Travels with Casey Read online

  But researchers across the world are struggling with variations of that question. Some, like neuroscientist Gregory Berns, flat-out equate dogs to people in this regard and insist that canines very much love us. Others don’t go nearly that far.

  “Do dogs hang out with us mostly because we’re treat-dispensers, or can they be said to have a real and genuine affection for us?” wondered Erica Feuerbacher, a conference attendee and then a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. We spoke on the hotel patio, only feet from the beach. “Has something changed along domestication from wolves where our interaction or our presence is rewarding to them in itself? We have these sayings in everyday life about dogs and unconditional love, and dogs being ‘man’s best friend,’ but what produces and maintains that relationship? We don’t really know.”

  To begin to explore that question, Erica devised an experiment to test whether dogs would work harder for a reward that consisted of food or human petting. The results were predictable—and depressing. Dogs want our treats more than they want our love.

  “I used shelter dogs in my experiment, which we would think are deprived of human interaction and might really want love and petting,” she told me at the conference. “But we found that dogs worked harder for food than human interaction.” (The lone exception was a female Pit Bull, who responded equally to human interaction and to food.)

  Erica then repeated the experiment with nonshelter dogs. “We wondered if maybe dogs had to have a history with a specific person for the human interaction to be meaningful,” she said. “But we found the same pattern—dogs preferred food.”

  At a circular table in a Radisson conference room, several of Erica’s fellow researchers from the University of Florida’s Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab waited to present their papers. Their canine studies were diverse, covering everything from social play to shelter behavior to odor detection. Nathaniel Hall, the author of a study about dogs and scent, told me he was interested in learning the best ways to train dogs for critical jobs, including detecting drugs and explosives. (A dog’s nose is significantly more sensitive than a human one; while we have about five million scent-receptor cells, a German Shepherd has some 225 million.)

  “There’s still so much we don’t know about a dog’s sense of smell,” Hall said, “especially when it comes to understanding how everyday odors influence our pet dogs’ behavior. For example, pet owners assume that when a dog sniffs another dog owner for more than a few seconds, it’s because the dog’s interested in the smell of the other dog. We might say, ‘Oh, your dog must smell my dog on me.’ Whether that’s true, I don’t know.”

  Another Ph.D. student, Sasha Protopopova, was presenting a paper looking at whether shelter dogs trained to gaze into the eyes of humans were more likely to get adopted. Sasha’s research focuses on canine adoption rates and adoptee preferences, and she wondered whether training dogs to make eye contact with humans would better their chances at leaving the shelter alive. In her study, though, Sasha found no statistical difference in adoption rates for shelter dogs trained to stare into our eyes.

  Florida’s Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab was led at the time of my visit by psychologist Clive Wynne, a former pigeon researcher considered by some to be the Debbie Downer of the canine cognition field. (He has since moved to Arizona State University.) Among those who study the intelligence and emotions of dogs, Wynne has perhaps been the most adamant about not looking through the lens of anthropomorphism.

  “People may behave like animals,” he once said, “but dogs are just good at being dogs.”

  Unlike Brian Hare, who runs the Duke Canine Cognition Center, Wynne would never write a book called The Genius of Dogs—he would argue that labeling dogs “geniuses” is just another way we project our human understanding of intelligence onto them.

  “Our love for dogs can sometimes lead us—even those of us who are supposed to be guided by the science—to exaggerate just how much they truly grasp,” Wynne told me during a break at the conference. “I’m certainly not trying to deny that dogs have an astonishing sensitivity to human beings, because they do. But I do try to be the voice of reason. I suppose that’s earned me a reputation as a bit of a curmudgeon.”

