Dogs are Dogs: Isn't that Enough?

As I look into the dark brown eyes of my dog, Scout, I am deeply moved.  She seems to understand me, seems to reflect back the love and admiration I feel for her.  Is it unreasonable to suppose that she is feeling the same emotions for me as I am for her, as a recent New YorkTimes Op-Ed piece has suggested?

Yes.  And here’s why.  Dogs are not people, and should not be judged in relation to people.  While your dog may love you as deeply as a dog can love a human, to confuse dog love for human love is to project our own emotional states onto dogs, and at the same time, to deny dogs their true nature.  This tendency to attribute human-like motives, beliefs, and emotions to other animals is called anthropomorphism, and is deeply ingrained in human ways of thinking about non-human things. 

While such anthropomorphic attitudes may be relatively harmless in many everyday circumstances, it has no place in science.  In my own field of comparative cognition – which seeks to understand how evolution and experience combine to create complex behavior – anthropomorphism has long been rejected on scientific grounds.  It simply fails to take account of the remarkably diverse ways in which different animals are put together – the unique evolutionary adaptations that have given rise to different sensory and nervous systems that combine to produce distinctively different perspectives on the world. 

Rather than projecting human-like traits onto other animals, scientists seek instead an animal-centered view that uses the latest science as a guide to how other animals perceive, learn, remember, and so on.  Part of what this science tells us is that dogs – perhaps by virtue of thousands of years of cohabitation with humans – are highly attuned to human behavior.  Dogs have been shown to respond to subtle facial and gestural cues of humans, and to establish and sustain eye contact with people in ways that are distinctive among animal species.

This is perhaps a unique adaptation that has grown out of centuries of shared contact with humans.  But what is not unique to dogs is their attraction to rewarding stimuli (including food, physical contact, and stimuli associated with them).  This tendency is shared by virtually every species on the planet, from fruit flies to primates (including the human kind).  As we’ve learned more about the brain (partly through MRI studies like those described by Professor Berns), we’ve come to appreciate some of the ways in which the neural underpinnings of reward-motivated action are shared across species.  

But a brain state is seldom activated by a single type of stimulus event, and thus to conclude similar cognitive or subjective states on the basis of similar brain activation (the main thrust of Professor Berns’ argument) suffers from what neuroscientists call the reverse inference problem.  That is, we notice that brain state A (say, activity in the caudate nucleus of a dog’s brain) is activated by stimulus X (say, an image of food), and that brain state A has also been shown in other studies with humans to respond to stimulus Y (say, a monetary reward), we conclude that stimuli X and Y engage similar subjective states.  This is a dubious practice, even when confined to a single species, and highly questionable when applied across species. 

Even if we were to accept Professor Berns’ claim that similar subjective states are involved in dogs and people, what are we to make of his further recommendation to grant personhood to dogs?  Given the cross-species generality in basic reward learning, and the brain mechanisms associated with it, should we not also be prepared to grant personhood to other species in whom reward-based brain changes occur?  The list would be long, including fellow mammals, such as rodents and primates, but also birds, reptiles, crustaceans, fish, and insects.  

The point in restricting human rights to humans is not to separate humans from the rest of nature, but to recognize that human rights, such as personhood, are human constructions that are appropriate to human societies.  To extend these to other animals is to project our own human-centric biases into domains where they don’t belong.  This not only runs counter to the latest science of animal cognition, it is ultimately disrespectful to other animals.  Dogs deserve our respect and admiration, not because they are like us, but because they what they are – astonishingly beautiful and intelligent animals with whom we have been fortunate to share some time on this planet.  Shouldn’t that be enough?