The joys of animal experimentation

I have been reading the most recent book by Stanley Coren, a PhD psychologist and canine behaviorist. I have been intrigued by canine psychology and sociology ever since we got these dogs. One thing that I love about living with them is that it's a constant cross-cultural experience. I'm a person who's studied five foreign languages, three of them to a level between competent and fluent. I am a citizen of two countries and I've lived in two countries (not the same two). I have visited 20 countries (four of which no longer exist) on three continents. It's fair to say that other cultures fascinate me.

Wolves and other wild canines have been shown to have extremely complex social structures and communication systems; domesticated dogs are basically wolves stunted into permanent puppyhood and bred to accentuate certain natural characteristics and de-emphasize others. But nonetheless they are all canis lupus - the wolf, the chihuahua, and the St. Bernard. Scientific research suggests that domesticated dogs have roughly the cognitive abilities and linguistic comprehension of a human two-year-old.

So living with dogs means learning another culture and language. Much as dogs may learn human language and habits - something wolves are very bad at, despite their superior intelligence - we humans must still learn and integrate into our daily behavior the fact that a direct look in the eye, or a smile, means something completely different in their culture. If you have multiple dogs, you'd better learn to read the language of tails and eyes, if you want to spot trouble before it erupts.

Anyway, reading this book totally makes me want to conduct experimentation on my dogs. I read about this research, and I think, "Hey, I wonder how long it would take my dogs to learn to go the long way around a V-shaped fence in order to retrieve a treat?" The book also makes me realize that both dogs are at an age where their cognitive abilities will start to decline. We will have geriatric two-year-olds on our hands. As much as Nelly's uncanny intelligence is occasionally terrifying, the prospect of her senility is much, much more so.

Happily, my urge to conduct harmless psychological experiments and my desire to keep Nelly in posession of her faculties are synergistic, because it turns out that dogs, like people, stay sharp into old age by eating antioxidants and challenging their minds in constantly new ways. Nelly and Toby need the doggie equivalent of the New York Times crossword puzzle and a good game of Boggle every now and then. Nelly especially likes to be challenged intellectually. When she was a puppy, she'd throw herself obsesively into a new game, until one day she'd decide she had milked all there was to learn from it. Done fetching tennis balls, never to do it again. Disembowling stuffed animals? Been there, done that. So I think she'd appreciate some new puzzles to solve.

I'm starting with a game where they have to remember whether the blue cup or the red cup has the treat under it, and bump the right one with their nose to get their reward. It's too, too fun.