  Though dogs’ behavior can seem uncannily human, Wynne stresses that dogs have vastly different cognitive and perceptive abilities. “I understand why people sometimes think their dogs are incredibly intelligent, to the point of being able to sometimes read our minds,” he said. “When you get up from your chair at home, sometimes you’re headed to the bathroom, sometimes you’re headed to the kitchen to make coffee, and sometimes you’re headed to take the dog for a walk. Why does the dog so often stay lying down when you do the first two, but not the third? Is the dog a mind-reader? No. But your dog is a master at observing you and looking for any correlations between your movements and the crucial outcomes for the dog—being fed, going to the bathroom, that kind of thing.”

  Wynne believes that dogs learn by socialization and observation, and that there’s not all that much difference between the brain of a dog and a wolf. Others, including Hare, fundamentally disagree, arguing that domestication has rewired the dog’s brain and given them a remarkable ability to understand human gestures and cues.

  “Brian and I have a massive disagreement,” Wynne said, “and we could probably make some money by going on the road and debating this.”

  Wynne and Hare do agree on one thing, though: they’re not all that interested in figuring out whether dogs are as smart as two-year-olds. When I visited Hare earlier in my journey at his Duke University lab, he told me that dog lovers often want answers to questions that can’t really be measured.

  “At my lab, we’re not trying to understand if dogs are little people,” Hare said. “I understand why people want to know if their dog is as smart as a two-year-old—the dog lover in me kind of wants to know that, too. But from an evolutionary perspective, that question doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I had some magic way to transplant a chimpanzee brain into a dolphin and a dolphin brain into a chimpanzee, that wouldn’t tell us much, because each brain has evolved to solve really different problems. The interesting question to me as a scientist isn’t whether a dog is as smart as a kid. The interesting question is, Why are animals the way that they are, and how does evolution shape them to be that way? Basically, how does evolution shape cognition?”

  One way in which a dog might be assumed to be more helpful than a two-year-old is in an emergency. Perhaps we have Lassie to blame for that—she could always be counted on to summon help if we found ourselves at the bottom of a well. But when William Roberts and Krista Macpherson from the University of Western Ontario tested how dogs reacted to two separate calamities befalling their owners, “not a single dog did anything useful at all,” Wynne told me.

  The study, titled “Do Dogs (Canis familiaris) Seek Help in an Emergency?,” is a cautionary tail of high canine expectations. In the first of two experiments, twelve dog owners walked their dog on a leash to the middle of a field and then pretended to keel over from a heart attack. A stranger sat ten meters away, and a video camera in a tree recorded the proceedings. The results? A few of the dogs pawed their owners before appearing to lose interest.

  One dog, a toy Poodle, did approach the stranger, but “it ran over and jumped in the person’s lap—not because it was trying to signal that its owner was in distress, but because it wanted to be petted,” Alex Boese suggests in his book Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments. “It probably figured, Uh-oh! My owner’s dead. I need someone to adopt me!”

  In a related experiment, Roberts and Macpherson had people walk their dogs into a room (where they were greeted by a stranger) and then proceed to a second room, where they’d been instructed to pull a bookshelf down on top of themselves in a way that looked like it really hurt. The humans then screamed in pain and implored their dogs to get help. Once again, man’s best friend didn’t appear especially bothered.

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p; “In no case did a dog solicit help from a bystander,” the researchers found.

  There are several possible conclusions to be drawn: One, dogs don’t care if we die. Two, dogs don’t understand the meaning of “getting help.” Three, dogs are actually too smart to be fooled by fake heart attacks and slow-falling bookshelves. (If dogs can distinguish between when we’re getting off the couch to go to the bathroom and when we’re getting off it to take them for a walk, surely they can distinguish between a real accident and playacting.)

  Whatever the case, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods caution us in The Genius of Dogs that though dogs are “arguably the most successful mammal on the planet, besides us,” they have many blind spots. Dogs are terrible at physics, for example. They don’t understand basic spatial and connectivity principles, including “that a ball cannot pass through a solid object like a wall, and that when two toys are connected, if you move one, the other will move, too.”

