I promised you this post, and I don’t want to leave you hanging – I want to talk to you about whether or not your dog know what it is doing is wrong, and I want to talk to you about it, because it is a statement that is often repeated by dog owners when they are attempting to convey just how naughty their dog is being.
I think that it is this look:
The “guilty dog look” that makes owners think that their dog knows hat it has done wrong. Research into dog emotions actually tell us that owners are particularly bad at reading their dogs expressions and whether they are indeed guilty or not (you can read about that study here: Dog Guilt), and the guilty look is actually a set of signals given off to appease another animal that is threatening them.
So the scenario can be that you come home from work – you get in the door to see that your loving pet has eaten your favourite pair of sneakers – you with one hand on your hip and the other pointing to the evidence before you exclaim, while staring at your dog “did you do this!” (as though there is a magical shoe eating fairy that possibly could have done it). In response to this your dogs nose heads down, their eyes head up, their tail and bottom curve slightly towards the stomach ( the doggy equivalent of covering your eyes when you are scared) – and slightly hunched they start moving to the corner of the room. Now you feel as though this look of guilt is empirical evidence that your dog feels bad – and you might for extra drama – grab the shoe while yelling “NO” at your dog. There that should teach ’em. Colour you surprised when 2 weeks later, the new pair of replacement sneakers are also devoured, after all your dog knows it was wrong to eat sneakers.
So why do we as people seem to forget that these wonderful intelligent creatures actually don’t speak our language? Is it because they seem so into us no matter what their comprehension of our actual attempts to communicate with them are? (your dog thinks your super cool) Is it because we as people actually find it hard to think of how other people feel or think, let alone to think of how another species feel or thinks. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have sympathy for one another – we certainly do – and we have sympathy for the animals in our lives most certainly, but it is very hard for us to truly understand the way our dog thinks and feels on a daily basis.
We are not ruled by our nose – we don’t sit out on the grass casually sniffing all the information that the world has to offer. As people scent is not our strongest sense so how could we possibly know what that canine world looks like? We don’t get super excited at the possibility of movement being something to chase, sniff or hunt. We don’t get so super excited at the prospect of our family coming home that we fail to be able to retain our senses enough to keep our feet on the floor. Up until recently (actually with some trainers still today) we said that dogs don’t feel emotions, despite the fact that they have an amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain. (To be fair to the trainers that state that dogs don’t have emotions, need to say this often to justify the use of discomfort and pain in training). It is very difficult to really place your self in the shoes of a dog and have a good guess at how they are feeling. This is the reason that trainers such as Jean Donaldson as us to focus on Observation (What is happening) and not Interpretation (Why is it happening) of behaviours.
When a trainer is observing the body language of a dog that an owner would generally interpret as guilty, there is really a wide gap between what we are seeing and what an owner believes that the dog is feeling. So if an owner is saying that their dog is guilty and a trainer is saying – actually these behaviours that you are describing are reflective of appeasement behaviours and more likely a result of the dog being anxious that you are upset with it than feeling bad – what we are actually asking is for the owner to look at their expectations of the dog, so that we can address the dogs behaviour.
Have you ever sent your partner, a friend of family member to get you lunch, and being particularly indecisive to the query “what would you like” and you have replied with “I don’t mind surprise me” – only to end up with the one thing on the menu that you would never have ordered in your whole life! There is a little part of the human brain that some how expects others to read our mind and anticipate our desires – a little thing we call expectations – and with great expectations generally comes greater disappointments.
When people get a dog, they get it with expectations – some set by our culture (to many Lassie mov1ies) that the dog will automatically understand us with out any real effort. That dogs are loyal and loving and finally that they will inherently know what it right or wrong after one good, said in the right tone “no”.
Of course when the “no” fails to show the results that we expect, the dog is now labelled – stubborn, wilful, disobedient, ignorant, untrainable – and then we break out the aversive training methods – spray bottles, coins in cans, metal chains, choke chains, prong collars, electric shock – as if these brilliantly adaptive, social animals that we have created to be our best friends, have no ability to learn through anything other than making their life uncomfortable and breaking their spirit.
But I digress, it is your expectation that your dog has figured life out, that is setting you up for failure. The idea that a dog has the same moral compass as people sets you up for failure. For a dog to know that chewing on your prize possessions is a no-no, means that the dog must understand that the shoe has value to you and that by destroying the shoe you will be upset by this, and now they must feel bad for their actions. In the dog world however the way that they know something that you own has value is that you actually hold onto it and perhaps guard it – if you walk away from it than it is community property until someone else is holding on to it. I think that most dogs the notion of valuing a pot plant for example would be not only unusual, but mostly pointless.
I have seen one of my dogs make a choice of a dog toy to chew on over a shoe – not because the shoe was the wrong thing to eat, but because we had created value in the toy. When there has been an item that saw an untimely demise – this is my issue for not taking the steps to manage the possible loss and not doing the training required to teach the better option.
How can your dog know it is wrong, when we have failed to teach them what is right? This is the crux of the matter – for the dog to know it has made a wrong choice it has to know what the right choice is and then ignored the right choice for the other option.
I guess this is the reason that I want you to re-think whether or not your dog actually know that it did something wrong – consider this my plea for the relationship between you and your dog. When your dog does something that you find less than desirable, as your brain is forming the words “she knows that she did ______ wrong” follow it up with – “or maybe we just have some more training that we need to do to prevent this from happening next time”.
