PDTE 2010 January Newsletter

PDTE AGM MEETING In Poland 26 – 27 September 2009
Humans & Dogs:
Interactions and Emotions
Anne-Lill Kvam, Norway
What is a dog? That is the first, primitive
and simple question I often ask, and most
of the time, wherever I am, I am met with
silence.
The basic, primitive answer is that dogs
are animals. They are pack animals, and
they are hunters. Not only do they run after
things that move, they also eat them. And
they are scavengers.
The next question is, What is a human
being? We are pack animals, absolutely.
These days most people live in very small
packs, but packs nonetheless. We used
to be hunter-gatherers, and our instincts
from that time are virtually intact. Later
we became farmers, and once we started
keeping animals and managing every
aspect of their lives from birth until death,
something in us changed. A Norwegian
vet attributes our ability to keep animals to
an “empathy switch” that has to be turned
on or off in our relationship with animals.
Keeping caged animals in the fur trade, for
instance, requires an absence of empathy
for the suffering of these animals or the job
would be impossible.
AND THEN WHEN WE STARTED INTER-
ACTING WITH OUR ANIMALS
What is interaction with an animal, or
with another live being? It is communication,
playing, talking, and trying to get the
message across. For example, putting on
a leash or taking it off is definitely a form
of interaction, and there are nice and notso-nice
ways of doing it. Training definitely
involves interaction, and there are many
nice ways of training dogs also.
I once had a monkey, and this little animal
taught me a lot. One day he wanted to
play with a young, rather exuberant
Labrador but was a little scared of all the
bouncing and barking. So he kept his
distance and approached ever so slowly,
and eventually the dog understood and lay
down. Finally the monkey came all the way
up to him and they ended up having a nice
time together with a piece of cloth. It was
really a gift to observe how this monkey
could communicate with dogs, pigs and
humans. He was the best trainer I ever
had.
EMOTIONS
Darwin observed that humans everywhere
on the planet, irrespective of what language
we speak or what country we come
from, have the same facial expressions
to express certain emotions. Wolves and
humans use the same facial muscles to
express anger. So do dogs, but depending
on the breed it may not always be as
evident.
Removing the first letter from the word
emotion gives motion — something we do,
an action we take. The emotions are produced
and processed in a part of the brain
called the limbic system, which is identical
in dogs and humans. What it means in
practice is that dogs and humans have the
same emotions. What many experts try to
explain away as mere instinct is anything
The best little trainer I ever had.
A nice way to train a dog.
Wolves and humans use the same facial
muscles to express anger.
but. If we relegate emotions like sorrow,
jealousy and grief in dogs to pure instinct,
then we can feel free to treat them as we
please. The moment I started to absorb
that my dog has exactly the same emotions
as I do, it made me think differently
about what I was doing, had done, and
could do in the future. The awful realisation
about all the things I had done in the
past, now that I saw them through my
dogs’ eyes, numbed me for several days.
A particularly interesting finding is that
the limbic system is linked to the part of
the brain that deals with rational thought,
technical skills and making wise decisions
— the cerebral cortex. This connection is
inverted, which means that when strong
emotions are activated the ability to think
rationally is inhibited, and vice versa. We
PDTE NEWS Page 16