What are these things called dogs?

"We must not--and incidentally we can't--become beasts. But we can be with a beast. It is personal enough to give with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has three legs in nature's world and one in ours.... Man with dog closes a gap in the universe."                      --C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Sometimes I look at my dogs and wonder, what is going on inside their crazy heads? And sometimes they look at me the same way. Or so it seems.

Recently I was working on a project about the great animal behaviorist and autism spokeswoman Temple Grandin, and got some interesting insights from her book Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. I find her work very refreshing; she loves and cares deeply for all animals, but maintains no squishy, silly sentiment about them that would turn affection into bad research. Note that she made her name by designing better and more humane slaughterhouses. Very interesting person.

The book I mention -- among several I consulted for this project -- has a chapter specifically about dogs, and I thought, Aha! Here's where I finally find out what's going on. I didn't want any nonsense about raising dogs as children, because while dogs are surprisingly human, they aren't actually human, and what makes people happy may not make them happy.

The first thing her chapter blew up for me was the myth about dog ancestors, the wolves. We pretty much all have the vision of the ferocious wolf pack, the males fighting one another for dominance, but it turns out that's only how wolves behave in captivity. In the wild, outside of what she calls the enforced pack, wolves tend to run in family units -- mom and dad, maybe a maiden aunt (yes, really), and the pups, who go out on their own after a couple of years. Wolves are predators, so they don't need to be in a herd; the pack or extended family is not their usual state. In this regard wolves are actually more human than we thought, or at least they were before we started attacking our own families as a society. But that's another story.

This raises the question -- are dogs really kids? No, but they may consider themselves to be, sort of. Research she cites shows that dogs exhibit different levels of wolf behaviors, in some ways indicating that dogs are behaviorally immature wolves. And if immature, they need parents. "Practically every dog-training book you look at tells owners that the single most important thing they need to do is establish themselves as the pack alpha," Grandin writes, "But if dogs are wolves, and wolves don't have pack leaders, why do dogs need a pack leader?"

Not that this means we can let Fluffy rule the roost. "Dog owners do need to be the leader, but not because a dog will become the alpha if they don't. Dog owners need to be the leader the same way parents do. Good parents set limits and teach their kids how to behave nicely, and that's exactly what dogs need, too." So while there's no goo-goo stuff about dog babies and "pet parents" in Grandin's book, the similarities of child- and dog-rearing are shown to have some basis in fact. Take THAT, Gaffigan!

The main difficulties I note about the "pet parent" nomenclature are that A) people who would make fine parents to actual children wind up spending their love, time, and energy on animals, which are not built for the kind of doting and investment that humans need, and B) people who consider themselves "pet parents" are more likely to spoil the pet rotten or to infantilize it and prevent it from being a happy, healthy animal. Or both.

But let's get one thing straight about animals, as Grandin does -- wolves may not be the insane man-eaters we tend to imagine, but they have not spent millennia of breeding learning to be our friends, and they do NOT make good pets. Neither do bears, crocodiles, rattlesnakes, chimpanzees, mountain lions, moose... unlike the TV Tropes, not everything is a dog! Not all animals are domesticated! This isn't something Grandin dwells on in this chapter of the book, but it's always worth a mention.

There's a lot more of interest to me in her section on dogs, and I want to address another concern on this tomorrow. What surprises me is that, though this 2009 book is a best-seller, so many of the ideas she argues against are still dominant in the dog- and wolf-behaviorist worlds.

In a way I think Grandin is a victim of her own success. She (with the help of her mother and some wonderful teachers) was able to overcome the limitations of pretty severe autism, a condition that gave her deep insight into animal behavior, and she gives a lot of talks on autism. But that's made her the "celebrity autism person," someone to be admired but not someone whose professional work commands attention (outside a limited field). And that's not her fault, but it's too bad. It's our fault for the way we tag celebrities. I wonder if it's frustrating for her.

Anyway, we'll revisit this book tomorrow. It's dog week! Until Friday.