Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

by Alexandra Horowitz

Overview

NOW FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED! The beloved #1 New York Times bestseller that “causes one’s dog-loving heart to flutter with astonishment and gratitude” (The New York Times Book Review).

The instant classic on the mind of the dog is now updated to include the latest results in the booming field of dog cognition. What do dogs know? How do they think? The answers will surprise and delight you as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Inside of a Dog is a fresh look at the world of dogs—from the dog’s point of view.

In clear, crisp prose, Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draws a picture of what it might be like to be a dog. What’s it like to be able to smell not just every bit of open food in the house but also to smell human emotions and even the passage of time? What is it like to have such good hearing that they notice the bodily vibrations of insects and the hum of a fluorescent light? Horowitz’s engaging narrative allows us to replace our urge to anthropomorphize dogs with a true understanding of the canine experience. What’s it like to use your mouth as a hand? How does a tiny dog manage to play successfully with a Great Dane? Why must a person on a bicycle be chased?

This fully revised and updated edition also reflects the latest findings on canine perception, dogs’ understanding of our emotions and of our language, and the evolving story of domestication. Some discoveries are not only informative but curiously amusing, such as dogs’ asymmetrical nostril use and their alignment with the earth’s magnetic field when pooing.

Much more than a scientific exploration; Inside of a Dog is a love letter to dogs, filled with personal observations and practical advice for people who live with dogs. With a light touch and the weight of scientific authority behind her, Horowitz offers an unparalleled exploration into the minds of our beloved four-legged companions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668087374
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Horowitz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation; Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell; Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond; and The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She teaches at Barnard College, where she runs the Dog Cognition Lab. She lives with her family of Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, and Felis catus in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

1. Umwelt: From the Dog’s Point of Nose Umwelt: From the Dog’s Point of Nose
This morning I was awakened by Pump coming over to the bed and sniffing emphatically at me, millimeters away, her whiskers grazing my lips, to see if I was awake or alive or me. She punctuates her rousing with an exclamatory sneeze directly in my face. I open my eyes and she is gazing at me, smiling, panting a hello.

Go look at a dog. Go on, look—maybe at one lying near you right now, curled around their folded legs on a dog bed, or sprawled on their side on the tile floor, paws flitting through the pasture of a dream. Take a good look—and now forget everything you know about this or any dog.

This is admittedly a ridiculous exhortation: I don’t really expect that you could easily forget even the name or favored food or unique profile of your dog, let alone everything about them. I think of the exercise as analogous to asking a newcomer to meditation to enter into satori, the highest state, on the first go: aim for it, and see how far you get. Science, aiming for objectivity, requires that one becomes aware of prior prejudices and personal perspective. What we’ll find, in looking at dogs through a scientific lens, is that some of what we think we know about dogs is entirely borne out; other things that appear patently true are, on closer examination, more doubtful than we thought. And by looking at our dogs from another perspective—from the perspective of the dog—we can see new things that don’t naturally occur to those of us encumbered with human brains. So the best way to begin understanding dogs is by forgetting what we think we know.

The first things to forget are anthropomorphisms. We see, talk about, and imagine dogs’ behavior from a human-biased perspective, imposing our own emotions and thoughts on these furred creatures. Of course, we’ll say, dogs love and desire just like we do; of course they dream and think as we do; they know and understand us, feel bored, get jealous, and get depressed. What could be a more natural explanation of a dog staring dolefully at you as you leave the house for the day than that they are depressed that you’re going?

The answer is: an explanation based in what dogs actually have the capacity to feel, know, and understand. We use these words, these anthropomorphisms, to help us make sense of dogs’ behavior. Naturally, we are intrinsically prejudiced toward human experiences, which leads us to understand animals’ experiences only to the extent that they match our own. We remember stories that confirm our descriptions of animals and conveniently forget those that do not. And we do not hesitate to assert “facts” about apes or dogs or elephants or any animal without proper evidence. For many of us, our interaction with non-pet animals begins and ends with our staring at them at zoos or watching nature shows. The amount of useful information we can get from this kind of eavesdropping is limited: such a passive encounter reveals even less than we get from glancing in a neighbor’s window as we walk by.I At least the neighbor is of our own species.

Anthropomorphisms are not inherently odious. They are born of attempts to understand the world, not to subvert it. Our human ancestors regularly anthropomorphized in an attempt to explain and predict the weather, natural phenomena, and the behavior of other animals, including those they might want to eat or that might want to eat them. Imagine encountering a strange, bright-eyed jaguar at dusk in the forest, and looking squarely in the jaguar’s eyes looking squarely into yours. At that moment, a little meditation on what you might be thinking “if you were the jaguar” would probably be due—and would lead to your hightailing it away from the cat. Humans endured: the attribution was, if not true, at least true enough.

