I Go Out Walking

I went for three walks yesterday.  The first one was just out behind the paddock.  There is large, flat area beyond the fence--it's covered densely with sagebrush and cholla.

 There's one  narrow path that winds through the bushes and cacti.  When I first started walking in that area, I couldn't see that there was a path at all and every time I walked there, I sort of randomly wove my way through the field to the large collection of boulders at the far end.  Once, though, I stumbled across the path and realized that it was there.  From then on, whenever I walked in the area I tried to locate and stay on the path.  I made progress over time:  now, once I'm on it I can easily see that it is a path. However, if I'm standing at the edge of the field looking for the path, I still have a hard time seeing where it starts.  A few days ago, S the blind dog was with me (the blind part is important here) and we were milling around in the area toward the beginning of the path.

S. is very obsessed with tennis balls. When he has one, there's little else he notices.  He likes to go on walks with me, and the walks for him are really just a series of periods where he stands around playing with the ball in one place, alternated with short jogs with the ball in his mouth to catch up, only to stand around play with the ball in that new place.

A few days ago on our walk, he had caught up with me and was playing with his ball, clutching it between his two front paws, and pretending every so often that it got away, chasing it down, and pouncing on it.  All of the sudden he turned his attention away from the ball and started to walk off through the sagebrush.  I couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing.  He never loses interest in his ball when he's playing with it.  Well, unless one of the cats runs by.  And where was he going?  The field is littered with cholla and prickly pear and unless he's right with me he runs into them.  He never runs off on his own.

I was about fifteen feet off and couldn't see him through the sagebrush.  I called for him to come back and still didn't see him so I started off toward where I thought he was.  And then I came across the path.  He was running up the path ahead of me, clearly with some object in mind, and then he suddenly stopped at a sage bush.  I didn't see anything on the bush.  I did, however, notice some fairly fresh coyote scat just a foot or two away from it, on the side of the trail.  I imagine a coyote had marked the bush with its urine.   Now I understood what had happened.  He had caught the scent of the coyote urine on the bush and went off in search of it.  He found the path and followed it to the bush.

After he finished sniffing (which took a good five minutes; I wish I understood what goes on in a dog's head during that smelling period; obviously some kind of information is being gathered), I gave him his ball which I had brought with me, and he trotted off up the path to where it meets up with an open area with a few juniper trees, with the ball in his mouth.  He stopped and played with the ball in the soft soil under the trees.  I kept on walking a bit further down the trail.  He eventually followed me, with his ball.  The trail begins to narrow after a point, down to a narrow rut, and there are a few prickly pears cactuses right on its edge.  If you aren't placing one foot exactly in front of the other, it would be easy to step on one of the cactuses.

Right before that area he stopped and began to whine.  I tried to coax him on, but he turned on his heels and trotted back down the path toward the paddock, in the direction of the house, with his ball in his mouth.  The whole path, I should say, is very narrow and has lots of little jigs and jogs where it turns to one side or the other to go around a sagebrush.  He followed every little turn until he was back at the paddock, which is generally free of brush and cactus.   Every so often he turned to make sure I was following.  I got the message that he didn't want to go for a walk.

I hesitate to infer specific mental states from the behaviors of human beings or dogs. For example, I know in the case of humans, because I can check my inferences through discussion with them, that my inferences are sometimes mistaken.  I sometimes infer from some one's facial expression that they're angry with me or upset about something, only to find out that they were feeling and thinking something completely different.  It's even more difficult to infer what dogs are thinking from their behavior, since we can't use words as a means of cross-checking our inferences.

Some would hesitate to assign any kind of consciousness to non-human animals I would not go that far.  It often seems to me that I have more in common with my dogs and cats than with many human beings.  The behavior and thinking of people attending Black Friday events, for example, is completely alien to me, as is much of that surrounding sports, celebrities, child rearing, religion, politics, etc.  My dogs and cats and I, however, engage in shared activities, have a common environment, and many of the same things catch our interest.  We communicate through gestures and body language, words, and sounds.

Yoga Dog

Admittedly, even though we engage in shared activities and a common environment, there are differences close to the surface.  For example, even though my dog and I might spend the afternoon in the living room together, he's dozing on the couch and at the same time, listening intently for the presence of one of the cats so he can chase her.  My attention, on the other hand, is on my computer; I'm reading things that other humans have written about politics and science, reading updates on Facebook, checking my e-mail.

I bring up this bit about the similarities and differences between my dogs and me, me and other humans, and the making of inferences from behaviors to states of mind, because I wanted to first describe the walk I took with my dog and then draw some conclusions about the meaning of my dog's behavior.   But looking back over my story about the walk with S., I see that I had already used a mixture of description and inference.  Unless you're extremely careful, it's very difficult to merely describe the behavior of animals you are familiar with, as opposed to interpreting the meaning of those behaviors.  [Here, by interpreting meaning I mean something like infer a mental state, such as an intention, a thought, or a feeling.]

Note:  I have much more to say on this subject and on my other walks, but if I only publish blog posts when I'm finished saying what I have to say  on a given subject, nothing will ever get published.  I started this blog post about a week ago and I've been sitting on it, with the idea that I have more to add.  But in the meantime the world and I have marched on, and there are other things that are now more at the forefront of my thinking that I'd like to be writing about.  So, this post is going up.  I'm constantly struggling to attain the elusive midpoint between acceptance of absolute crap and perfection, between incompleteness and completeness.  If I accept absolute crap from myself in writing, I can publish a lot; if I hold out for perfection, nothing gets published.