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What is it like to be a dog?

In her new book, Alexandra Horowitz evokes the dog’s perspective by interweaving the science of dog cognition and perception with personal reflections on her own dog’s behavior. Ranging from what it might be like to be able to smell sadness in humans or the passage of time; how the smallest Chihuahua can play with the most formidable Great Dane; the experience of hearing the hum of fluorescent lights; to why some dogs relentlessly pursue bicycle or ball, Inside of a Dog gives us insights into how dogs view the world. This book gives anyone who lives with, deals with, or admires dogs a new understanding of their sensory abilities, a nuanced interpretation of their behavior, and an appreciation of their minds.

Excerpts from Inside of a Dog

Chapter 1: 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 his folded legs on a dog bed, or sprawled on his 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 him. 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 which 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; of course they dream and think; they also 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 he is 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 shows on cable TV. 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.  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 would have regularly anthropomorphized in an attempt to explain and predict the behavior of other animals, including those they might want to eat or which might want to eat them. Imagine encountering a strange, bright-eyed jaguar at dusk in the forest, and looking squarely in its 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 high-tailing 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 his clutches. Instead, we are bringing animals inside and asking them to become members of our families. For that purpose, 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 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 claiming, say, depression from the evidence before us: the mournful eyes, the loud sigh. 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 his mouth; such a “smile”, however, can be misleading. On dolphins, 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 farthest thing from happiness. Similarly, a human might raise her eyebrows in surprise, but the eyebrow-raising capuchin monkey is not surprised. He is evincing neither skepticism nor alarm; instead, he is signaling to nearby monkeys that he has friendly designs. By contrast, among baboons a raised brow can be a deliberate threat (lesson: be careful toward which monkey you raise your eyebrows). The onus is on us to find a way to confirm or refute these claims we make of animals….

Chapter 3: Sniff

First sniff of the day: Pump wanders into the living room in the morning while I am dishing out her food. She’s looking sleepy but her nose is wide awake, stretching every which way as though doing morning exercises. She reaches her nose toward the food without committing her body, and sniffs. A look at me. Another sniff. A judgment has been levied. She backs from the bowl and forgives me by nosing my outstretched hand, her whiskers tickling while her moist nose examines my palm. We go outside and her nose is gymnastic, almost prehensile, happily taking in smells that gust by…

We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment. The room I’m in right now is a phantasmagoric mix of colors and surfaces and densities, of small movements and shadows and lights. Oh, and if I really call my attention to it I can smell the coffee on the table next to me, and maybe the fresh scent of the book cracked open—but only if I dig my nose into its pages.

Not only are we not always smelling, but when we do notice a smell it is usually because it is a good smell, or a bad one: it’s rarely just a source of information. We find most odors either alluring or repulsive; few have the neutral character that visual perceptions do. We savor or avoid them. My current world seems relatively odorless. But it is most decidedly not free of smell. Our own weak olfactory sense has, no doubt, limited our curiosity about what the world smells like. A growing coalition of scientists is working to change that—and what they have found about olfactory animals, dogs included, is enough to make us envy those nose-creatures. As we see the world, the dog smells it. The dog’s universe is a stratum of complex odors. The world of scents is at least as rich as the world of sight

Sniffers
…Her ungulate-grazing sniff, nose deep in a patch of good grass, trawling the ground and not coming up for air; the examinatory sniff, judging a proffered hand; the alarm-clock sniff, close enough to my sleeping face to tickle me awake with her whiskers; the contemplative sniff, nose held high in the wake of a breeze. All followed by a half-sneeze—just the CHOO, no AH—as though to clear her nostrils of whatever molecule she’d just inhaled.

Dogs don’t act on the world by handling objects or by eyeballing them, as people might, or by pointing and asking others to act on the object (as the timid might); instead, they bravely stride right up to a new, unknown object, stretch their magnificent snouts within millimeters of it, and take a nice deep sniff. That dog nose, in most breeds, is anything but subtle. The snout holding the nose projects forth to examine a new person seconds before the dog himself arrives on the scene. And the sniffer is not just an ornament atop the muzzle; it is the leading, moist headliner. What its prominence suggests, and what all science confirms, is that the dog is a creature of the nose.

The sniff is the great medium for getting smelly objects to the dog, the tramway on which chemical odors speed up to the waiting receptor cells along the caverns of the dog nose. Sniffing is the action of inhaling air, but it is more active than that, usually involving short, sharp bursts of drawing air into the nose. Everyone sniffs—to clear the nose, to smell dinner cooking, as part of a preparatory inhale. Humans even sniff emotively, or meaningfully—to express disdain, contempt, surprise, and as punctuation at a sentence’s end. Animals mostly sniff, as far as we know, to investigate the world. Elephants raise their trunk into the air in a “periscope sniff”; tortoises slowly reach and open their nostrils wide in a sniff; marmosets sniff while they nuzzle. Ethologists watching animals often take note of all these sniffs, for they may precede an attempt to mate, a social interaction, aggression, or feeding. They record an animal as “sniffing” when it brings its nose close to—but not touching—the ground or an object, or an object is brought close to—but not touching—the nose. In these cases, they are assuming that the animal is in fact inhaling sharply—but they may not be able to get close enough to the animal to see the nostrils moving, or the tiny vortex of air that stirs the area in front of the nose.

