This is #51 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.
dog in play pose; by Thomas Zimmermann on wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
Last week my neighbourhood ramble took me by a local off-leash ‘dog park’. As an inveterate animal lover and cultural anthropologist, I couldn’t resist, and ended up hanging around for quite a while.
Yesterday, having done a bit of research on dogs’ group behaviours, notably drawing on this excellent video of a speech by zoologist and trauma psychologist Patricia McConnell, I ventured back to that park, and this time I was astonished at what I’d learned so quickly about dogs’ collective social language. I was a beloved dog’s person for a decade when I was younger, but it was only when she was older and my daughter visited with ‘her’ dogs that I started to learn the collective language of dogs. And, in the process, I learned a bit about the collective language of humans.
This post was originally going to be just about my trips to the dog park. But after the second visit, I stopped off at my favourite local café to write up some of my thoughts before I forgot them. And, looking around the room, I was blown away at how many of the same types of body language, social rituals and signals I’d observed in the dog park were in evidence in the other human animals’ behaviours in the café.
I ended up staying at the café for hours (being careful to observe the appropriate social rituals myself, and making sure I wasn’t taking up a table needed by others) and finding many parallels between canid and primate behaviours. The specific signals we use are quite different, but our use of signals with the same ‘signature’ and ‘message’ is quite remarkable.
I wondered how best to tell the ‘story’ of my observations, to show the parallels without having the narrative wrenching the reader back and forth between what I’d seen at the dog park versus the café. Using a table seemed too formal. So I decided to use a device I’ve adopted for conversations in my fiction writing — using a different colour (green for the dog park, black for the café). (This may not render properly in some readers, so if it’s not showing up right on your ‘newsletter’ format or RSS reader version, here’s a link to the original blog version.)
Here’s what I observed:
A dog, its tail wagging furiously, waits impatiently for the double gate to be opened, and then races over to where a group of dogs are playing. Their ‘game’ is interrupted for introductions. The greeting for ‘friends’ is enthusiastic (lots of gentle barking verging on howling) and full of the play bow signal depicted in the illustration above. But one of the small dogs in the group is clearly a ‘newcomer’. It is greeted by the dog who just arrived with a tail-wagging but seated posture. The small dog comes over and sniffs, then there’s the obligatory circular butt-sniffing, and then the small dog signals acceptance with a play bow. And the group game of chase is on again. (Meanwhile, I’m sure I’ve missed a myriad of signals from the other dogs that all the dogs have clearly seen and understood.)
A guy walks into the café, sees his friend, and there follows immediate hugs and vocal whoops. This friend is accompanied by a woman who clearly does not know the guy who just came in. This guy now smiles, nods, and steps back as the woman rises, returns the nod and smile, and then approaches the guy and offers a handshake. The three then sit together and start talking.
As soon as the dog who’s just come in joins the group of friends playing, its human is promptly forgotten and ignored. Getting it to go home is going to be a challenge!
Outside the café, a dog leashed to the outside railing whines as it stares at its person, warm inside, consorting with the other humans. A few minutes later, the human suddenly looks up, alarmed, points to the dog, grabs his drink to go, and rushes out to the ‘abandoned’ dog.
Some of the dogs ‘scent-mark’ parts of the dog park by peeing on them or rubbing their bodies against them. In a couple of cases, another dog quickly ‘over-marks’ those locations. Dogs’ incredibly sensitive noses can discern a vast amount of information about the ‘marking’ dog just from the marker it has left.
At the table beside me, a man says to one of the people at his table: “Pleased to meet you. Tell us a bit about yourself.”
The dogs that are sitting rather than playing with other dogs, are conspicuously spaced out — within eyeshot of the closest dogs and their person, but otherwise as far apart as possible. This apparently has two evolutionary purposes in dog groups: (1) to avoid proximity that intrudes on another dog’s ‘space’ and hence threatens “hierarchy tension”, and (2) to minimize risk of infection of the larger group with diseases or parasites.
In the café, a woman leaves her backpack on a table to ‘reserve’ it as she orders her drink. When she returns, a guy has occupied the adjacent table and has put his jacket on the wall-length bench he is sitting on, more than half-way between the two tables. The woman now puts her backpack right up against the guy’s jacket. A few minutes later, a second woman sits at the table on the other side of the first woman, but seems to be deliberately leaving maximum space between her and the first woman, as their tables are quite close together. Now, the first woman slides away from the second woman, moving her body, her coffee, and her backpack with her, until she is equidistant from her two ‘neighbours’. Her backpack is now partly on top of the guy’s jacket. The guy looks over and pulls his jacket towards him.
