If dogs are pretending to love us, then they are damn good actors.
I have some issues with Masson’s work. I would have loved it if he’d included a description a dog preying on some animal in Dogs Never Lie About Love.
He covers every part of their natural behavior but that one. If you see a dog acting as a predator, it can be a moving experience. It can also be terrifying if you’ve deluded yourself into believing that they don’t have these instincts. For someone like Masson, I think he would find it rather disconcerting.
He’s also one of those animal rights people who talks about these issues in a way that reminds me of how the Christian right talks about abortion.
The fact that he’s on the left makes no difference. It puts me off.
I think a better discussion of the issues can be found here.
That said, I do believe most birds and mammals do have emotions and can experience pain and suffering. And all of them will experience a certain level of suffering at they live their lives.
Most wild animals die horrific deaths. A hunter’s bullet causes far less suffering than the other “natural” ways these animals die.
We have to accept that this world is partially maintained through death. Despite our intellect, man has not created a world that transcends the simple realities that all things die and in most deaths, there will be some pain and suffering.
We can either deny these realities, or we can work to mitigate them.
And that’s where our focus should be.
***
Why is it that dogs are able to form bonds with species other than humans?
It has more to do with agriculture than the fact that dogs just like making friends.
When we domesticated other species, we culled those dogs that tried to eat our sheep and goats.
Those dogs that formed bonds with our sheep and goats and protected them from predators were given special treatment.
Charles Darwin noticed that most Western dogs learned very quickly to leave domesticated stock alone, while dogs from South Pacific and Australia could never be trusted around sheep. Darwin, like Masson, believed that it was the love of man that caused Western domestic dogs to leave stock alone.
I think it’s more likely the result of this early selective breeding.
Of course, Western dogs are not universally safe with stock, but I have known some fierce hunting dogs that learned to leave pet ducks alone.
When I was growing up, a predatory Norwegian elkhound and even more predatory farm collie learned to never touch my pet Muscovy ducks. The elkhound did kill one duck because it was eating out of dog’s food bowl. The elkhound wanted to discipline the duck for breaking pack rules, and the duck didn’t survive the punishment.
I also know of Walker coonhounds that can kill a raccoon in less than a minute but think the world of their owner’s cats.
Somewhere in domesticating the dog, the animal has evolved an ability to recognize which animals are prey and which animals it should befriend. For a predatory animal, that is quite an accomplishment.
I think some study is needed on this aspect of dog behavior. Maybe this will fit in nicely with the theory that dogs are very good at following rules. Rule following in dogs is being extensively studied in Hungary at Eotvos Lorand University’s Department of Ethology.
If my dog caught a squirrel, my reaction would be the exact opposite. I’d be more like “Hell, yes!”
I don’t know why people have issues with dogs engaging in predatory behavior. Of course, these are very often the same people who have issues with people engaging in similar behavior. (They usually don’t have a problem with cats doing this, and cats do it even more often and with greater efficiency than any dog.)
I mean this is a Weimaraner, a hunter, pointer, and retriever (HPR).
Oh, I forgot.
Miley did catch a huge fox squirrel a few weeks ago. It was sitting out in the pasture and was too far from any tree to escape. She caught it, but because she is a retriever, she couldn’t actually kill it. So she carried it around alive in her mouth, which gave the big squirrel an opportunity to fight back.
And it fought back.
And it took refuge in a tree.
Willie and his squirrels.
Willie is a young Jack Russell from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who recently spent a weekend at my grandpa’s house in very rural West Virginia. Willie lives with my aunt and uncle, and he’s very smart. He is dead serious about retrieving things, which is more than I can say about Miley.
Like many of his breed, he is likes to chase small furry things. At home, Willie and Madeleine, the other Jack Russell who lives at that household, can be launched with the mere mention of the word squirrel. They take squirrel hunting very seriously. It is as if it is their main duty to keep the bushy-tailed rats off the lawn.
However, they are contained in a fenced yard, allowing the squirrels an easy escape from the jaws of these small brown and white wolves. In all the years they have been chasing squirrels in North Carolina, they have caught only one squirrel. (Of course, dogs have a hard time catching squirrels, whether they are fenced in or not.)
As I have mentioned earlier, West Virginia’s trees have not produced enough mast this year to feed the large numbers of squirrels, turkeys, and white-tailed deer.
My grandpa has taken pity upon the squirrels, in part because he actually wants to keep their numbers high for next year. He hunts squirrels, and he knows that if they squirrels go into winter without a bounty of nuts from the fall, there will be fewer squirrels next year.
So he has set up a massive squirrel feeding operation. One of his feeders is on the deck in full view of his sliding glass door. Here, the vast hordes of fox squirrels and normal and melanistic grays fight over the corn in the feeder all day long. It is quite entertaining to watch.
And when Willie and Maddy were at his house a few weekends ago, they very much agreed. They would stand by the sliding glass door like wolves staring down a herd of caribou. Maddy would quiver all the way down to the tip of her docked tail, and Willie would stand like a pointer with one foot raised. When the sliding glass door was opened the first time, Maddy ran right off the deck after the squirrels, and Willy chased them out of the yard and across the old pasture into the woods. This was Jack Russell heaven.
Getting to watch and chase so many squirrels really had an effect on Willie.
When they returned home, Willie went to his toy box and took out three of his stuffed toys.
Now, Willie has a collection of toys. He has more stuffed toys than many children do. He had a wide selection to choose from.
So it was very interesting that Willie picked out the three stuffed squirrels that were in his box.
Willie was expressing himself with his toys. I don’t think it takes a genius to recognize this.
He was showing his people that he really liked watching and chasing those large numbers of squirrels all weekend.
And it is really quite remarkable. He was using objects that represented the animals that he saw. It is obvious that he knows those stuffed squirrels aren’t the same as the real ones, but he does know that they somehow represent the real ones.
***
Willie is not the only dog to use toys to represent things.
I saw this program on the National Geographic Channel a few years ago. This doberman had been abandoned and had trouble trusting people. He eventually came out of his shell, but what was really interesting is that he also used toys to express himself:
Tool use is not very common in non-human animals, snd in many cases, it is unclear whether the animals are using tools as the result of inherited motor patterns or are actually using learning too use through observation or reasoning.
Chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans have been seen using tools as a result of their novel intelligence. They clearly learn tool use through observation.
Now, I think that is the latter type of tool use that we’re seeing here. This dog probably watched children use that raft and then decided to use it to fetch without getting too wet.
This is actually a more sophisitcated and unusual behavior than you might suspect.
