This is a Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier guest post. After some brief sidequests LiC AMT is back on her main quest, which is Dogs. I mean, also linguistics, which is mentioned briefly here, but she mainly writes to other people about linguistics.

I should begin this post with one of those painfully sincere apologies that the internet seems to demand from a certain class of influencer and politician: Friends, readers, I have been unfaithful to my dogs. I went for a girls relaxing weekend on an island of wine tastings and lake swims, and I fell for the charms of Maggie, the chocolate lab our host was dog-sitting.

When I drove up the driveway for the first time on Saturday morning, I heard some deep but mellow woof-barks, and then saw a solid chunk of dog barreling towards me to sniff my belongings and nudge my legs. She followed me to the open trunk and noted immediately that the bag I was unloading contained some little dog treats. She sat expectantly, twitched her lips, and gently scarfed them from my offered hand.

A human called out as yet unseen from the deck: “Hello! Have you met Maggie?” … I explained I had already given her a treat. My priorities were praised.   

Ten minutes later I went out to explore the path from the house down to the lake, and immediately I had a co-conspirator gamboling past me across the grass, past the household cats, prancing down the stairs and floating bridge to the dock. We examined the water, the sticks in the grass, the eagle across the lake in a tall tree. Maggie looked suspicious off the dock but was happy to wade in the shallows and chew the occasional reed. The onlooking cats looked even more suspicious. Maggie suggested we go back inside, and so we climbed back to the other human residents.

On Sunday morning, Maggie took me for what I thought was going to be a spritely trail walk to an old railway trestle bridge. Clearly having appointed herself my tour guide, she explained on the way back that I would repay her kindness by letting us run home. I was neither prepared or dressed for this choice, but SHE WAS SO HAPPY to run with me that I ran much of the 4km wearing glasses and too many layers. Along the way, she took breaks to sniff grass and pee carefully on rocks and then would BEAM at me and return to her comfortable trotting speed. Turns out Maggie’s usual humans include a marathoner and a cyclist so I understand that I was scratching an itch for her, and when we got home she wagged her whole body to report our adventures to our hosts, and almost immediately fell asleep.

… But not for long! Because shortly after our exertions I screwed up my resolve to swim in the bracingly cold lake, and so headed back to the dock with human and canine observers. Maggie’s hydrophobia meant she would not join me (a great bonus, as concerns not having to dry her off afterwards) but it also meant that the further I swam, the more concerned whimpering and tip-tapping she would perform on the dock, pacing back and forth a bit and perhaps psyching herself up to come rescue me if absolutely necessary. The water was very cold but it was truly not an emergency; the other human tried to be reassuring, but I soon swam back to soothe her nerves. To celebrate my survival, she licked my face so hard I almost fell back off the ladder into the lake. There was much sweet rejoicing.

***

Now, I have a more important apology and confession. I have been failing utterly to read the current popular literature on dog cognition. For context: I have been planning to spend an upcoming sabbatical turning from my normal study of child language acquisition to questions of canine perception and comprehension of human speech, and I would like to write about the topic for something beyond a purely academic audience. And as concerns the existing literature: turns out I cannot bear its bullshit. This sounds harshly arrogant and overgeneralizing of me, but I have come to see that it’s on the whole true, and so I must decide what to do about it.

In writing out my weekend report of meeting Maggie above, there is a very clear distillation of the problem. If Maggie had been a human I met for the first time – more specifically, say Maggie had been a young child just beginning to learn English as a second language -- I would have equally been able to tell you that she had led me somewhere to show me something, or that she had watched me doing something with consternation, expressed her fear for my safety, roused the intense suspicions of the cats, and so on. I would have been relying on similar cues from my observation, rather than directly quoting the motives and attitudes she had narrated to me herself. With further evidence, and/or more experience with Maggie, you or I might question some of my initial interpretations of this child’s behaviour or vocalizations -- At a particular moment, was she scared or annoyed? Did she want me to play with that toy alongside her, or just observe her playing with it? — But there would be no need for me to explain how or convince you that Maggie could, in principle, want me to do things, intend to communicate ideas or suggest activities, remember previous incidents with the cat and choose to act (for good or ill) accordingly. I might be wrong about what was in her mind, and I could even mistakenly attribute intentions to her that are beyond her current mind -- but you wouldn’t need me to convince you she HAS a mind.

However. HOWEVER. When non-fiction literature discusses dogs, this common ground is bafflingly impossible. Either the authors give you gee whiz bestest doggies! prose, in which scientific substance is on equal footing as “my Pomeranian predicted the Oscars”, or they are so virulently, unrepentantly behaviorist that they condescending explain that dogs have no personalities, minds, thoughts or emotions, but merely act like they love us because we trained their black box nervous systems to do so. I … don’t even know where to begin with this dichotomy, other than to say that I’m really not exaggerating it as much as you think I am. Even the author whom I would rate as the most impressive and empirically-sound dog cognition writer has a recent book in which I searched the first forty pages to find barely two insights. To be clear -- I am sure this person DOES have many, many more insights to provide, after decades of study, but it would seem that insight has been left out, which in turn makes me suspect that the received wisdom says there is no audience for them. 

Can it really be so rare to care about the truth and the facts and the science of dog cognition while also not thinking it aggressively delusional to infer from dogs’ observable behaviour that they have too have minds? And thus, can I not write about it? Will no one want to read it? Will no one be given the chance to have it sold to them? … If I can’t read any of my alleged competitors’ books without throwing them across the room, I am a little unsure about how to proceed.

Anyway, at least you’ve had a collection of Maggie pics to enjoy, while I think about what to try next.