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| 93% of a Dog's Brains are in her Nose |
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Most dog books are about picking a dog or training your dog or fixing dog problems.
This
one is not one of those. It is entirely about how dogs understand
their world ("dog cognition") and the experiments that reveal their
nature.
You see many dog books by PhDs (sometimes in a subject
having nothing to do with dogs). I've read several and they tend to
follow a pattern. Credentials. Some observations with experiment to
back them up. Then, very quickly, they fall into conventional wisdom,
anecdotes, opinions, and other "facts" that are justified not by science
and experiment, but purely by the authority of the author.
Almost
everything said about dogs in "Genius of Dogs" is based on rigorous,
repeatable and often ingenious experiments. If there's only a single
experiment backing up an observation, the authors tell you it's possibly
questionable till someone else can repeat it. That's honesty! That's
respect for your reader! Dog books don't usually admit to their
fallibility.
The "Genius" in "Genius of Dogs" refers to those
mental abilities dogs have that are truly exceptional in the animal
kingdom. The two that really stood out:
1. Dogs are brilliant
(compared to even primates) at recognizing human direction (like
pointing and facial expression). What's truly amazing is that this does
not seem to be a learned thing. As young puppies, relatively isolated
from human contact, they still pick up on gestures like pointing. Wolf
cubs and chimps can't without a lot of training.
2. Dogs aren't
unusually gifted at solving problems like mazes or getting around
obstacles or opening latches. In fact, they seem to be not all that
bright in some experiments. But if you SHOW them how to solve a
problem, they will pick it up almost immediately. They might not know
how to go around a fence to get some treats, but once they see another
dog or a human go around, they get it. I've seen this brilliance at
copying behavior with my own dog. I spent a day and a half laboriously
teaching him to go through a dog door with treats and luring and what
not. He slowly got it. But with another dog who couldn't figure out
the dog door either, when he saw my dog, Pogo, jump through a couple
times, he figured it out instantly. 30 seconds of training vs a day and
a half! Learning by example is a dog thing. Learning by conditioning
(clicker/reward/positive or Alpha/do what I say cause I say so and I'm
the boss both work, but aren't playing to the dog's mental strengths).
The
book is essentially a list of experiments and results strung together
with some personal anecdotes from the (apparently) main author, Michael
Hare. The anecdotes are mostly benign and sort of amateurishly told
compared to the meat of the book. But they are harmless and tend to
relieve what might otherwise be a moderately dense book. (It's not a
text book, but it is a book filled with explanation and evidence).
There
is a small section on training at the end. Mostly it's critical of
current training methods for following classical
conditioning/behaviorist/operant clicker methods. The main point is
that dogs are not black boxes and their best way of learning is not from
simple action/reward/punishment, but by using their strengths (learning
by copying and by reading human gesture). That's not completely fair
because all clicker training (and alpha training too) emphasize the
human connection with the dog. The dog must give the trainer his/her
attention. The dog is not put in black box isolation from other
stimulus. Still, the authors' point that training could better take
advantage of dog Genius is well taken and could lead to some remarkable
new training techniques if some human genius could work out a system...
