Sit, stay, speak: a dog gets a rare chance to talk about what's on, and in, his mind

Science News, Dec 18, 2004 by Bruce Bower

Hanging around people for tens of thousands of years caused dogs to evolve internal radar for human body language, according to Hare.

Fair enough. But my view is that hanging around dogs for tens of thousands of years has caused even bigger evolutionary changes in people. Because we're fuzzy friends who--until now--have never had a negative word to say about them, people have evolved to shower us with their goopiest emotions. Consider my neighbor Mrs. Kandinsky. She's a charming old woman who thrusts her face against my nose as she grabs my ears and exclaims, "How's poopsie's little sweetheart? How's little Larry, Larry, quite contrary?" Yech. Then, she blasts me with mouth fumes--people-breath is so vile. I don't know why people haven't evolved sweeter breath to avoid offending dogs' highly evolved sense of smell.

On the other hand, through the millennia people have learned that dogs are convenient receptacles for their passions, rage, and other loopy emotions. Consider my two owners. Every few days, one of them pours out his or her forbidden desires and simmering resentments to me in private. I look on in shock while actually working out eat-revenge strategies. The pope should hear so many confessionals. Now that I can talk, what am I supposed to do, assign them a penance for each sin? Or perhaps I should go therapeutic and chime in every so often with "Uh huh, go on, what do you think it means?" Then, I could send them a bill.

Speaking of therapy, I think that pet psychology is a laugh. It's the owners that need the treatment. Dogs that bark and charge with teeth bared are just emotional bullhorns announcing that life at home is not a bowl of bacon-flavored kibble. That's where dogs are like little kids.

Maybe I'll organize the neighborhood dogs into a vigilante-justice mob. We'll get together every week and put a scare into owners that neglect and abuse their dogs. No one has to get hurt, but it will be interesting to see how high two-legged critters can climb up trees. I think I'll call our group Bite Club.

Serenity now. Serenity now.

Perhaps you're right, Brutus. People and dogs just have to live with their differences. I believe it was Sigmund Freud who said, "Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations."

Freud was a dog lover, of course. He owned a series of chows and gave them free run of his office. One time, Freud's chow jumped on top of a reclining patient as he was recounting an intensely disturbing memory. Freud exclaimed, "You see! Jofi is so excited that you've been able to discover the source of your anxiety!"

How's that for object relations?

Little did Freud know, as researchers have now found, that all it takes to become a "therapy" dog is for one of us to walk into a hospital, nursing home, mental-health center, or homeless shelter. People who have never had to trail behind us on frosty nights with a pooper-scooper or scrape chewed-up wads of leaves off the living room rug treat us like four-legged gods.