Another in a series of posts about what dogs think.

When my dogs eat their own feces or gobble up donkey manure by the mouth full, I often feel disgusted.

But what about the dogs themselves? Are they ever disgusted, and by what? When dogs lick their testicles or roll in manure and mud, we take this to mean they lack any sense of shame or disgust.

But look at it from their point of view.

We like to eat oranges and squeeze fresh lemons, but if I offer citrus to my dogs (don’t try this at home), I see a range of disgust responses – curled up lips, drooling, and retreat from the sour smell.

The food we see as healthy and refreshing is often revolting to my dogs. Do they ever wonder if I am disgusting?

I’ve often wondered which emotions make us human and separate us from dogs. Most biologists single out disgust, guilt, and shame as uniquely human emotions. They have long argued that animals possess only a handful of emotions, never mix them up, and don’t experience them the way we do.

Shame and guilt, in particular, require a level of self-awareness that most animal species are believed to lack.

People often tell me their dogs look guilty when they are scolded or do something wrong, but most vets will tell you that a frightened dog looks the same as a “guilty” dog.

Guilt implies conscience, and I’ve never seen a dog exhibit guilt for any natural behavior. When Bud kills a chipmunk, he looks quite natural, neither guilty nor joyous. It is just life.

My dogs always look uneasy when I scold them or tell them to stop doing something. Assuming they have the conscience and consciousness to feel guilty about it is a big leap that many dog lovers are quick to make.

In his landmark book Mama’s Last Hug,  biologist  Frans DeWAAL admits he isn’t sure anymore that animals have far fewer emotions than people.

“More and more I believe that all the emotions we are familiar with can be found one way or another in all mammals and that the variation is only in the details, elaborations, applications, and intensity,” he writes.

But that is a lot of variation for non-biologists to understand.

The problem is how we process and sort all of this out in the human language. I can describe what I feel, but my dogs can’t. And the only way to talk about what they feel is to talk about it in our language since they don’t have one we can identify.

When people tell me what their dogs are thinking, I know they can’t possibly know that because dogs can’t tell us what they are thinking beyond surface movements and postures.

Few people I know are objective about what their dogs feel and think because our relationships with dogs have become so intimate and so emotional. We have no perspective.

Emotions exist outside of and beyond language. I learn a lot about what dogs are thinking from their facial expressions and body language. Are their ears back, is their tail wagging, are their eyes wide, are they standing or lying down, moving forward or freezing?

Emotions are observable, but feelings are private. I have no idea what is going on inside of Zinnia’s big and beautiful head.

When pet owners come home and discover mayhem and rule-breaking – chewed up sofas and pillows, mangled shoes – they know who did it.

While the guilty dog is being scolded, he refuses to look up and adopts a submissive posture. But even though the people will see the dog as guilty, there is really no evidence that the dog feels anything like remorse.

More likely, say biologists, he knows that there is trouble, which makes him anxious – the physical symptoms in a dog for anxiety are the same as humans assume guilt.

Chimpanzees say De Waal, crawl in the dust for their leader, lower their body to look up at him, or turn their rump toward him, putting themselves in a vulnerable position. I’ve seen my dogs do the same thing when they meet larger or more aggressive dogs.

Or when I get angry. Are they reacting instinctively to a kind of danger, or are they really trying to apologize to me?

From what I’ve read, the behavior of dogs after a transgression is perhaps best understood not as an expression of guilt but as the typical attitude of the member of a hierarchical species in the presence of an annoyed dominant figure: a mixture of submission and appeasement that serves to reduce the likelihood of punishment or attack.

It works, too, when I see my dogs look so unhappy and submissive when they are in trouble. I usually back off right away, assuming they have learned their lesson (not!) Another way in which they have learned to manipulate us.

They might have all of our emotions, but we can’t know because we insist on projecting our human neuroses onto them.

When behaviorists and trainers want to get a depressed or lethargic dog to get moving, they will often first get another dog to rub against their clothes and lick their hands. When the patient smells this, he or she gets fascinated and excited, not envious.

People insist on believing that their dogs get jealous when they pet another dog, but in fact, this importing of smells is often used as a reward or a stimulant.

Dogs love to study the smell of another dog; they learn all about this mysterious new member of the species by their smell. For them, it’s like watching a Superhero movie – a treat and delight. There is no evidence of any kind that dogs feel or understand envy when their human brings dog smells home.

This is the problem when we think we know what our dogs think. We assume they must be thinking the way we think, and nobody in science or biology believes that is remotely possible.

As we emotionalize our dogs, we project more and more of us onto them.  If you ever watch the news, you will see that this is doing them no favor. They are far superior to us in many ways, and they lack many of our worst traits.

The idea of the abused dog has become central to the emotionalizing of them. People assume that almost any behavioral or aggression problem was caused by abuse, especially if their dog was rescued. There is real and serious dog abuse in the world. Still, researchers believe the extent of dog abuse has been greatly exaggerated, often by rescue workers and shelter workers anxious to find homes for the needy dogs.

Many people tell me that rescuing a dog is the only proper moral way to get one and that any other way is immoral. I respond by telling them they are no f riends of dogs or the people who love them.

My own sense of dogs and animals like donkeys is that they live in the moment. They don’t worry about the future or even know it exists. They don’t fear death because they don’t know about it.

They very naturally do what humans almost never do – accept their lives and live in the moment. And sit in judgment of other animals or envy their lives.

There are good rescue groups and bad ones, good breeders, and bad ones. The good ones – I got Zinnia from one – work hard to preserve dogs’ health and good temperament. Any rational dog lover would be grateful to them for that.

But that’s the problem with figuring out dogs’ emotions – the visions of the people who love them are clouded, sometimes drowned – by emotion.

More later.