The State and Future of Dogs

Captivity is the state of being for our companion dogs, and as we’ve stressed, captivity carries significant costs. It’s not easy for dogs to live as our pets. Being “good dogs” requires a continual stream of limitations to their natural dogness. Regardless of whether dogs have “chosen” to evolve with us, they have very little choice in the specific human environments in which...

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Play - A Kaleidoscope of the Senses

We’ve left our discussion of social play behavior until the end because play is a kaleidoscope of the senses. Play nicely draws together our discussion of how dogs use their senses in tandem to understand and interact with the world, other dogs, and humans. Play obviously involves sight and touch, as dogs watch one another closely and chase, mouth, and wrestle with one another....

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses - Hearing

Dogs’ ears come in many shapes and sizes — long and short, floppy and erect, and all variations in between. Dogs’ ears are surprisingly mobile. More than eighteen muscles control the pinna, or earflap, alone, which allows the nuanced movements that make dogs’ ears so expressive and so good at picking up sounds. Dogs move their ears to communicate how they are feeling. They...

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses - Sight

We tend to think of humans as visual mammals and dogs as olfactory and auditory mammals, but science is challenging these stereotypes. The visual world we make available to our dogs is worth considering because it can impact their well-being. Let’s consider the canine visual cosm...

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses - Touch

Touch, like the other senses, has many facets. In this chapter, we consider touch very broadly, so that it includes not just dogs’ physical contact with the world but also their interactions with their physical environment and with other dogs and peop...

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses - Smell

We begin with the sense of smell, which plays the lead role in a dog’s experiential world. A dog’s world is a continuous cacophony and symphony of odors swirling around and into their noses. As “nosed animals,” a term we borrow from Alexandra Horowitz, dogs live in, and are consumed by, a world of smells.1 Our human sensory experience is dominated by sight, so to understand...

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Canine Captives

 Unleashing Your Dog is a field guide to living with dogs in ways that enhance everyone’s quality of life and that expand the freedom for dogs to really be dogs. Leashes are symbolic of our complicated relationship with our canine companions: They literally tie us together, one on each end. To people, the leash represents going out into the world with our dogs and giving them...

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses - Taste

A dog’s sense of taste is far less sensitive than our own. Dogs only have around 1,700 taste buds, whereas we have about 9,000. Humans can taste all five flavors: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (savory). Dogs (as far as we know) taste only salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. It’s interesting to note how much variation there is in how well and what sorts of things animals...

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Exercising and Enhancing the Senses

If it’s true that dogs are captive animals — because their experience of the world is largely, if not totally, influenced by what we, their caregivers, provide for them — then we can make our dogs’ lives better by improving their environments and interactions in their terms. We can protect them from the stressful aspects of human environments, allow them as much freedom as...

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