Nigel: my family and other dogs by Monty Don

Author:Monty Don [Don, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2016-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

22. A Dog’s View

Dogs do not compare how they feel now with past experience. As humans all our sensations, emotions and health are set against some standard that will vary greatly both individually and with time and circumstance. The way we feel today is only really measurable in terms of how we felt yesterday. Inevitably we transfer this to our dogs and assume they are feeling happier than they were or better than they will. They are not. They are just being, here and now. This enables them both to glory in the essence of the present and ignore the relative problems by which we are still measuring happiness and health.

Although dogs learn all kinds of things from experience, guilt – the sense of having done something wrong that will result in retribution – is not one of them. I know this goes against all the apparent evidence of a dog cringing in guilt with a chewed shoe in its bed, but your dog is two steps ahead of you and has adopted a submissive posture to soften your wrath. Because it is reading your body language before you are even aware that you are sending any messages out. The dog is not sorry for having done the deed, and almost certainly not aware of what it is that you are cross about, but is nevertheless very sorry indeed that you are cross.

It follows from this that there is little point in punishing a dog for something that it has done in your absence. It will take the punishment and show a lot of contrition, but not really understand what it is being punished for. In order for the punishment to be effective and fair in controlling future misdemeanours, you have to catch them red-handed.

The upside of this lack of guilt is that I do believe any dog will respond directly to mood and tone as well as very subtle indications like a nod or wink or slight tilt of the head. This means that the relationship between a dog and human can be extraordinarily subtle and intimate on an emotional as well as a practical level. When we say that ‘my dog understands me’, in many ways it does. A dog’s emotional intelligence is far higher than that of many humans – but that does not mean that their intellectual brain is developed in the same way. They can know what you are thinking before you have verbalised it to yourself. They will know you are sad and share the burden of it, but never know why or what is making you feel that way.

This is of a piece with the extraordinary facility that dogs have to read signals from movement, tone, scent – especially scent – and mood. Dogs that are trained to respond to incipient epileptic fits are simply (or perhaps very complexly) reacting more sensitively than their owners.

Much more mundane, and probably more familiar to every dog owner, is the way that dogs seem to completely

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