  The Genius of Dogs includes a handy chart comparing the cognitive abilities of canines to other mammals. The authors give dogs “genius” rankings for “comprehending visual gestures” and “learning new words,” but they’re only average at “navigating through space” and “vapid” when it comes to “understanding physics.”

  Though dogs will usually take the shortest route to a reward, things get dicey when they face detours or barriers. Unlike wolves, dogs aren’t good at adjusting mid-route. They get easily stumped in a maze, developing an unsuccessful strategy “where no matter what they could see in front of them, they alternated between turning left and right.” (Though everyone seems to know a story of a dog who gets lost and then finds his way home, canine cognition researchers insist that it’s rare—and that you should probably just have your dog microchipped instead.)

  Worst of all, dogs seem to have little awareness of their own cognitive limitations. If you hide food from a chimpanzee, Hare and Woods write that it “will inspect different hiding locations before making a choice.” Dogs, on the other hand, just guess.

  “Studies designed specifically to examine whether dogs know if they know something have found little evidence that dogs are aware of their own ignorance,” the authors conclude.

  I’m not so sure what to make of that. After all, the same can be safely said of some humans I know.

  ONE OF the challenges of driving around the country for months in an RV is that seemingly everyone—friends, Facebook followers, long-lost lovers—expects a visit.

  “Oh, I’m barely out of your way,” they would lie, bribing me with promises of home-cooked meals, charming guest cottages, or reunion sex.

  To many people, a motorhome conveys the kind of vehicular lollygagging that lends itself to day- or week-long detours. But I had a limited amount of time in the Chalet, and I decided that any significant deviation from my itinerary had better come with the promise of a good dog.

  I got one such offer in Florida, and it came at an opportune time. After a week without Sam in the motorhome, I was feeling lonely. So I was happy to drive to Fort Lauderdale to visit my newly engaged gay twentysomething friends Neil and Brant and their dog, Amelia. She’d been found wandering through a Winn-Dixie parking lot five months prior to my visit. She ended up at the Humane Society of Broward County, where shelter workers temporarily named her Dixie. As best as anyone could tell, she was a Rhodesian Ridgeback/Lab mix. (She probably also had some Pit Bull in her, but shelters across the country go to extraordinary lengths to pretend Pit Bulls aren’t Pit Bulls.)

  Neil and Brant had showed up by chance at the shelter the day after Dixie arrived. The couple hoped to adopt a child together eventually, but first they wanted to test their parenting skills on a nonhuman. They figured they would adopt a small dog, because they lived in a modest apartment complex while Brant attended medical school.

  But then they met Dixie. When they first spotted her at the shelter, she was napping on a cot in her kennel. Though Neil and Brant remember different details from that moment, they agree that she eventually noticed them staring at her, jumped up from her cot, and walked over to say hello through the kennel fence.

  “We melted,” Neil recalled. “It was pretty much decided right there that she’d be coming home with us.”

  After waiting three days (Dixie was placed on a temporary hold in case anyone claimed her), Neil and Brant took her home and renamed her. Amelia quickly ingratiated herself with the couple—she watched television with them on the couch and hogged their bed at night. They took her for long walks and let her race after other dogs at the local dog park.

  But Amelia came with some quirks. She would cower in fear, for example, whenever Brant or Neil picked up a shoe. If they left their shoes out, she would destroy them. Though crate-trained, Amelia once broke out when Neil and Brant weren’t home and ransacked their apartment. Brant showed me a picture of the damage. I’d never seen anything like it—the room looked as if an angry mountain lion had recently come for a visit. There was nothing left of the comforter. The floor was strewn with shirts, boxer shorts, a broken cologne bottle, and white pillow stuffing. A black dresser leaned on its side, defeated. The window shade was slashed.

  “She has just a tiny bit of separation anxiety,” Brant joked as Amelia tried to get Casey to chase her around their apartment on my first afternoon there. “The few times we’ve let her have the run of the apartment, we always come back to find something destroyed.”

