Dogs don’t perceive the world the same way we do. You had better think about that when training, or making demands of, a dog.
While humans and dogs have a similar three level afferent (inward conducting) neural pathway, transmitting sensory information towards the brain, the dogs brain processes that information for different priorities. As that information flows towards the cerebral cortex, the dog’s brain has fewer neurons and connections for developing perceptions than those available to the significantly larger human cerebral cortex. Dogs brains have different interpretations, experiences, understanding, memories, and sets of learned or innate responses.
What does that mean?
The larger, more connected, more capable brain of a human integrates the picture of what can be experienced into what is important to a human. That might seem to be an absolute advantage, but it is not.
What dogs “see” is what is important to a dog. Humans can usually see the “whole” differently than a dog, however sometimes dogs make that leap and see things as we would, in situations that we would never expect a dog to understand. Those times with dogs are rare and we can’t count on them in the everyday training or management of most dogs.
Thus, dogs “see” (smell, see, hear, feel, etc.) things that we can’t see, or at least in ways we can’t see. That’s one major reason why dogs are so valuable as working dogs. Dogs also do different things with those perceptions, such as running faster than a human, or indicating scents that are not detectable to a human, or biting into or fighting with other animals or humans in a way that we would not want to do.
These differing perceptions are what makes dog management and training more of a challenge than most people realize, for the dog trainer, the owner, and the dog. If we think a dog sees something the same way we do, then we will set up programs, and expect results, that would be appropriate for a human. Often, we are being unfair to dogs because their perceptions are significantly different than ours. We see a flicker of light on a wall, and we recognize it is coming from the reflected light off our watch. The dog sees that flicker of light, and it triggers the dog to check it out as if it might be a bug crawling up a wall. Our dog startles, runs to a window while barking, while we didn’t hear anything, and we are irritated that the dog is making it hard to hear someone talking. We want a dog to stay out of the kitchen, but the dog can’t tell where the eating area stops and where the kitchen area begins, yet we still get angry at the dog.
There are even finer discriminations that come into play with working dogs and the difficult tasks we expect of them. This is why dog training has specialties, since each discipline takes many years to develop and test programs that work for those sets of tasks. Add in the various breed and temperament differences of individual dogs, and you can understand why you don’t see a lot of trainers that can do everything (regardless of what their marketing claims). How a coonhound sees a set up training problem is significantly different than how a greyhound would perceive the same training situation. How a Malinois sees a training situation is different than how a Rottweiler sees that same situation. Dogs also don’t see things the same way as a cat, horse, or bird. People get in trouble when they know other species well, and then apply the same logic to a dog. Appropriate adjustments need to be made.
There was an experiment, awful in its design and application, that punished dogs that couldn’t discriminate the difference between a circle and an oval. When the dogs got the wrong answer, they were punished with an electric shock. When the circles and ovals were so similar that the dogs couldn’t tell the difference, the dogs had horrible mental breakdowns. For most humans, they would have quit the test at some point knowing that the experiment wasn’t fair. We probably would have just gotten angry and complained instead of falling apart. Unfortunately, we do similarly unfair things to dogs, and they develop behavioral disturbances. A good example is the development of separation anxiety. When a dog can’t figure out what is going on, the breakdown can be mild to severe anxiety, loud distress vocalizations, and often significant destructiveness.
Dogs aren’t humans. Training should take that into account, especially when dogs are having trouble living up to our expectations and perceptions. They don’t perceive things the way we do. That is a good thing when properly appreciated.
Plan accordingly.