Typically, though, we are no longer in the position of needing to imagine the jaguar’s desires in time to escape their clutches. Instead we are bringing animals inside and asking them to become members of our families. For that purpose, even while they may pique our interest in an animal, reflexive anthropomorphisms fail to help us incorporate those animals into our homes, and have the smoothest, fullest relationships with them. This is not to say that we’re always wrong with our attributions: it absolutely might be true that our dog is sad, jealous, inquisitive, depressed—or desiring a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But we are almost certainly not justified in concluding, say, depression from simply the evidence before us: the mournful eyes, the loud sigh. We assume too much, too quickly. Our projections onto animals are often impoverished—or entirely off the mark. We might judge an animal to be happy when we see an upturn of the corners of the mouth; such a “smile,” however, can be misleading. On dolphins and the adorable axolotl, the smile is a fixed physiological feature, immutable like the creepily painted face of a clown. Among chimpanzees, a grin is a sign of fear or submission, the furthest thing from happiness. Similarly, a human might raise their eyebrows in surprise, but the eyebrow-raising capuchin monkey is not surprised. They are evincing neither skepticism nor alarm; instead they are signaling to nearby monkeys that they have friendly designs. By contrast, among baboons a raised brow can be a deliberate threat (lesson: be careful which monkey you raise your eyebrows toward). The onus is on us to find a way to confirm or refute these claims we make of animals. (Even if you’ve never consciously noticed dogs raise their eyebrows at you, they do, and the big-eyed look that results is essential to the “puppy-dog eyes” we love so much. So much, in fact, that dogs who do it are adopted more quickly from shelters than those who don’t.)

It may seem a benign slip to go from sad eyes to claiming major depressive disorder, but anthropomorphisms can slide from benign to harmful. Some risk the welfare of the animals under consideration. If we’re to put a dog on antidepressants based on our interpretation of their eyes, we had better be pretty sure of our interpretation. When we assume we know what is best for an animal, extrapolating from what is best for us or any person, we may inadvertently be acting at cross-purposes with our aims.

For instance, consider the farmed mink, raised for their fur (and we should consider them: even in 2024, 1.3 million were killed for their pelts in the U.S.). Minks are housed in small wire-mesh cages with little but water, a nesting box, and mush for food. Attempts to improve their short lives might imagine providing them with more space or better food—the kinds of things we would like if in such impoverished environments. When provided with more space, though—or toys or another nesting site—accessible through weighted doors, what one group of minks preferred more than anything else was access to a small pool of water to swim in. The little minks continued to work to get to the pool, even when the door to the pool got twice as heavy, then twice as heavy again, until they were pushing as hard as they could against doors two times their weight. And when access to the pool was temporarily blocked, their cortisol—stress—rates spiked—just as much as when they were temporarily deprived of food.

For humans, swimming is a luxury, often a pleasure; we do not expect that we’ll always have access to a pool or that having such access is necessary for life. From the mink’s perspective, while swimming isn’t technically necessary for life, in the wild it would be the stuff of life. In the wild they would be swimming and diving daily, following currents of smell and pursuing prey. If we try to improve their welfare within the captive context by thinking about what we’d like, a pool might not come to mind. Similarly, cows will work hard to get access to outside, as hard as they would work for food when really hungry. They will take a little hunger; they just don’t like to be inside.
Do our anthropomorphic tendencies ever miss so fabulously with dogs? Without a doubt they do. Take raincoats. There are some interesting assumptions involved in the creation and purchase of tiny, stylish, four-armed rain slickers for dogs. Let’s put aside the question of whether dogs prefer a bright yellow slicker, a tartan pattern, or a raining-cats-and-dogs motif (clearly they prefer the cats and dogs). Many people who dress their dogs in coats have the best intentions: they have noticed, perhaps, that their dogs resist going outside when it rains. It seems reasonable to extrapolate from that observation to the conclusion that they dislike the rain.

They dislike the rain. What is meant by that? It is that they must dislike getting the rain on their body, the way many of us do—and thus, like us, they’d like a raincoat. But is that a sound leap? In this case, there is plenty of seeming evidence from the dog themself. Is the dog excited and wagging when you get the raincoat out? That seems to support the leap... or, instead, the conclusion that they realize that the appearance of the coat predicts a long-awaited walk, just as a guide dog recognizes that they are on duty when in harness, and off duty when the harness is off. Does the dog flee from the coat? Curl their tail under their body and duck their head? Undermines the leap—though does not discredit it outright. Do they look bedraggled when wet? Do they shake the water off excitedly? Neither confirmatory nor disconfirming of their feelings about a raincoat. The dog is being a little opaque.

Here the natural behavior of related, wild canines proves the most informative about what the dog might think about a raincoat. Both dogs and wolves have, clearly, their own coats permanently affixed. One coat is enough: when it rains, wolves may seek shelter, but they do not cover themselves with natural materials. That does not argue for the need of or interest in raincoats. And besides being a jacket, the raincoat is also one distinctive thing: a close, even pressing, covering of the back, chest, and sometimes the head. There are occasions when wolves get pressed upon the back or head: older wolves might scold a younger one, pinning them down by the snout. This is called muzzle biting, and accounts, perhaps, for why muzzled dogs sometimes seem preternaturally subdued. And a dog who “stands over” another dog is being dominant. The subordinate dog in that arrangement would feel the pressure of the other animal on their body. The raincoat might well reproduce that feeling. So the principal experience of wearing a coat is not the experience of feeling protected from wetness; rather, the coat produces the discomfiting feeling that someone higher ranking than you is nearby.

