spiritdogs
I think that dogs clearly communicate intent and there's not much that is reflexive about defending a bone. Some dogs will not do it, in fact. Others will clearly use distance increasing signals, or launch an aggressive response. Pit Bulls, as a breed, are one of the only breeds that do not display the way other dogs do, and I believe that it isn't because they don't have a reflex, I believe it's because they developed it as a survival mechanism for the fighting ring which was selectively bred by humans.
Hi, SpiritDogs,
Thanks for your reply.
Just to clear up one point, I never said that pit bulls don't have the lip-curling reflex, just that a pit I knew named Augie Doggie didn't have it (though parts of your discussion about pit bulls may be relevant to why he didn't have it).
As to your statement that "dogs clearly communicate intent," I would offer that that's probably based primarily on human projection; we tend to project our own kinds of thought processes onto our pets, especially when there's a momentary lull in the action. We see that little lacuna and we unconsciously say to ourselves, "He's thinking about it..." Then, after the lull, when the dog finally takes action on whatever stimulus or situation he was presented with, we're convinced that his behavior was the result of a very deliberate and conscious, internal thought process, when it's more likely the result of an internal emotional process: i.e., the dog "feels" out the situation (rather than thinking it through) before acting.
Also, in order for you to show that "dogs clearly communicate intent," you would have to explain how a dog is a) consciously aware of his own internal states, b) consciously aware that other beings have internal states similar and dissimilar to his, and c) you would have to explain how a dog can exert conscious control over the movements of his body parts in order to communicate information about himself to those other beings.
Helen Keller said that before she learned to use sign language she had no awareness of her own internal states. This would strongly indicate that the use of some kind of language, written, spoken, or signed, is a necessary prerequisite for the first level of intent I described in my article (and paraphrased in the above paragraph). If this is so, then in order for your statement "dogs clearly communicate intent" to be so, it would mean that dogs have the ability to use language, written, spoken, or signed. (If I'm not mistaken, I think you mentioned in another post that this is part of what you believe about dogs.) But in order for that to be true we'd have to get into a debate about if and how and why evolution would provide dogs with a linguistic ability without also providing them a means of speaking, writing, or signing their thoughts through words.
Don't get me wrong. I think dogs are amazing animals. And I think they're one of the most expressive species as well. In fact one of the most interesting things about dogs is their ability to exhibit reflexive behaviors (such as a play bow) and fixed-action patterns (like the stalking behavior) in a complex variety of ways, where other animals can't; their fixed-action patterns are far more fixed than what we see in dogs, who seem to be able to improvise on those patterns the way jazz musicians improvise on a fixed melody line. This ability of dogs to "improvise," which I think comes from their emotional flexibility, may be one reason so many people, scientists included, believe that dogs are thinking things through rather than acting on pure instinct or emotion. So what I'm trying to get at in this article is whether dogs' abilities to communicate are based on deliberate, conscious thought processes, or pure emotion (or some other facility, such as telepathy, which has been proposed by Oxford's Rupert Sheldrake and veteran dog trainer William Campbell).
As for the main thrust of my article, whether dogs have the ability to form the intent to report information, and therefore have the ability to consciously use their body language to do so, I think that is quite worthy of discussion. The main reason is because far too many people who believe their dogs can think -- that their dogs "know what they did was wrong," or that they do things deliberately, etc. -- end up mistreating their dogs as a result. If we can educate people that dogs are feeling beings, but that they don't do things "on purpose," or "deliberately," or with malicious intent, then fewer dogs will be hurt of mistreated or misunderstood.
That's my hope, anyway.
LCK
I also disagree with the idea of "distance-increasing signals." But that's a topic for another day.