Do Dogs "Think"?

[From a post to PositiveGunDogs on October 22, 2009]

On Oct 22, 2009, at 9:03 PM, another poster wrote:

Thinking is always ongoing with animals as we all know.

Hi, [name]. I'm afraid I'm on the other side of this statement from both you and Alice [this refers to Alice Woodyard, who also replied to the same person I'm replying to].

I'm going to assume that by "thinking" you mean that dogs perform conscious reasoning. If so, first of all, I don't think there's any way to determine whether dogs do that or not, and secondly, my own observations suggest that they do very little of it.

I see too many situations where something should be obvious to a dog but the dog's behavior tells me that it isn't obvious. A common example is awareness of lines (such as a leash or rope) attached to the dog's collar. A dog without line experience often acts as though she has no idea that the line can prevent her from moving beyond the length of that line, and also often seems unaware that she cannot go on one side of an object while the handler attached to the other end of the line goes on the other.

Dogs, of course, can learn those things, but it doesn't seem to me that they learn by means of a reasoning process. Instead, they just begin to learn that particular stimuli in particular contexts combined with particular decisions on the dog's part have particular outcomes. Dogs are extremely good at that kind of learning. It COULD involve reasoning, but it does not need to, and my experience suggests that it does not. I say that because if you change the stimuli or contexts in ways that should not interfere with the reasoning process -- for example, go to a different location -- often the dog will no longer behave according to previous experience and will have to go thru the learning process again. It takes time for the dog to learn which elements of the context and stimuli make a difference in the outcome and which do not, though eventually they do learn some of that, and we call that "generalizing". Dogs are notoriously bad at generalizing. To me, that's because they're not incorporating reasoning into the process, they're just collecting data points.

An analogy might be a blind person learning about walking thru doors with a sighted assistant. As first, he might think he can get out ahead of the assistant, but thru experience of walking into doors, he eventually learns that he needs to wait until he feels the assistant moving forward, or hears the assistant say "It's OK to continue without me." To the assistant, it may appear that the guy can now see because he doesn't walk into doors any more, but the truth is, the blind guy still has no idea whether a door is front of him or not. He's just acting as though he can see because experience tells him what stimuli and contexts have desirable outcomes when he walks forward.

We are often mystified about how a dog could possibly not "understand" some cue. I think the mystery goes away if we stop thinking that it's a rational process and start realizing that the dog is just unconsciously sorting out how the current context and stimuli compare to her previous experiences. One little change in the context or stimuli -- a new scent, a change in wind direction, some internal sensation such as hunger -- might make it impossible for her to recognize this as a "similar" situation to one she has experience with, while our rational abilities tell us that that scent, wind direction, or internal sensation has nothing to do with the cue we're giving her and the behavior we're asking for.

I don't think I can prove to you, or to myself, that dogs don't "think". But I also don't think I can prove that they do.

LL&L