This interpretation is borne out by most dogs’ behavior when getting put into a raincoat: they may freeze in place as they are “dominated.” You might see the same behavior when a dog resisting a bath suddenly stops struggling when they get fully sodden or covered with a heavy, wet towel. The be-jacketed dog may cooperate in going out, but not because they like the coat; it is because they have been subdued.II And they will wind up being less wet, but it is we who care about the planning for that, not the dog. Similarly with winter coats: while dogs who shiver in the cold may benefit from them, most dogs’ behavior indicates they do not need or desire them. (And in all cases, should you want to keep your dog warm, a coat that covers the belly, which is usually less hairy and thus more exposed, would be in order, not one that covers the back.) The way around this kind of misstep is to replace our anthropomorphizing instinct with a behavior-reading instinct. In most cases, this is simple: we must ask dogs what they want. You need only know how to translate their answer.
Here is our first tool to getting that answer: imagining the point of view of the dog. The scientific study of animals was changed by an Estonian-born biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uexküll. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt (pronounced OOM-velt): their subjective or “self-world.” Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal. Consider, for instance, the lowly deer tick. Those of you who have spent long minutes hesitatingly petting the body of a dog for the telltale pinhead that indicates a tick swollen with blood may have already considered the tick. And you probably consider the tick as a pest, period. Barely even an animal. Von Uexküll considered, instead, what it might be like from the tick’s point of view.

A little background: ticks are parasites. Members of Arachnida, a class that includes spiders and other eight-leggers, they have a simple body type and powerful jaws. Thousands of generations of evolution have pared their life to the straightforward: birth, mating, eating, and dying. Born legless and without sex organs, they soon grow these parts, mate, and climb to a high perch—say, a blade of grass. Here’s where their tale gets striking. Of all the sights, sounds, and odors of the world, the adult tick is waiting for just one. It is not looking around: ticks are blind. No sound bothers the tick: sounds are irrelevant to its goal. It only awaits the approach of a single smell: a whiff of butyric acid, a fatty acid emitted by warm-blooded creatures (we sometimes smell it in sweat). It might wait here for a day, a month, or a dozen years. But as soon as it smells the odor it is fixed on, it drops from its perch. Then a second sensory ability kicks in. Its skin is photosensitive, and can detect warmth. The tick directs itself toward warmth. If it’s lucky, the warm, sweaty smell is an animal, and the tick grasps on and drinks a meal of blood. After feeding once, it drops, lays eggs, and dies.

The point of this tale of the tick is that the tick’s self-world is different from ours in unimagined wys: what it senses or wants; what its goals are. To the tick, the complexity of persons is reduced to two stimuli: smell and warmth—and it is very intent on those two things. If we want to understand the life of any animal, we need to know what things are meaningful to them. The first way to discover this is to determine what the animal can perceive: what they can see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense. Only objects that are perceived can have meaning to the animal; the rest are not even noticed, or all seem the same. The wind that whisks through the grasses? Irrelevant to the tick. The sounds of a childhood birthday party? Don’t appear on its radar. The delicious cake crumbs on the ground? Leave the tick cold.

Second, how does the animal act on the world? The tick mates, waits, drops, and feeds. So the objects of the universe, for the tick, are divided into ticks and non-ticks; things one can or cannot wait upon; surfaces one might or might not drop onto; and substances one may or may not want to feed on.

Thus, these two components—perception and action—largely define and circumscribe the world for every living thing. All animals have their own umwelten—their own subjective realities, what von Uexküll thought of as “soap bubbles” with them forever caught within. We humans are enclosed in our own soap bubbles, too. In each of our self-worlds, for instance, we are very attentive to where other people are and what they are doing or saying. (By contrast, imagine the tick’s indifference to even our most moving monologues.) We see in the visual range of light, we hear audible noises, and we smell strong odors placed in front of our noses. On top of that, each individual creates their own personal umwelt, full of objects with special meaning to them. You can most clearly see this last fact by letting yourself be led through an unknown city by a native. They will steer you along a path obvious to them, but invisible to you. But the two of you share some things: neither of you is likely to stop and listen to the ultrasonic cry of a nearby bat; neither of you smells what the man passing you had for dinner last night (unless it involved a lot of garlic). We, the ticks, and every other animal dovetail into our environment: we are bombarded with stimuli, but only a very few are meaningful to us.

