Bad Dog

As a psychologist and a dog lover, I considered the July 2 front-page article ["That Hangdog Look Might Not Be What You Think"] on Alexandra Horowitz's study of dogs and emotions entertaining. But I found it hard to take either the story or the experiment seriously.

The experiment itself seems to confuse canine pack behavior with command-and-control. Any properly socialized dog will respond to its alpha human with submissiveness gestures if the human expresses displeasure. This does not mean the dog experiences guilt in a human sense -- that requires mapping an action to an internal moral code. In dogs, the closest thing to such a code may be the hard-wired mandate: "Do not displease the alpha." And the dogs in this experiment apparently acted in accordance with this.

The experiment also introduced an inappropriate time variable: People commanded their dogs not to eat a treat and then left the room. The researcher took an action with the treat, the people returned, and the researcher said what had happened (sometimes truthfully, sometimes not). Time passed between the command and the owners' return. But dogs have limited time perception, which is why an inappropriate canine action must be corrected immediately, so the dog associates the correction with the mistake. Time between action and correction means the dog cannot know why it is being corrected, so it reverts to "do not displease the alpha" behavior. This proves nothing about "guilt" at all.

As for comments by the reporter and the researcher on dog "owners," I would suggest that since humans provide dogs with food, shelter, exercise, health care and waste-products cleanup, the question of who owns whom is an open one.

MARK J. ESTREN

McLean