Dogs Are All About Love
By Clive D.L. Wynne
I don’t know what possessed us to get a dog. We were about as far from an animal-obsessed family as you could hope to find. At various times, we had shared our home on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, with a cat, a tortoise and some guinea pigs, but none of these beasts had engaged us with much intensity. We were a family not easily moved to enthusiasm or really any form of emotional expression. I was about 14 years old. My younger brother, Jeremy, was around 12 and our oldest brother, Terry, had already left for college.
I remember the dog being Jeremy’s idea, but that doesn’t match his recollections. He says the plan was mine. We all agree our father was dead-set against it.
In any case, my mother and I drove off to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) on strict instructions from the others that we were just to look and report back. No acquisition was to be made without full consultation.
The RSPCA had a simple structure: a single row of about a dozen kennels. I don’t remember any of the other dogs. There was just this one, Benji, who was clearly our dog. I wish I could say how he convinced us of this. All I remember is that we had to take this dog home, despite the family edict that we could only look, not purchase, until all vetoes had been put aside.
“Benji loved us more intensely than anyone in our little house had ever expressed their love before.”
If so much of Benji’s entry into our lives is lost in the mist of failing memories, one thing remains indelible in all of our recollections: Benji loved us to pieces. He loved us more intensely than anyone in our little house had ever expressed their love before.
When Jeremy and I came home from school each day, we would plonk ourselves down on the sofa. Hearing our return, Benji would race in from wherever he had been resting. Gaining speed as he galloped across the living room, he would launch himself into the air, landing on our heads in an orgy of licking and tail wagging. Nobody in our family had ever behaved with such loving abandon. Had he been a person, we would have been embarrassed for him, but since he was just a dumb beast, we accepted his ebullient affection gratefully. In fact, we couldn’t help but reciprocate his obvious and oblivious fondness, but more than that, he showed us all that it was fine to let people know that you care for them. He broke the crust of our fine English reserve.
I must have spent about four years of my life living with Benji. In time, I went to college, to graduate school and then, at 25, I started my international wanderings. Benji remained his jubilant loving self, even as age sapped his bounce. Whenever I came back to visit, his tail would show he was as thrilled to see me as ever, though his years of flying onto the back of the sofa were behind him.
In the UK, a student is expected to know from day one what he wants to study. I was lucky to find a degree program called Human Sciences that allowed the indecisive to taste a smorgasbord of sciences from Anthropology to Zoology—anything so long as it contained a scientific approach to the human condition. Ironically, perhaps, I became fascinated by nonhuman animals. What captured me was the question of the evolution of minds. How could evolution by natural selection, choosing without thought who shall live and who shall die (or, to get closer to the nub of the matter, who shall have offspring and who shall not) lead to the existence of beings that can learn and reason? What does it mean for animals to have minds?
I started out studying these questions in the species that have become the animal psychologist’s “go-to” beings for research on animal learning and reasoning: The pigeon and the rat. I was excited to be involved in studies showing that pigeons are capable of far more subtle reasoning than their ‘bird-brained’ epithet had suggested to previous generations of psychologists.
When I moved to Australia, I graduated to the unique marsupial fauna of that island continent and investigated whether their reputation for limited intellect was deserved. It wasn’t: one tiny mouse-like marsupial we studied—the fat-tailed dunnart—proved to be the fastest learner ever investigated by science.
“There is no being with whom people have had a longer or more intimate relationship than the dog.”
When I came to the United States in 2002, I quickly felt lost. I didn’t think that every interesting question about the learning, reasoning and other cognitive abilities of rats, pigeons or marsupials had been answered, and yet—honestly?—I was a little bored. Lonely even. I may have moved away from the human focus of my undergraduate training, but I was missing my own species. Like an alcoholic with a secret drinking problem, there was something I had to hide from my students and colleagues: I hated going up into my own lab. I didn’t want to be stuck in a windowless space with just birds or rodents for company. I wanted to be back out in the world where the people were.
I realized I was curious about questions not just of animal intellect, but of how people and other species interact with each other. I started collecting the first-person accounts of people who had lived with great apes: chimpanzees … gorillas even. For a while I looked into whether I could study people who live with apes, but one slightly frightening visit to a lady in Florida cured me of that plan. In any case, I soon realized that, if I was interested in human-animal relationships, the species I should be studying was right there at my feet—the dog.