The same object, then, will be seen (or, better, sensed—some animals do not see well or at all) by different animals differently. A rose is a rose is a rose. Or is it? To a human a rose is a certain kind of flower, a gift between lovers, and a thing of beauty. To the beetle, a rose is perhaps an entire territory, with places to hide (on the underside of a leaf, invisible to aerial predators), hunt (in the head of the flower where ant nymphs grow), and lay eggs (in the joint of the leaf and stem). To the elephant, it is a thorn barely detectable underfoot.

And to the dog, what is a rose? As we’ll see, this depends upon the construction of the dog, both in body and brain. As it turns out, to the dog, a rose is neither a thing of beauty nor a world unto itself. A rose is undistinguished from the rest of the plant matter surrounding it—unless it has been urinated upon by another dog, stepped on by another animal, or handled by the dog’s person. Then it gains vivid interest, and becomes far more significant to the dog than even the well-presented rose is to us.
Discerning the salient elements in an animal’s world—their umwelt—is, in a sense, becoming an expert on the animal: whether a tick, a dog, or a human being. And it will be our tool for resolving the tension between what we think we know about dogs, and what they are actually doing. Yet without anthropomorphisms we would seem to have little vocabulary with which to describe their perceived experience.

Understanding a dog’s perspective—through understanding their abilities, experience, and communication—provides that vocabulary. But we can’t translate it simply through an introspection that brings our own umwelt along. Most of us are not excellent smellers; to imagine being a smeller, we have to do more than just think on it. That kind of introspective exercise only works when paired with an understanding of how profound the difference in umwelt is between us and another animal.

We can glimpse this by “acting into” the umwelt of another animal, trying to embody the animal—mindful of the constraints our sensory system places on our ability to truly do so. Spending an afternoon at the height of a dog is surprising. Smelling (even with our impoverished schnozzes) every object we come across in a day closely and deeply yields a new dimension on otherwise familiar things. As you read this, try attending to all the sounds in the room you are in now that you have become accustomed to and usually tune out. With attention I suddenly hear the fan behind me, a beeping truck heading in reverse, the murmurations of a crowd of voices entering the building downstairs; someone adjusts their body in a wooden chair, my heart beats, I swallow, a page is turned. Were my hearing keener, I might notice the scratch of pen on paper across the room; the sound of a plant stretching in growth; the ultrasonic cries of the population of insects always underfoot. Might these noises be in the foreground in another animal’s sensory universe?
<figure> Even the objects in a room are not, in some sense, the same objects to another animal. A dog looking around a room does not think they are surrounded by human things; they see dog things. What we think an object is for, or what it makes us think of, may or may not match the dog’s idea of the object’s function or meaning. Objects are defined by how you can act upon them: what von Uexküll calls their functional tones—as though an object’s use rings bell-like when you set eyes on it. A dog may be indifferent to chairs, but if trained to jump on one, they learn that the chair has a sitting tone: it can be sat upon. Later, the dog might decide that other objects have a sitting tone: a sofa, a pile of pillows, the lap of a person on the floor. But other things that we identify as chair-like are not so seen by dogs: stools, tables, arms of couches. Stools and tables are in some other category of objects: obstacles, perhaps, in their path toward the eating tone of the kitchen.

Here we begin to see how the dog and the human overlap in our worldviews, and how we differ. A good many objects in the world have an eating tone to the dog—probably many more than we see as such. Feces just aren’t menu items for us; dogs disagree. Dogs may have tones that we don’t have at all—rolling tones, say: things that one might merrily roll in. Unless we are particularly playful or young, our list of rolling-tone objects is small to nil. And plenty of ordinary objects that have very specific meanings to us—forks, knives, hammers, pushpins, fans, clocks, on and on—have little or no meaning to dogs. To a dog, a hammer doesn’t exist... as we think of a hammer. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.

A clash of umwelts occurs when dog meets human, and it tends to result in people misunderstanding what their dog is doing. They aren’t seeing the world from the dog’s perspective: the way the dog sees it. For instance, some dog owners insist, in grave tones, that a dog is never to lie on the bed. To drum in the seriousness of this dictum, this person may go out and purchase what a pillow manufacturer has decided to label a “dog bed,” and place it on the floor. The dog will be encouraged to come and lie on this special bed, the non-forbidden bed. The dog typically will do so, reluctantly. And thus one might feel satisfied: another dog-human interaction successful!

But is it so? Many days I returned home to find a warm, rumpled pile of sheets on my bed where either the wagging dog who greeted me at the door, or some unseen sleepy intruder, recently lay. We have no trouble seeing the meaning of the beds to the human: the very names of the objects make the situation clear. The big bed is for people; the dog bed is for dogs. Human beds represent relaxation, may be expensively outfitted with specially chosen sheets, and display all manner of fluffed pillows; the dog bed is a place we would never think to sit, is (relatively) inexpensive, and is more likely to be adorned with chew toys than with pillows. What about to the dog? Initially, there’s not much difference between the beds—except, perhaps, that our bed is infinitely more desirable. Our beds smell like us, while the dog bed smells like whatever material the dog bed manufacturer had lying around (or, worse, cedar chips—overwhelming perfume to a dog but pleasant to us). And our beds are where we are: where we spend idle time, maybe shedding crumbs and clothes. The dog’s preference? Indisputably our bed. The dog does not know all the things about the bed that make it such a glaringly different object to us. They may, indeed, come to learn that there is something different about the bed—by getting repeatedly scolded for lying on it. Even then, what the dog knows is less “human bed” versus “dog bed” but “thing one gets yelled at for being on” versus “thing one does not get yelled at for being on.”

