- Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Do dogs have as complex a mental life as humans? Do they feel the same minor emotions – pride, humiliation, puzzlement, guilt, jealousy, shame? Such emotions seem to require a level of cognitive sophistication, particularly when it comes to self-awareness or self-consciousness. In short, is the dog as conscious as a human being? Does he process information and develop memories of what he has sensed?

Dr Stanley Coren, one of the most renowned dog experts in the world, says yes. To judge by people who write in with anecdotes of their own dogs, dog owners seem to be quite familiar with these emotions. All of us have seen the puzzled tilt of the head when a dog is presented with a new sound or behaviour.

Animal scientists claim that the most important evidence of consciousness is, if an animal has a picture of the world that goes beyond what he can see at the moment. For instance, knowing that X building exists whether you can see it or not.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget described the ability to know that an object’s existence does not depend on our being able to sense it at the moment, as object permanence. He showed that this is not an ability that we are born with, by showing a young child a toy that he wants. As the child reaches for it, the researcher covers it with a sheet of paper so that his view of the toy is blocked. Under these circumstances the child will not try to reach past or around the paper, but acts like the toy no longer exists, looking around blankly or crying. In babyhood, even a child’s parent is simply another object that appears and disappears from view. This would explain why babies enjoy games of hide and seek.

A child develops the ability of object permanence at about two years of age and will understand that the object is there, just not in view. So he will start looking for it. This means that the child’s brain has now progressed to making a mental representation of the object and the world in which it exists. The consciousness is now of a higher level and can be used for complex thought and emotion.

That a dog has object permanence is apparent to all. You have seen them trying to recover balls that have rolled out of sight.  Dogs that are used by hunters know that the quarry has fallen somewhere even though he cannot see it and he will retrieve it. In fact experiments done by psychologists Sylvain Gagnon and François Doré of Laval University in Quebec , Canada have found that puppies of just 5 weeks already have this ability – long before human children.

There is a magic trick that demonstrates object permanence quite clearly. A magician shows you a coin in one hand, makes a fist of both and then asks you to find the coin. You choose a fist and then find that not only is it empty but so is the other. This produces astonishment and confusion because it violates your expectation of the situation based upon object permanence. Dogs, when shown this trick show exactly the same puzzlement.  I saw a delightful video on You Tube (Taikuutta koirille - Magic for Dogs ) in which magician Jose Ahonen shows a number of different dogs the magic trick in which he has a dog treat, and it’s suddenly gone. You can easily see the amazement in the dogs' body language. If the dogs had no mental imagery of the object and no mental map of its location then they would have no cause for surprise or puzzlement.

Do dogs suffer guilt? There are two schools of thought. One says that dogs put on a doleful look and shuffle about because they know you are upset and use that body posture to try to get you to calm down and avoid punishment. But most dog owners believe that their dogs experience guilt. One owner described her reasoning as follows: “I behave in a particular way when I feel guilty; my dog behaves in a similar way in equivalent circumstances.”  Charles Darwin observed that the types of behaviours associated with guilt – keeping one’s head down, and averting one’s gaze – are also seen in other social non-human species as well. In fact, guilt serves to reinforce social relationships, reduce conflict and to minimize the effects of transgressions against social partners – important for dog, monkey and man. Even the animal behaviour scientist Konrad Lorenz wrote of the dog’s “guilty look,” saying that we can “assume with certainty that it hides a guilty conscience.”

But is the guilt at breaking a rule genuine or is it a learned response resulting from a tone of voice or scolding? In 2009, Barnard College psychologist Alexandra Horowitz found evidence that dogs were more likely to display behaviours associated with guilt after being scolded. However, dogs displayed guilt-associated behaviours in situations in which owners did not scold the dogs at all.

Canine cognition researchers from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest reported a recent experiment in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science designed to address this ambiguity. 64 dogs were left alone in a room (separately). Food for humans was placed on a table and the dog told to sit and not eat the food. The owner left the room and then came back. Researchers assessed how dogs greeted their owners after eating or not eating the food. Again the results were ambiguous. Could it be that researchers do not know the difference between shame and guilt – a confusion that occurs when analyzing human behaviour as well? Feeling bad that they’ve done something that someone else disapproves of; this also requires a complex emotion.

Hundreds of dog owners have anecdotal evidence “Once my dog bit a visitor to my greenhouse. I yelled at him, and he gave me a “guilty” look, as expected. But then he did something extraordinary. He meekly approached the woman who had been bit and gently leaned against her leg, as if to apologize. I had never taught him anything like this, and indeed I was apprehensive when he started to approach her again, so he certainly was not getting any cues from me about this behaviour.”

“Attempting to chase a squirrel, my dog ran from the den to the backyard without stopping to open the screen door, which she knocked out of its hinges. I laughed; my mother jokingly said, “Wait till Dad gets home.” She returned to normal behaviour, but when Dad got home three hours later she crept towards the front door on her belly rather than running to greet him. This was not a conditioned response.”

Why should a mammal with the same overall brain structure, the same neurotransmitters, and the same action patterns and behaviour as ours not experience the same sort of subjective feelings as us?

Charles Darwin's idea about evolutionary continuity is that the differences among species are variations in degree rather than kind - "If we have or experience something, 'they' (other animals) do too." Mark Bekoff, the animal emotions scientist, sums it up “Perhaps we should replace the notion of human exceptionalism with species or individual exceptionalism, a move that will force us to appreciate other animals for who they are, not who or what we want them to be.”

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