A shy dog stands by itself, its person distracted talking with another human. Other dogs come over towards it, but each time they do, the shy dog quickly scoops up its water dish (a behaviour apparently called ‘resource guarding’), and the ‘visiting’ dog turns away.
A group of four people are sitting together and sharing some desserts. One of them leans forward in his seat, subtly curling his fingers around his napkin, on which sits a large piece of cheesecake.
A large dog snarls and lunges towards a small yapping dog that keeps running around it. Immediately, the small dog freezes, and then slowly backs away from the larger one, and then turns and runs away.
Outside the café there is an argument: “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” The other person responds first with hands on hips, and then instead of responding, turns away, puts his hands in the air, moves aside, and sarcastically sweeps his hands to usher the aggrieved person by.
Two dogs play-bow and then chase each other, then briefly wrestle. One of their people is concerned and goes to separate them, but the other person restrains her. Turns out they’re fine. More play-bows and chasing ensues.
A woman responds to a comment from a guy she is sitting across from, by simultaneously sticking out her tongue and smiling at him. He says something else and now she half-stands in her seat and glares at him. But she’s still smiling. He does the sticking-out-tongue while twiddling fingers from his nose gesture. But he’s still smiling too. She kisses her hand and then moves her hand to his lips. He kisses her hand. They both laugh.
One of the larger dogs in the park is sitting by itself, right at its person’s feet. Everything about its body language is shrunk back — minimized posture, tail still and wrapped around its body.
In the café, three ‘singles’ are staring at their phone, book, and laptop respectively. Two of them have headphones on. They occupy the ‘corners’ of the café. I don’t see them ever look up.
A classic ‘dog park’ story concerns a dog that hung around outside a dog park for hours, looking in. One of the people observing it decided it must be lost and prepared to take it in to animal welfare, when suddenly its person came running up, saying “Thank god; I should have checked here first”. The dog, finding itself lost apparently for the first time in its life, instinctively went to its favourite place, the dog park, not to its (person’s) home.
There are four people that I know of who are not only regulars at the café, but who actually ‘set up shop’ there when they come in. They have quite elaborate set-ups — laptops with easels, impressive cameras with small tripods, desktop ‘white boards’, fancy mikes and headsets — the full office ‘suite’. And they sometimes even ‘entertain’ clients there. I changed my ‘regular’ café a while back and it was an emotionally challenging change. It’s more than just my ‘third place’.
I had a brief chat with one of the people at the dog park, and asked him whether he had taken ‘his’ dog to other dog parks. He replied that he had, and the reason he kept coming to this one is that “our dog likes the other dogs here”. Why? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it mattered.
“My” café has a certain ambiance, a ‘culture’ unique to it. I’ve been to lots of other local cafés, and their cultures and clientele are different, even though several of them are owned by people from the same ethnicity. And the physical layout and decor of the café doesn’t seem to affect who hangs out there. What’s more, the owners of two of them said that their ‘busy’ times are completely unpredictable and inconsistent, and that the demographic of their patrons has changed multiple times. Why do I go there? Because I like the people and the ambiance, the energy of the place. For now.
I asked the guy whose dog likes the dogs in that specific dog park, what he thought was the biggest area of conflict he has had to deal with. His answer?: “Unsocialized dogs, and unsocialized people.” Dogs that have never learned how to socialize properly with other dogs, so they send mixed, confusing messages to the other dogs. And people who have never learned to socialize properly with other people they don’t already know well. He said it that baldly. Lots of people, like lots of dogs who don’t have a lot of chance to interact with strangers of their own species, are socially illiterate.
In the café, this social illiteracy is often in ready evidence. Some people talk too loud. Some just take up too much space, physically and psychologically, hogging and spreading out across large tables and oblivious of others coming in looking for places to sit. Some are constant complainers. It would seem that some of these people just feel they are privileged and better than everyone else, while others perhaps wear their obliviousness and socially obnoxious behaviour as a mask for fear and social anxiety. I’m always amazed at how easily we can be conditioned to misbehave.