In the dog umwelt beds have no special functional tone. Dogs sleep and rest where they can, not on objects designated by people for those purposes. There may be a functional tone for places to sleep: dogs prefer places that allow them to lie down fully, where the temperature is desirable, where there are other members of their troop or family around, and where they are safe. For free-ranging dogs, that means resting some distance away from disturbances by people, and in the shade. For the dog in your home, most any flattish or softish surface satisfies these conditions. Make one fit these criteria, and your dog will probably come to find it just as desirable as your big, comfy human bed.
To bolster our claims about the experience or mind of a dog, we will learn how to ask the dog if we’re right. The trouble, of course, with asking dogs if they are happy or depressed is not that the question makes no sense. It’s that we are very poor at understanding their response. We’re made terribly lazy by language. I might guess at the reasons behind my friend’s recalcitrant, standoffish behavior for weeks, forming elaborate, psychologically complex descriptions of what her actions indicate about what she thinks I meant on some fraught occasion. But my best strategy by leaps is to simply ask her. She’ll tell me. Dogs, on the other hand, never answer in the way we’d hope: by replying in sentences, well punctuated and with italicized emphases. Still, if we look, they have plainly answered.

For instance, is a dog who watches you with a sigh as you prepare to leave for work depressed? Are dogs left at home all day pessimistic? Bored? Or just exhaling idly, preparing for a nap?

Looking at behavior to learn about an animal’s mental experience is precisely the idea behind some cleverly designed experiments. The researchers used not dogs, but that shopworn research subject, the rat studied in laboratories. The behavior of rats in cages may be the single largest contributor to the corpus of psychological knowledge. In most cases, the rats themselves are not of interest to the experimenter: the research isn’t about rats per se. Surprisingly, it’s about humans. The notion is that rats learn and remember by using some of the same mechanisms that humans use—but rats are easier to keep in tiny boxes and subject to restricted stimuli in the hopes of getting a response. And the millions of responses by millions of rats living in labs have greatly informed our understanding of human psychology.

But the rats themselves are intrinsically interesting as well. People who work with rats in laboratories sometimes describe their animals’ “depression” or their exuberant natures. Some rats seem lazy, some are cheery; some pessimistic, some optimistic. The researchers took two of these characterizations—pessimism and optimism—and gave them operational definitions: definitions in terms of behavior that allow us to determine whether real differences in the rats can be seen. Instead of simply extrapolating from how humans look when pessimistic, we can ask how a pessimistic rat might be distinguished by its behavior from an optimistic one.

Thus, the rats’ behavior was examined not as a mirror to our own but as indicating something about... rats: about rat preference and rat emotions. The researchers’ subjects were placed in tightly restricted environments: some were “unpredictable” environments, where the bedding, cage mates, and the light and dark schedule were always changing; others were stable, predictable environments. The experimental design took advantage of the fact that, hanging out in their cages with little to do, rats quickly learn to associate new events with simultaneously occurring phenomena. In this case, a particular pitch was played over speakers into the cages of the rats. It was a prompt to press a lever: the lever triggered the arrival of a pellet of food. When a different pitch was played and the rats pressed the lever, they were greeted with an unpleasant sound and no food. These rats, reliably like rats before them, quickly learned the association. They raced over to the food-dispensing lever only when the good-harbinger sound appeared, like young children rallied by the jingle of an ice-cream truck. All of the rats learned this easily. But when the rats were played a new sound, one between the two learned pitches, what the researchers found was that the rats’ environment mattered. Those who had been housed in a predictable environment interpreted the new sound to mean food; those in unstable environments did not.

These rats had learned optimism or pessimism about the world. To watch the rats in the predictable environments jump with alacrity at every new sound is to see optimism in action. Small changes in the environment were enough to prompt a large change in outlook.III Rat lab workers’ intuitions about the mood of their charges may be spot-on.

We can subject our intuitions about dogs to the same kind of analysis. For any anthropomorphism we use to describe our dogs, we can ask two questions: One, is there a natural behavior this action might have evolved from? And two, what would that anthropomorphic claim amount to if we deconstructed it?
Licks are Pump’s way of making contact, her hand outstretched for me. She greets me home with licks at my face as I bend to pet her; I get waking licks on my hand as I nap in a chair; she licks my legs thoroughly clean of salt after a run; sitting beside me, she pins my hand with her front leg and pushes open my fist to lick the soft warm flesh of my palm. I adore her licks.

