My dog Harry sat in front of me, staring into my eyes. I couldn’t discern an expression of any type and his head was not tilted as it so often did when he was trying to understand me. He obviously wanted something, but what? The quick mental list all dog parents (and parents I imagine) run through had all boxes checked: he’d been fed, gone out recently, had a long sniff walk earlier in the day, and even finished a game of Go Find It with treats in the living room.
I used the words that usually made his tail wag uncontrollably:treat, walk, outside, scratch, with no response except a slight wag at treat, and he definitely didn’t need more of those. I sat, hoping he’d give some clue, and then eventually was pulled into a screen as so often happens in modern life.
I suddenly realized how silly it is that I’d logged hundreds of hours of orangutan and elephant observations at the Los Angeles Zoo and studied comparative primate morphology, biopsychology, and cognition at University of Chicago, but couldn’t figure out what my sweet dog wanted in this moment.
Eventually he jumped up beside me on the couch and snuggled in for a rest. I came to learn over time that he did this sort of blank staring when he was overly tired, and was expressing his desire to be in a bed where he could nest, moving a blanket just so as he turned in a circle before finally plopping down.
My studies had not prepared me for the intricacies of living with a Canis lupus familiaris. Why is it expected that humans and certain other animals can make an easy life together? My experience has been that there takes a great deal of careful work to understand another species when human language is out of the question and we can only see things from our perspective.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time living among animals, yet we rarely stop to consider what it’s like to be the other species in the room.
What does science actually tell us about the minds of the animals we live alongside?
A dog isn’t just a creature whose behavior needs explaining. A cat isn’t just a pet with quirks. A zoo animal isn’t just an interesting subject for scientific observation. They’re other minds, sharing our homes, our cities, our institutions, and our world, and we’re trying to understand them with the only mind we have: a human one.
Join me as I combine animal behavior, cognition, science, and storytelling, to explore what we know about the minds of animals and what we can never quite know. I’ll examine the ways we communicate, misunderstand, care for, study, and live with other species, and ask what those relationships reveal about both animals and ourselves.
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