By the time we got home, it was dark and it had started to rain. There was no question that Lyra would receive a proper funeral. But I would have preferred to wait until the morning.
Helen summed up the situation: “Dad, I can’t sleep knowing that her body is just lying here.”
So, with headlamps in place, Kat and I set to the task of digging Lyra’s grave in the dark. Despite the rain, the red Georgian clay did not yield easily to our shovels. Neither of us cared. After two hours of digging and prying rocks, we were staring at a hole so deep that we had to stand in it to dig any farther. We both took some comfort in the blisters that had formed on our hands. A tearing of the skin that symbolized the tearing in our hearts.
We lowered Lyra into the hole and called the girls outside.
They each placed a stuffed animal next to her, and we covered her in a favorite blanket. In turn, each of us placed a shovelful of earth in the grave.
The grief was too overwhelming for anyone to speak, so I spoke for all of us.
“Lyra, you were the gentlest, kindest dog we have ever known. You will be in our hearts forever.”
Choking back tears, and as I had upon Newton’s death two years before, I recited “The Rainbow Bridge”:
Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge…
24
What Dogs Are Really Thinking
DIA DE LOS MUERTOS 2012
IT HAD BEEN TWO years since the inception of the Dog Project, and our shrine to the dead was now one soul larger. I thought back to the weeks following Lyra’s death. Nobody in the house had been the same. Maddy missed cuddling with the big teddy bear, and Kat longed for Lyra’s happy, vacant face staring up at her from the foot of the kitchen table. Even Callie had lost a little bit of her spark and had taken to following me around the house. Helen was morose and cried herself to sleep with Lyra’s collar in her grip.
After all we had accomplished, I wondered whether Lyra had been trying to tell me something. I supposed it had been possible, but I also knew that her personality was such that even if something had been bothering her, she wouldn’t have given any indication. It was the way of the golden retriever. Unflappable and perennially friendly, these are the reasons why goldens are so popular.
But the traits that make goldens so lovable also make it harder to know what they are thinking. I had learned to read Callie but I had taken Lyra for granted. For some time after Lyra’s death I faulted myself for this oversight. But gazing at Lyra’s picture, I realized just how different our dogs had been. Callie was a hunter. Lyra wasn’t. Although Lyra had come from a line of dogs bred for hunting and retrieving, she had never displayed any of those traits. She had never even taken to swimming.
Finally, after two years, the Dog Project had begun to find clues to why we love dogs so much and how dogs became who they are. Eventually, our results might even explain why dogs and humans came together thousands of years ago. The brain data pointed to dogs’ unique interspecies social intelligence. In answer to the question “What are dogs thinking?” the grand conclusion was this: they’re thinking about what we’re thinking. The dog-human relationship was not one-sided. With their high degree of social and emotional intelligence, dogs reciprocated our feelings toward them. They truly are First Friend.
Throughout the world, the two most popular pets are dogs and cats, and both are descended from predatory species. It seems odd that the first animals that humans supposedly domesticated were hunting animals. You would think that it would have been much easier for prehistoric humans to take in more docile species. A common explanation for this is that dogs helped humans hunt while cats caught vermin. While plausible, this theory assumes that humans domesticated animals because of their usefulness in survival.
The results from the Dog Project suggest a different explanation. While the caudate activation in the dogs’ brains shows that they transfer the meaning of a hand signal to something rewarding like hot dogs, the other brain regions activating point toward a theory of mind. Our results support a theory of self-domestication based on dogs’ superior social cognition and their ability to reciprocate in human relationships. Moreover, these interspecies social skills evolved from dogs’ predatory past.
Apart from humans, strong evidence for theory of mind has been found in only monkeys and apes, which have social cognition for primates but not necessarily other animals. Dogs are much better than apes at interspecies social cognition. Dogs easily bond with humans, cats, livestock, and pretty much any animal. Monkeys, chimpanzees, and apes will not do this without a lot of training from a young age. And even then, I would never trust an ape.
The different types of social cognition may be a result of the different diets of the species. Apes eat fruits, grasses, seeds, and sometimes meat. Like humans, they are omnivorous. Dogs (and cats), on the other hand, are mostly carnivorous. This means that dogs’ ancestors, the wolves, had to hunt their prey. Apart from humans, primates do not depend on meat for a substantial part of their diet.
Hunting is hard. It is not as simple as waiting for prey to wander by. Predator species must outsmart their prey. To some extent, this means that predators must get in the mind of their prey. A lion, for example, stalks a gazelle by anticipating what it is going to do, but the gazelle only reacts. All predators, whether they hunt alone or in packs, had to evolve an interspecies theory of mind to be successful. The brain-imaging results suggested that through evolution, dogs somehow adapted their ancestors’ skills in reading the mind of other animals from a predatory capacity to one of coexistence.
Around twenty-seven thousand years ago, a subspecies of wolves domesticated themselves and became dogs. During this period, the ice sheets had reached their greatest extent, stretching as far south as Germany in Europe and New York City in North America. The ice sheets would have pushed humans who had previously migrated north to move south again. The wolves, who were well adapted to cold climates, also would have moved south following the ice sheets. As a result, both humans and wolves probably came into contact with each other more frequently.
Why wouldn’t they have eaten each other? Perhaps they did. But more likely, a few wolves realized that they could hang around humans. Some researchers have suggested that the wolves survived by scavenging from human leftovers. However, John Bradshaw has pointed out that wolves require a prodigious amount of food, and it is unlikely that a wolf could have survived exclusively off human garbage. Others have suggested that wolves helped humans hunt. This might have been possible, but even modern dogs need to be trained to help the hunter. And wolves are not nearly as trainable as dogs. Moreover, dogs appear almost nowhere in prehistoric cave art that otherwise depicts human hunting activity.
The results from the Dog Project, however, support a much simpler theory. Because wolves were predators, they were already well evolved for intuiting the behavior of other animals, which meant that wolves had a high level of interspecies social cognition, perhaps even a theory of mind. For wolves used to hunting, it would have been a trivial mental feat to learn the habits of humans. If humans fed them, it would have been simply because they liked having them around, not because wolves provided any survival function. Anthropologists have long known about the universal human tendency to take in animals as pets. Everything from reptiles to birds to mammals. In almost all cases, pets provide no useful function other than it makes humans feel good.