I frequently hear dog owners verify their dogs’ love of them through the kisses delivered upon them when they return home. These “kisses” are licks: slobbery licks to the face; focused, exhaustive licking of the hand; solemn tongue-polishing of a limb. I confess that I treat Pump’s licks as a sign of affection. “Affection” and “love” are not just the recent constructs of a society that treats pets as little people, to be shod in shoes in bad weather, dressed up for Halloween, and indulged with spa days. Before there was any such thing as a doggy day care, Charles Darwin (who I feel confident never dressed up his pup as a witch or goblin) wrote of receiving lick-kisses from his dogs. He was certain of their meaning: dogs have, he wrote, a “striking way of exhibiting their affection, namely, by licking the hands or faces of their masters.” Was Darwin right? The kisses feel affectionate to me, but are they gestures of affection to the dog?

First, the bad news: researchers of wild canids—wolves, coyotes, foxes, and other wild dogs—report that puppies lick the face and muzzle of their mother when she returns from a hunt to her den—in order to get her to regurgitate for them. Licking around the mouth seems to be the cue that stimulates her to vomit up some nicely partially digested meat. How disappointed Pump must be that not a single time have I regurgitated half-eaten rabbit flesh for her.

Furthermore, our mouths taste great to dogs. Like wolves and humans, dogs have taste receptors for salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and even umami, the earthy, mushroomy-seaweedy flavor captured in the flavor-heightening monosodium glutamate. Their perception of sweetness is processed slightly differently than ours, in that salt enhances the experience of sweet tastes. The sweet receptors are particularly abundant in dogs, although some sweeteners—sucrose and fructose—activate the receptors more than others, such as glucose. This could be adaptive in an omnivore like the dog, for whom it pays to distinguish between ripe and non-ripe plants and fruit. (And dogs are omnivores, not obligate carnivores, as cats are, requiring the nutrients of meat to survive; dogs have even evolved more copies of a gene to break down starch than wolves have, allowing them to enjoy your bagel with you.) Interestingly, even pure salt doesn’t kick-start the so-called salt receptors on the tongue and the roof of the mouth in dogs the way it does in humans. (There’s some disagreement whether dogs have salt-specific receptors at all.) But it didn’t take long reflecting on her behavior for me to realize that Pump’s licks to my face often correlated with my face having just overseen the ingestion of a good amount of food.

Now the good news: as a result of this functional use of mouth licking—“kisses” to you and me—the behavior has become a ritualized greeting. In other words, it no longer serves only the function of asking for food; now it is used to say hello. Dogs and wolves muzzle-lick simply to welcome another dog back home, and to get an olfactory report of where the home-comer has been or what they have done. Mother dogs not only clean their pups by licking, they often give a few darting licks when reuniting after even a brief time apart. A younger or timid dog may lick the muzzle, or muzzle vicinity, of a bigger, threatening dog to appease them. Familiar dogs may exchange licks when meeting at the ends of their respective leashes on the street. It may serve as a way to confirm, through smell, that this dog storming toward them is who they think they are. Since these “greeting licks” are often accompanied by wagging tails, mouths opened playfully, and general excitement, it is not a stretch to say that the licks are a way to express happiness that you have returned.
I still talk about Pump’s looking “knowingly,” or feeling “content” or “capricious.” These are words that capture something to me. But I have no illusion that they map precisely to her experience. And I still adore her licks; but I also adore knowing what they mean to her rather than just what they mean to me.

By imagining the umwelt of dogs, we’ll be able to deconstruct other anthropomorphisms—of our dog’s guilt at chewing a shoe; of a pup’s revenge wrought on your new Hermès scarf—and reconstruct them with the dog’s understanding in mind. Trying to understand a dog’s perspective is like being an anthropologist in a foreign land—one peopled entirely by dogs. A perfect translation of every wag and woof may elude us, but simply looking closely will reveal a surprising amount. So let’s look closely at what the natives do.