Few have looked closely at exactly what happens in a sniff. But recently some researchers have used a specialized photographic method that shows air flow in order to detect when, and how, dogs are sniffing. They have found that the sniff is nothing to be sniffed at. In fact one could make the case that it is neither a single nor a simple inhalation. The sniff begins with muscles in the nostrils straining to draw a current of air into them—this allows a large amount of any air-based odorant to enter the nose. At the same time, the air already in the nose has to be displaced. Again, the nostrils quiver slightly to push the present air deeper into the nose, or off through slits in the side of the nose and backward, out the nose and out of the way. In this way, inhaled odors don’t need to jostle with the air already in the nose for access to the lining of the nose. Here’s why this is particularly special: the photography also reveals that the slight wind generated by the exhale in fact helps to pull more of the new scent in, by creating a current of air over it.

This action is markedly different from human sniffing, with our clumsy “in through one nostril hole, out through the same hole” method. If we want to get a good smell of something, we have to sniff-hyperventilate, inhaling repeatedly without strongly exhaling. Dogs naturally create tiny wind currents in exhalations which hurry the inhalations in. So for dogs, the sniff includes an exhaled component that helps the sniffer smell. This is visible: watch for a small puff of dust rising up from the ground as a dog investigates it with his nose.

Given our tendency to find so many smells disgusting, we should all celebrate that our olfactory system adapts to an odor in the environment: over time, if we stay in one place, the intensity of every smell diminishes until we don’t notice it at all. The first smell of coffee brewing in the morning: fantastic…and gone in a few minutes. The first smell of something rotting under the porch: nauseating…and gone in a few minutes. The sniffing method of dogs enables them to avoid habituation to the olfactory topography of the world: they are continually refreshing the scent in their nose, as though shifting their gaze to get another look….

Chapter 7: Canine anthropologists

I am I because my little dog knows me (Gertrude Stein)

The dog’s gaze is an examination, a regard: a gaze at another animate creature. He sees us, which might imply that he thinks about us—and we like to be considered. Naturally we wonder, in that moment of shared gaze, Is the dog thinking about us the way we are thinking about the dog? What does he know about us?

We are known by our dogs—probably far better than we know them. They are the consummate eavesdroppers and peeping toms: let into the privacy of our rooms, they quietly spy on our every move. They know about our comings and goings. They come to know our habits: how long we spend in the bathroom, how long we spend in front of the television. They know who we sleep with; what we eat; what we eat too much of; who we sleep too much with. They watch us like no other animal watches us. We share our homes with uncounted numbers of mice, millipedes, and mites: none bothers to look our way. We open our door and see pigeons, squirrels, and assorted flying bugs; they barely notice us. Dogs, by contrast, watch us from across the room, from the window, and out of the corner of their eyes. Their watching is enabled by a subtle but powerful ability which begins with simple vision. Sight is used to pay visual attention, and visual attention is used to see what we attend to. In some ways this is similar to us, but in other ways it surpasses human capacity.

The blind and the deaf sometimes keep dogs to see or hear the world for them. For some disabled persons, a dog may enable movement through a world they cannot navigate alone. Just as for the physically impaired dogs can act as eyes, ears, and feet, so also do they act as readers of human behavior for some autistic individuals. Persons with any kind of autism spectrum disorder are united by their shared inability to understand the expressions, emotions, and perspectives of other people. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes, for an autistic person who keeps dogs, the dogs may seem to be human-mind-readers. While an autistic person cannot parse a brow furrowed with concern, or interpret the rising tone indicating someone’s fright or worry, the dog is sensitive to the mindset behind them.

Dogs are anthropologists among us. They are students of behavior, observing us in the way that the science of anthropology teaches its practitioners to look at humans. As adults, we walk among other humans largely without examining them closely, socially trained to keep to ourselves. Even with those we know best, we might stop attending to the minute changes in their expressions, their moods, their outlooks. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that as children we are little scientists, forming theories about the world and testing them by acting. If so, we are scientists who hone our skills only to later neglect them. We mature by learning how people behave, but eventually we pay less attention to how others are behaving at every instant. We outgrow the habit of looking. A curious child stares with fascination at the stranger limping down the street: he will be taught this is not polite. A child might be enraptured by a swirl of fallen leaves on the pavement; by adulthood, he will overlook it. The child wonders at our crying, monitors our smiles, looks where we look; with age we are all still able to do all this, but we fall out of the habit.

Dogs don’t stop looking—at the gimpy walk, at a rush of leaves tumbling down the sidewalk, at our faces. The urban dog may be bereft of natural sights, but he is rich in the odd: the drunken man swerving through crowd; the shouting sidewalk preacher; the lame and destitute. All get long stares from the dogs who pass them. What makes dogs good anthropologists is that they are so attuned to humans: they notice what is typical, and what is different. And, just as crucially, they don’t become inured to us, as we do—nor do they grow up to be us….

About the Author

Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years she shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and served on the staff of The New Yorker. She and her husband live in new York City with Finnegan, a dog of indeterminate parentage and determinate character.

Available at:

Amazon UK

Amazon US