When I was about 6, I was bitten pretty badly on the back of one leg by a neighbor’s German shepherd that saw me running around in circles and mistook me for fleeing prey. It had the effect of making me look at dogs differently than most people. In even the smallest dog I could see the teeth, the potential for rage, and I felt an inability to know what they were really thinking or feeling. Unlike humans, you couldn’t communicate easily with a dog, and I wondered at people’s willingness to raise the sharp toothed creatures and treat them like their children.
When I was perhaps 10, I lost my fear of dogs. I had a friend who was a few years older, who every kid on the street admired for his bravery, his athleticism, and his collection of martial arts weaponry. A bunch of us were in a large field when 2 doberman pinchers appeared at the far end of the field and started approaching us, snarling. My friend ran away from us, and away from the dogs, and they took chase after him. But then he turned and ran straight at them being noisy and flapping his arms, and they became confused, and ended up running from him. I realized then that dogs were vulnerable creatures, and easily manipulated by human intelligence. I started to see better how dogs have many states of mind, which vary between individuals. As you can see from my paintings of the terribly sweet Lara and the very inquisitive Tank, I have attempted through painting to capture the essence of some of the dogs I know. My fiancee and I recently rescued a beautiful puppy that’s a German shepherd mix of some type, named her Bizou, and she’s now part of our family. She gives us play bites sometimes, but they don’t hurt.
Yet some part of me remains aware that models for predicting behavior can be seriously flawed.
Sometimes our models are flawed because in making our models for animal behavior we are getting confused about the true causes. The dog is barking because its territory is being infringed, not because it doesn’t like someone.
Sometimes they are flawed because the models are only predictors of what usually happens, and don’t account for extreme situations. Like a polar bear deciding it wants to play with a husky (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/play/audiogallery/soundseen.shtml#slideshow).
And sometimes our models don’t accurately reflect what usually happens, because we are kept ignorant of behavior or choose to avoid observing true behavior. Like the vicious fighting engaged in by giraffes trying to establish dominance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HCIGFdBt8).
With animals, when our models fail to make accurate predictions, we call it wildness. And yet perhaps unpredictability is more a fault of our ability to model, of our internal capabilities, than it is a characteristic of the animal. The animal is likely acting on a complex chain of cause and effect relationships, which we don’t understand, but that are still there. If that’s true, real wildness lies in ourselves.
Update, 9/28/07: Some animals, once trained, are more likely to hold to that conditioning than others, at least until a powerful environmental stimulus causes them to forget their conditioning. We consider such animals domesticable, and think of their character as reverting to one that is more wild. But in this use of the word “wild” we often mean behavior we would find predictable (e.g., the dog will chase a skunk), but tried to condition out of the animal. My conclusion is that wildness has two definitions: one is based on the unpredictability we feel about nature, and the other just means acting as they would in nature without human agency or conditioning even if we find such acts predictable. In this second sense, the dog isn’t really acting wild, it’s acting natural, as if “in the wild”.