In the following chapters we will consider the many dimensions contributing to a dog’s umwelt. The first dimension is historical: how dogs came from wolves, and how they are and are not wolflike. The choices we’ve made in breeding dogs led to some intentional designs and some unintended consequences. The next dimension comes from anatomy: the dog’s sensory capacity. We need to appreciate what the dog smells, sees, and hears... and if there are other means by which to sense the world. We must imagine the view from two feet off the ground, and from behind such a snout. Finally, the body of the dog leads us to the brain of the dog. We’ll look at the dog’s cognitive abilities, the knowledge of which can help us to translate their behavior. Together, these dimensions combine to provide answers to the questions of what dogs think, know, and understand. Ultimately they will serve as scientific building blocks for an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog: halfway to being honorary dogs ourselves.
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1. I. This was made most evident for me one day collecting data of the behavior of the white rhinoceros. At the Wild Animal Park it is the animals who roam (relatively) freely, and the visitors are restricted to trains that travel around the large enclosures. I was situated in the narrow patch of grass between the track and the fence, watching a typical day of rhino socializing. As the trains approached, the rhinos stopped what they were doing and moved quickly into a defensive huddle: standing with rumps together, heads radiating out in a rough sunburst. The animals are peaceful, but with poor vision they can be easily startled if they do not smell someone approaching, and they count on each other as lookouts. The train stopped, and everyone gaped at the rhinos who, it was announced by the guide, were “doing nothing.” Eventually the driver moved on, and the rhinos resumed their ordinary behavior.
2. II. This is similar to what was discovered by midcentury behaviorist researchers who exposed dogs used in laboratories to an electric shock from which they couldn’t escape. Later, put in a chamber from which there was a visible escape route, and shocked again, these dogs showed learned helplessness: they did not try to avoid the shock by escaping. Instead, they froze in place, sadly—seemingly resigned to their fate. The researchers had essentially trained the dogs to be submissive and accept their lack of control of the situation. (They later forced the dogs to unlearn the response and end the shock.) Happily, the days of experiments wherein we shock dogs to learn about their responses are (mostly) over.
3. III. Subsequent research has found that simply by being put into enriched environments—cages with places to hide and objects to interact with—rats living in cages in a lab become more optimistic.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Essential...for pet owners and students of animal behavior who have followed developments in the emerging field of comparative psychology." —-Library Journal Starred Review

Interviews

An interview with Alexandra Horowitz

What drove you to write this book?

I spent many years living with my own dog, Pumpernickel, and had what to dog owners will be a familiar range of questions about her behavior and experience: What does she do when I'm away from home? Is she bored? Happy? What does she dream about? Why does she roll in that? Pump was a great, unique character, and the longer I knew her, the more curious I became about her.

At the same time, I was working toward my doctorate in cognitive science. I became interested in what is now called "animal cognition": observing the behavior of animals to get an idea of their cognitive capacities. Notably, dogs were not a subject of study when I began: only apes and monkeys (and some other exceptional birds, etc.) were considered to be cognitively interesting -- presumably because of their close relation to humans. But it occurred to me, and to other scientists elsewhere at the same time, that dogs could be studied in the same way. That's when I began doing research observing dogs.

Since then, the study of dog cognition has taken off: there are now dozens of academic groups looking at dog behavior. Still, most academic research doesn't try to answer the kinds of questions I had about my own dog. I wrote the book as a way to make the recent research accessible to those interested in dogs, and to try to apply it toward those questions.

How is your book different than other dog books? Does the world need another book on dogs?

Despite the fabulous photo of a Great Dane's head on the cover (and verso) of the book jacket, I really don't think of my book as a typical "dog book." It is a book about using cognitive science to better imagine the minds of animals -- and the animal I focus on is the dog. It is also an attempt to answer the question "what is it like to be another animal?" -- a philosopher's question, but one that I think many people have about their pets or other animals they run across.

Within the category of books on dogs, I think there is a lot of territory that hasn't been covered yet. We are awash in training books, and in personal stories of cute, or bad, or heroic, or clever dogs. My book is not one of these. It is not a training book (though through a better understanding of his dog, an owner may come to train him better); and it is not a sentimental book (though it is full of the sentiment that comes with having a relationship with one of these magnificent creatures). Instead, this book is about imagining the dog's point of view: how the dog experiences the world; what he wants and needs; what he thinks about and understands. I think this is something we haven't done nearly enough of, especially considering how prevalent dogs are in our society, and in our days.

Could you explain the concept of a dog's "umwelt," which is a centerpiece of your book?

An animal's "umwelt" is what life is like to the animal: the animal's point of view. The idea is that to understand an animal, one has to appreciate how the world looks to the animal. And to do that, one needs to know what sensory equipment these animals have -- how good is their vision? what can they smell? can they detect electrical impulses? etc. --and the things in the world that are important to them. Humans are a big part of the "umwelten" of dogs -- but in a housefly's umwelt, for instance, we are pretty much indistinguishable from other mammals. On the other hand, the dog and the fly both share an acute perception of, and a fascination in locating, foul- smelling objects -- whereas such smells register to us, but only with a mind to avoid whatever the smell is.

In my book I encourage the reader to try to understand the dog better by paying more attention to what his umwelt is. What can the dog see, smell, hear? What does the dog think about and know about? What things are relevant to the dog, and what things are not? To grasp the dog's umwelt is to better appreciate what it is like to be a dog.

Can we know what is it like to be a dog, then? Do they see the world like we do?

I think it is not possible to know exactly what it's like to be a dog, just as it is impossible to know what it is like to be another person. But the more we know about the dog's abilities, both cognitively and perceptually, the better we are able to imagine what it might be like to be a dog.

