Clive Wynne founded the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University and is director of research at Wolf Park, Indiana. His new book is Dog is Love courtesy Quercus Books
CLIVE WYNNE has long been fascinated by other creatures’ minds. He studied the behaviour of pigeons, rats and marsupials, but came to realise that he was more interested in how people and other species interact with each other. So he shifted his focus to dogs, the animal we have the longest and most intimate relationship with.
At that time, the idea was emerging that what makes dogs unique is their ability to read human gestures. It began with a simple experiment: a piece of food is hidden under one of two cups, but the dog doesn’t know which. A human then points at the cup with the food and the dog follows their gesture to it. Simple enough, right? Yet experiments showed that other species, even chimps, couldn’t do it. Dogs, it seemed, were geniuses at social cognition.
Yet as Wynne dug into this idea, it started to fall apart. Instead, he began to think that what set dogs apart was something much more woolly: love. As his new book Dog is Love details, finding rigorous ways to test this idea wasn’t simple.
TO’C: What made you suspicious of “dog genius” 鈥 the idea that dogs have a special kind of intelligence for understanding humans?
CW: I don’t deny that our dogs are exquisitely sensitive to the things that we do. Certainly, dogs that live with people and are completely dependent on people for the fulfilment of all of their needs are sensitive to everything that…