The research I did made me aware that a dog’s wagging tail can have several, conflicting (and conflicted) meanings. Generally it’s an outlet for expressing and discharging excitement, but the accompanying cues make all the difference in the message. A free-wagging tail means joy, a furiously wagging tail pointed straight down means high anxiety. A wag mostly to the right means “I like this”; a wag mostly to the left means “Yikes I’m not sure about this” *.
Humans, it seems, smile instead of wagging our tails, but the smile is often just as ambiguous. I often see this in the café. A tight smile is a grimace, the opposite of an open, happy smile. Then there’s the polite smile of the owners and staff and people talking with people they either don’t know or don’t like very much. Anthropologists call it a “deference” smile.
“Looming over” behaviour in dogs is almost always dominance display and can be either aggressive or defensive. In either case it is a signal to the other dog to back off and signal submission or at least acquiescence. I’ve seen it only once in the dog park, because it is a sign of intolerance, which the antithesis of the social play and fun the dog park is all about. The “loomer”, I noticed, was immediately shunned by the other dogs.
Human “looming” displays would seem to stem from the same aggressive/defensive psychology, but they are subtler and more varied. Humans have multiple ways of signalling they are ‘bigger and stronger so watch out’, varying from “antler” displays (hands behind the head, elbows out), to crossed arms, or a swaggering, arm-swinging gait, or man-spreading sprawl to occupy maximum space. In the café, most of the men I witness making these displays appear confident, though in a few cases they seem the opposite — borderline fearful about the situation. Most of the women I see displaying them (a much rarer occurrence I think, and mostly crossed arms) appear angry.
Dog trainers have observed that dogs are roughly five times as receptive to visual signals as aural ones. Their capacity to ‘read’ even our most nuanced body language and expressions seems vastly superior to their capacity to understand spoken communications, which in any case depend more on tone than on word content.
You know what I think about our incapacity to convey what we think, and especially what we feel, in words. We are incoherent and inarticulate, and we’re lousy listeners. And our languages are shabby and inadequate to the task of accurate communication. But from lack of practice we have also become poor at both expressing ourselves and at ‘reading’ others through visual signals. Small wonder there is so much misunderstanding. Add in the vast differences in olfactory comprehension, and I think dogs inevitably ‘know’ other dogs in a way that no human could ever know another human.
So I watch the canids and the primates, in the dog park and in the café — the loud and the quiet, the participants and the observers. I notice the impatience of the senior members of both species with the younger. I understand why it’s such a terrible gaffe to ‘pet’ a strange dog, or a stranger’s baby.
And I wonder: Which dog am I? Not the ‘single’ lone canid trying to shrink to invisibility, I think, though maybe sometimes I am. Perhaps I’m the curious one not sure how to be embraced by the pack — not lonely, but kind of hovering at the edges. Not desperate to belong, but willing to consider the possibility.
There was a medium-sized border-collie-mix dog who I watched for a while in the dog park, eyeing the rest of the group (unmenacingly, not with the herding dog’s famous intense stare**), and wandering among the little clusters of dogs. Head cocked. Just studying the group, it seemed. Enjoying the company, but not entirely partaking of it.
That’s me, I guess.
* There’s no clear consensus on how or why this left-vs-right tail-wagging evolved or whether other dogs can interpret it. But there’s recently been an astonishing discovery about dogs’ incredibly powerful sense of smell: Dogs can select independently which nostril to smell through. All smells are initially sniffed by the right nostril. Familiar smells continue to be sniffed through this nostril, but if the smell is novel, the dog switches to using the left nostril. Why? Best guess is that that hemisphere of the brain is better suited to analyzing the novel smell!
** There are many myths about herding behaviour. And while it’s true that some breeds of dogs can be conditioned to herd much more easily than others, there’s a rather dismaying reason why this remarkable and sophisticated skill exists at all, and it’s not to please the dogs’ human ‘masters’. Herding emerged as a means for groups of wild small canids to corral, bring down, and kill and eat much larger game, and the breeds it evolved in most extensively were those in ecological niches that relied on hunting larger prey. I’ve seen this instinctive behaviour in many dog species not bred to herd. It’s amazing to watch groups of dogs that have never been conditioned or trained to know how to do this, corral and pin animals of every size with consummate precision and skill.
