Fae is a very good girl with an odd habit of collecting her humans' shoes. Photo / Anna Sherman
Humans and dogs have lived alongside one another for thousands of years, and our two species get along remarkably well. But there are still misunderstandings.
“People have an intuition about dogs’ emotions,” said Clive Wynne, director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. “And yet, in fact, in an objective test, they’re really quite bad at it.”
We asked Washington Post readers and staff to submit questions about their dogs’ bizarre behaviours, and then we asked three experts to explain.
Anna Sherman says she’s stumped by why her dog Fae steals Sherman’s shoes and brings them into her dog bed.
The experts suggested this might be Fae’s way of saying “I love you”.
Karen Jesch, a PhD student at the Boston College Canine Cognition Centre, said that your pet prefers your smell to that of an unfamiliar human or dog and that the part of their brain that’s associated with love and affection lights up when they smell a familiar human.
“Shoes have a very strong smell. But really importantly, that smell belongs to us,” Jesch said. “My hypothesis would probably be that the dog is just taking something that smells a lot like their human. And it could maybe be a way of keeping that reminder of their favourite person close by.”
Wynne noted that shoes don’t smell gross to dogs.
“Shoes are generally packed full with the intense smell of their owner,” Wynne said. “Dogs, generally speaking, are very driven by olfaction and don’t have any of our disgust at certain kinds of smells that we would rather keep away from.”
He guessed that Fae does this only when her owners aren’t home – which Sherman confirmed.
“There’s something comforting about keeping the strong smell of a beloved human as close as possible,” Wynne said.
Gracie, a 9-year-old border collie mix, is generally a vocal dog. But her owner, our colleague Sheila Hayes, wanted to know why Gracie howls at the radio, specifically NPR – and only at NPR?
Wolves use howling as a “rallying call” to let members of their pack know their location. They can hear one another from miles away. Many of their domesticated descendants still howl, with some dogs even matching the pitch of music.
“Our dog, when I was a kid, used to start howling when my dad would start playing the violin, and we all thought it was just part of a family-wide cry of despair that this awful noise was going to start up again,” Wynne said. “But in reality, the tones of the violin were triggering something in that little dog’s brain that reminded him of rallying calls.”
Wynne had two theories to explain Gracie’s behaviour. Either the frequency of the radio is making her think another dog is talking to her and she’s trying to answer. Or the howling happened coincidentally once when NPR was on, and her human was so charmed by it that Gracie made it a habit.
“It could be that there was a random sound on NPR, maybe even, who knows, a report about wolves,” Wynne said.
If the dog’s owners reacted and gave her attention, the behaviour was reinforced.
“Any behaviour that’s rewarded is more likely to be repeated in the future,” Wynne said.
Several people asked why their dogs move their food before eating it.
Amy Brittain’s dog, Dolly, carries her food by the mouthful from her bowl to the living room every day so she can eat it on the rug. Fahey House’s Westie, Marlie, pushes her food out of her bowl and on to the pad underneath.
Jesch said it’s probably a matter of comfort.
“Some dogs might find their bowl uncomfortable,” Jesch said. “Maybe the bowl slides around when they’re trying to eat out of it. Maybe their name tag clinks on a metal bowl and they don’t really like that sound very much.”
Moving food is something canines do in the wild.
When feral dogs “find food, they don’t just eat it right where they are”, said Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and director of the Duke Puppy Kindergarten. “They may take it back to their den, they might have to feed puppies.”
Experts said it may be about guarding resources, especially if the dog shares the home with other pets or kids. But it may also be personal preference, another way that humans and dogs are similar. You may prefer to eat at the kitchen counter or a table, or maybe take your food and eat sitting on the couch.
Judy Zone in Salt Lake City wrote in with a puzzler.
“Our English bulldog is obsessed with traffic cones and swings,” Zone said. “We have yet to purchase her an outdoor swing … but we have purchased her traffic cones that she works hard to destroy.”
Woods said that most dogs have an instinctive desire to pull things apart but that they all like different materials.
“Some of them are real stuffy killers,” she said. “They’ll just murder every stuffy in the room. … It looks like the bulldog just really likes that kind of texture. That’s really his jam.”
Jesch guessed that both the swing-chasing and the traffic-cone-destroying behaviours are connected to the inherited instinct of the predatory sequence – search, chase, grab, dissect, eat.
“One of the pieces in there is dissect. And so it is just an instinct for animals, when you chase something and you acquire it, the next step is to pull it apart,” Jesch said.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.