There is no being with whom people have had a longer or more intimate relationship than the dog. Humans and dogs have been living and working alongside each other for over 14,000 years. The careful burial of dogs over 8,000 years ago—complete with the same wealth of treasures as our ancestors buried with their human family members—shows just how ancient and strong is the bond between our species.
Once I realized it was dogs I needed to be studying, I quickly knew I had found my true métier. The skills I had developed over the previous decades, carefully probing the capacities and limits of the animal mind, were entirely relevant to understanding dogs. But the extra layer that engaged me was that here were animals whose essence was defined by their interactions with people.
At the dawn of a new century, I wasn’t the only behavioral scientist going to the dogs. A number of researchers were interested in understanding what it was that makes dogs so successful in a human-dominated world. The developing wisdom proposed that millennia of hanging around people had made it possible for some human smarts to rub off on our canine companions. Dogs, it was argued, are the only nonhuman animals who understand that human actions reveal our intentions and our knowledge states. To take a very simple example, only dogs understand that a person pointing at something is telling you there is something good to be found in that location.
When I first heard this theory, I found it exciting and quite plausible. And the first studies my students and I carried out confirmed everything we had been told: When we pointed at something, dogs dutifully trotted off to investigate. Clever dogs: So much smarter than dumb chimpanzees in the same tests!
And yet, when we had the chance to test hand-reared wolves we were astonished. They were just as good at these kinds of simple puzzles as pet dogs. All our dogs are descended from wolves. If what we are looking at here are special skills that dogs acquired on their journey from wolves, then wolves should not succeed on these tests. Meanwhile, when we tested dogs living in animal shelters—dogs who did not appear afraid of us and loved playing our little games to get the treats which were success’s reward—these shelter pups just couldn’t figure out what we were about.
It turns out, after many years of systematic investigation by my students as well as many other groups around the world, what makes an animal successful in understanding human intentions is not whether that creature is or is not a member of a domesticated species, but what kind of life experiences he or she has had. The dog is a domesticated species. This means that, over thousands of years, its habits have changed in ways that make it more readily able to live with people. But every individual dog still has to grow up around people and lead a daily life that includes interactions with people if he or she is to respond to humans in the ways that we know and love.
All of this was for a while the source of some controversy and I felt misunderstood. People tarred me as saying that there really wasn’t anything special about dogs. I knew that couldn’t be true, but I had trouble articulating an alternative conception of what made dogs so unique. If it wasn’t something about their intelligence, what exactly could it be? Why did people so readily open up their homes, and their hearts, to these animals?
It was at this point that memories of Benji—by this point in my story dead nearly 40 years—refreshed and recharged my thinking as a behavioral scientist. Benji’s success in our family—the purpose of his life really—was his love for us. His unbounded big-heartedness that we could not help but reciprocate was what got him, not merely in the door, but cared for to the limits of our understanding of what he needed in life.
“Once I realized it was dogs I needed to be studying, I quickly knew I had found my true métier.”
I realized that the secret of dogs’ success lies in their unbounded capacity to form strongly emotional relationships with members of other species. It’s what I call, in my scientific writing, “exceptional gregariousness,” or “hyper-sociability.” But the reality does not require these multi-syllabic neologisms. It’s what everyone calls love. Dogs love us. That is their secret super-power.
Parts of this were apparent in research that was carried out over half a century ago showing that dogs form powerful bonds with even minimal exposure to people. But many other aspects have only become apparent since I had this realization. Studies show that dogs are far more inclined to seek out and spend time with people they care about than even the most carefully hand-reared wolves. Tests designed to measure the attachment of small children to their care-givers by separating them briefly and then observing how they respond when brought back together have been adapted for use with dogs and indicate that dogs are just as connected with their people as little kids are with their mothers. The latest science goes beneath the surface and finds evidence of dogs’ love for people in their patterns of brain activity, their hormones and even their genes.
Time makes a mockery of all our affectionate enthusiasms, of course, but Benji’s message to us lives on. He loved us, and expressing that love is no reason to be ashamed. That was his essence and the powerful lesson that he taught my family. He cracked open our carapaces and showed us how affection can be expressed. We will always be grateful to him for that. Forty years later, I realize that the capacity to form powerful emotional connections to members of other species isn’t unique to Benji—it is the birthright of every member of his endearing species. Thank you, Benji, and all your wonderful kind.
Clive D.L. Wynne is a Professor of Psychology and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. He is also the author of the recently published book Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You.