Almost human? Fido's feelings

Last week, researchers refreshed the debate on whether dogs can feel ‘human’ emotions, with news about an experiment with food bowls that might suggest optimistic or pessimistic attitudes among the dogs that took part. Anything that can help us to understand our dogs’ behaviour, especially if that behaviour is caused by anxiety or stress, must be a good thing. But I’m not sure measuring dogs against a human yardstick is the answer.

Since dogs tend to live closely with their owners in a domestic setting, we have many opportunities to relate to their emotional state, and like most dog owners I’m sure my dogs lead an emotionally rich life. Our dogs don’t share our language, so a lot of their emotional and thought processes are a mystery to us. The popularity of ‘dog whisperers’ like Cesar Millan, who seem to understand the language of dogs better than most of us, is testament to that mystery and our urge to unravel it. But does that mean we’re witnessing ‘human’ emotions in our dogs?

By suggesting that dogs might be optimistic or pessimistic, the research draws attention to the vast and subtle range of possible motivations for dog behaviour. In the experiment described, a food bowl was placed at ambiguous points between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ locations, where the dogs had grown used to seeing two other bowls – one containing food, the other empty. The ‘optimistic’ dogs ran to the ‘ambiguous’ bowl in search of food, while the ‘pessimistic’ ones didn’t.

I’m sure those dogs had their reasons, but I’m not sure the experiment proves that an optimistic or pessimistic outlook was the cause. If a dog didn’t look for food in the new bowl, perhaps it was confident that food would appear in the ‘positive’ location and saw no need to investigate. I also know from experience that some dogs are anxious about unfamiliar objects, and this might affect their inclination to explore a bowl in an unfamiliar place. Without being a part of the trial, I don’t know for sure what conditions it was conducted in, but surely it’s also possible that, with a highly developed sense of smell, some dogs already knew whether the bowl was worth investigating, even from a distance.

When Charlie was quadriplegic the vet warned me that, in order to recover, he had to ‘want’ to walk again. Whippets are very adaptable dogs, and one of the concerns was that, as such, he might accept a level of disability and get on with it as best he could – but if he had accepted a life of reduced mobility, would that make him pessimistic? Or would that level of acceptance and ‘getting on with it’ make him an optimist? I just don’t think it’s that easy to attribute optimism or pessimism to levels of acceptance.

This is not to say that dogs can’t be optimistic or pessimistic, as well as feeling a huge range of other emotions. I think that, over thousands of years of canine domestication, there’s been a long-running cultural exchange between humans and dogs – how else would we be able to communicate as well as we do? But as this study makes clear, there are gaps in that communication.

It would be arrogant to assume that dogs don’t feel any of the emotions we feel, but there’s also arrogance in the assumption that canine emotions must mirror those of humans. Perhaps the root of the riddle lies in the fact that, as humans, we only have our human emotions to refer to in our relationships with animals – it’s an imperfect measure, but it’s all we’ve got.

Out of the office

This summer, I cut my ties with office life and struck out as a freelance writer.

I’ve got two main obsessions - dogs and words. I'm lucky to be able to earn my living by writing, and my ideal job would be to do that while hanging around with my dogs. Freelancing is something I’ve always wanted to do, but leaving office life means making a scary leap into an uncertain world. In the end, as I was preparing to make that jump, I was pushed by my dog.

In June this year, Charlie the whippet (that's him in the picture) collapsed in the garden and lost the use of his legs. We took him straight to the emergency vet who confirmed him as quadriplegic, probably due to a neurological problem in his neck. Charlie was referred to another vet for an MRI scan the next day, revealing a prolapsed disc and some other conditions in the vertebrae of his neck, which had caused damage to his spinal cord. He had major surgery to remove the tops of his vertebrae and decompress the cord.

Charlie refused to eat for most of the six days he spent in animal hospital. Whippets are already naturally slender dogs, so Charlie was a worrying sight, but luckily he started eating properly again as soon as we got him home from the hospital. Then we began a long process of rehabilitation. Charlie had to reroute his neural pathways so he could first roll upright, then stand up and learn to walk again. I had to take him into the garden and hold him upright whenever he wanted to go to the toilet. He’s nearly 12 years old, so as the vets constantly reminded me, his recovery would be slow - in fact, it took over three months of hard work.

At the time, I worked as a writer for a professional membership organisation, and although they were very understanding about me working from home so I could look after Charlie, they wanted me back in the office full-time as soon as possible. But I realised I didn’t want to go back to full-time office work at all. In fact, while it was a job many people would be happy to have, it had already become something of a dead end for me. I had no ambition to gain any kind of a promotion in an office environment. All I wanted to do was earn a living from writing while spending time with my dogs, and suddenly I couldn’t find one good reason why I shouldn’t do that.

So I handed in my notice, and here I am now. Charlie’s story has a happy ending because he’s walking – even running – again, albeit a bit lopsided. But it’s also meant a happy beginning because it’s prompted me to make what I think is one of the best decisions of my life, both as a professional and as a dog-owner.

For all the appeal of freelancing, it does lack the security of a full-time job. It's early days yet and I know there'll be a lot of hard work involved, but so far it hasn't felt that way. And it’s a different world, being at home while everyone else is at work. You get the chance to see a whole other side of the place you live in.

I’ll tell you about how we get on, and many other things, in future posts.