sociability between dogs and wolves.
The behaviour test is the simplest thing I’ve ever done and I still love it. You just have somebody sit in a chair and mark a 1-metre radius circle around the chair, then measure what portion of a 2-minute interval the animal chooses to spend inside the circle.
If you do this with your dog at home, assuming that you and the dog have been separated for a brief period beforehand, you’ll find that most dogs spend all of their time inside the circle. For wolves, even when it’s people who acted as their parents from when they were puppies, they’ll spend about 40 seconds inside. If it’s a stranger, no time at all.
Is there evidence that this difference in sociability is rooted in genetics?
Geneticist Bridgett vonHoldt [at Princeton University] looked through the dog genome and found areas that showed , which is to say impacts of domestication. There was one particular section of a dog chromosome where, in humans, the genes are implicated in Williams-Beuren syndrome. This syndrome has many impacts but one is exceptional gregariousness. From DNA samples taken from dogs and wolves, it turned out that three of the genes involved in Williams syndrome are correlated with this difference in the behaviour of dogs and wolves.
You mention experiments where dog owners pretend to have a heart attack or are pinned down by a bookshelf. Their dogs didn’t help!
I think those tests were too intellectually demanding. I mean, would you know what to do if somebody has a heart attack? What’s the dog supposed to do if a bookcase falls on you? It’s an absurdly demanding situation to put a dog into. But there are plenty of studies that show dogs will try to help. These are things people can easily do for themselves: pretend to cry and you will see dogs show all sorts of signs of distress. In new experiments that my student Joshua Van Bourg and I have been doing, we have people climb into a box that can be easily opened and then cry out in distress. Sure enough, the dogs come and open the box.
Can science really demonstrate that our dogs love us?
Whatever definition of love you come up with – in scientific study, we talk about affiliation, gregariousness, contact, concern about being separated from a loved one – your dog loves you. You know, my mother of all people is sceptical about this. She says it’s just because you feed them. So, is there space for scepticism? Yeah, sure. But if you are willing to accept that there is any individual in your life who loves you, then I think you have to accept that your dog loves you. By whatever measures we can use – hormones, brain waves, physiology, behaviour, whatever evidence you require to convince you that something loves you – your dog fulfils those criteria.