We naturally imagine that dogs are more or less like us -- only less sophisticated, less smart, with less going on in their heads. This is simply wrong. When we realize what they can sense that we cannot, a new picture appears: one in which the dog is in an extraordinarily rich sensory world, with complex social interactions, and with a special ability to read our behavior. Dogs don't see the world like we do: they "see" mostly through smell -- both through the nose and a special organ called the "vomeronasal organ" in the roof of their mouths. Their vision is pretty good, not as finely detailed and colored as ours is, but it is secondary to their ability to see the world through their noses. Even imagining that is difficult for us vision-centered folks.

You write that we often misinterpret dogs' behavior. Can you give an example of how we do so?

Dogs are frequently treated as though all their behaviors map to human behavior. We call raising a paw "shaking hands" -- this is tongue-in-check, of course, but it is still surprising to learn that "shaking" is a submissive behavior of dogs, done to show that they are not threatening, and to avoid an attack. I certainly don't think that's what people intend to have the dog say with a shake.

My favorite example is of the dog "kiss": a dog's slobbering, rambunctious licking of our mouths when we return from being away is often considered to be a sign of his affection for us. But if we look at the behavior of their cousins and ancestors, wolves, we get a far different impression of this behavior. When a wolf return to the pack from a hunt, he or she is mobbed by his packmates -- who all lick madly at his mouth. What they are trying to do is to get the returning wolf to regurgitate some of the freshly killed meat he has eaten (which they often do).

So when your dog licks your mouth, he is probably doing something similar: seeing what you've eaten, and encouraging you to spit some of it up (they will never be unhappy if you do...unlike the others in your life who may kiss you on the mouth). On the other hand, it is still fair to call this behavior a "greeting" behavior -- one which despite its gory past, is also indication of recognition, familiarity, and -- perhaps! -- affection.

You write "dogs are anthropologists among us," What do they know about us?

Based on smell alone, they seem to know a lot about individuals. They can tell if you've recently had sex, smoked a cigarette, done these things one after another; they know if you've just eaten, or gone for a run, or pet another dog. They can smell your emotions: dogs have the ability to sense the hormones we exude when we are scared; they can most likely detect other emotions too.

Smell is not their only source of information about us. Dog owners are sometimes impressed how dogs know when they are packing for a trip, or getting ready for a walk. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Humans are creatures of habit, tending to act similarly when we get dressed, get ready to go, prepare dinner, etcetera. Dogs are very good at observing the series of events that leads to a consequence of interest (like a walk), and remembering the chain of events that preceded it. Sometimes it seems that dogs know our intent before even we do.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope people gain a new appreciation of just how different dogs are from what we ordinarily think -- and that people use this to build a new relationship with their dogs based on what the dog can understand and is interested in. I hope that people start taking their dog's umwelt into account -- and thus reconsider putting that raincoat on him, or pulling him away from a good smell, or keeping him from socializing with other dogs.

When people get a dog, one of the first things they set about doing is figuring out how to "train" him. I find this curious -- somewhat like schooling a newborn infant in the house rules as soon as he's home from the hospital. There are so many more compelling ways of dealing with dogs than just training them and then considering the interaction complete. If, instead, we live with them for a while, watch them, let them act doggily, and let them react to us and us react to them, we begin to forge a relationship that is far more interesting for all involved.

Editorial Reviews

In promotional copy, the publishers invite readers to think of this book as "Temple Grandin meets Stephen Pinker," a somewhat daunting assignment, not far wrong. As both a cognitive scientist and a dog-owner, Dr. Alexandra Horowitz has attentively studied both humans and canines. Her Inside of a Dog fulfills many pet lovers' fondest wish: to learn what Fido or Frida really thinks and knows. Scientific rigor, literary flair, and a most endearing subject. Enthusiastic reader response in hardcover; now in paperback.

Alexandra Horowitz's smart new book fills a niche in this field. Most authors seeking to explain canine minds are pushing a trendy training style or a worthy humane-treatment goal. Horowitz sets out to study dogs for their own fascinating sake…Inside of a Dog offers a thoughtful take on the interior life of the dog, a topic often left to poets and philosophers and Marley & Me. A Barnard psychologist, Horowitz doesn't deliver an academic monograph based on, say, freshly unearthed details about the wild dogs of the Siberian steppe. Rather, she mixes observations of her own dog with a breezy survey of animal-science literature as she ponders more basic questions about the pet dogs of the American living room: What's with the sniffing? Why do they bark? Oh, and do they actually like us? The result is a work long on insight and short on jargon.
—The Washington Post

Michael Schaffer

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. "Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance." They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz's book is a good step in that direction.
—The New York Times

Cathleen Schine

"Discover why your dog is so sensitive to your emotions, gaze, and body language. Dogs live in a world of ever-changing intricate detail of smell. Read this captivating book and enter the sensory world of your dog." — Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human

"Inside of a Dog is a most welcome authoritative, personal, and witty book about what it is like to be a dog. This engaging volume serves as a corrective to the many myths that circulate about just who our canine companions are. I hope this book enjoys the wide readership it deserves." — Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (with Jessica Pierce)

From the Publisher

A thoughtful take on the interior life of the dog...long on insight and short on jargon.”

Washington Post