  Before going to dinner that night at a surprisingly decent sushi buffet, I suggested we put a ThunderShirt on Amelia. “It didn’t work for Casey,” I said, “but I think he might be an outlier.” Neil and Brant discussed it and decided to be brave. “Here goes nothing,” Neil said, as I helped him wrap Amelia. “We’ll let her have the run of the apartment and see what happens.”

  When we returned ninety minutes later, Amelia was hanging out on the couch, seemingly without a care in the world. We inspected the apartment for damage. Nothing.

  Brant screamed, “It’s a miracle!”

  The next day, we took the dogs to a local dog park and then came home and relaxed by the pool. After nearly ten days in the sun, I was looking positively Mediterranean. Neil and Brant caught me up on their wedding plans and told me about the quaint, dog-friendly bed and breakfast in Vermont where everyone would be staying.

  Though I was genuinely excited for them, all their happy talk and tender physicality made me envious and more than a little sad. I’d hoped to marry my ex-boyfriend, but that had become unlikely since our breakup.

  To take my mind off my feelings, I spent that evening flirting with a friend of Brant’s from medical school. Marc was twenty-eight, handsome, charming, and smart. Best of all, he said yes when I offered to give him a tour of the Chalet.

  “Guys have invited me back to their apartments and their cars,” he said, “but never an RV!”

  We talked for an hour that night in my motorhome—about Florida, medical school, the trip, the book, and the Facebook page. As the evening turned to morning, I didn’t want him to leave. Neither did he.

  “Of course this happens,” he said before heading home. “I meet someone great, and he doesn’t live in Florida and is leaving tomorrow to drive around the country.”

  Before I could stop myself, I heard myself say, “Maybe you could join me for some part of the trip?”

  Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

  CASEY AND I spent our last two days on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

  First we stopped in Sarasota to meet Cary, a woman who’d read about my journey and suggested that I come meet her black Lab, Pepe. Cary and her husband had adopted the dog a few years before, and though he’d arrived housebroken and well socialized, he wouldn’t respond to basic commands like “Sit” or “Stay.”

  Cary suspected that the dog had been a member of another family and most likely had a name, but she’d had no idea what it was. “I would sit around with the dog and toss out names like Rover and Blackie, just to see if we might get luc
ky,” Cary told me, relaxing in a squeaky rocking chair in her living room overlooking her condo association’s man-made lake. Her husband, Mike, swayed in his own rocking chair across the room.

  None of the dog names worked until the day Cary, who is Cuban, tried traditional Hispanic ones. “One day I’m sitting in the living room with Mike, and the dog is lounging on the couch,” Cary recalled. “On a whim I said, ‘Pepe,’ and the dog jumped off the couch and came over to where I was sitting. My husband and I looked at each other and said, ‘No way!’ ”

  They tried again a few minutes later with the same result. Cary then told Pepe to “Siéntate,” a command that the dog had always ignored in English. Pepe sat right down. “I started going through the basic commands in Spanish, and Pepe knew all of them,” Cary told me. “I wish I could have taken a picture of his face. He was ecstatic. His humans were finally speaking his language!”

  Cary had already bonded with Pepe before learning his name, but she and Mike credit speaking Spanish with deepening their connection to their dog. Though he now knows commands in English as well, Cary says Pepe is still more likely to respond to Spanish.

  “And he still barely listens to me,” Mike lamented. “He looks at me while I butcher Spanish, and I swear he’s thinking to himself, ‘What the hell is this imbecile saying?’ He definitely likes Cary more than he likes me.”

  I told them about Piper, a dog I was going to meet that afternoon in Tampa. Piper had bitten a home intruder two years prior, only to have the robber stab her with a crowbar.

  “Poor dog,” Cary said.

  I brightened her mood by filling in the rest of the story. “The day after the robbery,” I explained, “a police dog named Bosco chased down the suspect. Bosco even roughed him up, for good measure.”