How pets tell you what they want
Sometimes pet owners joke about how well a pet has "trained" us. But there's a reality behind the joke.
Are you ever aware of just how well your pet has learnt to influence you?
Because they do influence you. They notice what gets your attention, and what prompts you to do pet-friendly things like feed or cuddle or play with them. Then they keep doing those things. And you keep responding by feeding or cuddling or playing with the pet.
It does seem a lot like training...
Sometimes it's a sound the pet makes that gets you to do what it wants. Other times it's a party trick.
My dog Connor discovered a party trick, and then converted it into a man-training technique.
The party trick was to raise himself up on his butt and haunches, then wave his paws around in front of him. It's his penguin impression, or possibly meerkat. It is ridiculously cute. So cute, I took photos of it.
I'm not sure if Connor knew he was being photographed, but he sure noticed all the acclaim and delight his trick brought. So then he turned it to his advantage.
Connor's penguin pose became part of his attention-getting repertoire, slotted between "staring with pathos, especially over shoulder" and "barking at the man".
Lately, it's become clear that Connor has narrowed the purpose of the penguin pose, and refined its message. It's no longer a general attention-getting, boredom-fighting technique. It's now exclusively a method for saying "feed me", or more correctly and credibly, "I'm due for a feed or my regular evening treat".
Yes, that's true: he only seeks a feed when he really is due for one, and he needs to remind his humans of the situation.
It's as though Connor has come to several highly intelligent realisations. One, it's pretty pointless just getting your human's attention - you need to do something with it. Two, the best reason for getting attention is to get fed. And three, crying wolf is counterproductive - the human won't trust you if you overuse your precious food-lobbying technique.
That's some smart dog.
So now, when I see Connor in the penguin pose, I realise that he and Phoebe need to be fed. Connor understands the phrase "feed the dogs", so I say it to him. This sends him on a mission to find Phoebe and bully her to come with him to the kitchen, because he knows that the feeding is for both of them.
It means that Connor and I have "trained" each other. He's trained me to recognise his I-want-food posture, and I've since trained him to continue using it. Is that a bad thing? I'll come back to that.
It's not just dogs that learn ways to influence us. Cats do too.
A few years ago, researchers found that cats send a certain signal to motivate people to feed them. A cat imbeds a little urgent cry into its purr, which prompts its human to fill the food bowl. This mini-cry - something that happens naturally in a cat's purr every now and then - may work by activating a human's built-in tendency to be nurturing.
When the cat notices that the human responds to the mini-cry with food, it learns to exaggerate and use the sound again.
This mini-cry, like Connor's penguin pose, is one of many ways that pets learn to let people know what they want.
And it fits in with one of my beliefs about being a pet owner, which is that the relationship between a pet and the person who loves it is full of nuances and subtleties. It's not just about a human ordering a dim animal what to do. It's about cues built into our DNA.
Pets "tell" us things all the time. They do it through meowing, barking, purring, body language, tricks, gestures. As much as we might think of ourselves as "masters' or "owners", it's built into our pets' instincts to try to influence us. And they need to. I believe there's no shame in being "trained" in this sense by your pet.
We're different species from our pets, we can't speak the same "language", but we're incredibly good at getting on a wavelength with each other - if we just pay enough attention.
Wow, I went all deep! Anyway, do chime in with a comment on the ways your own pet has learnt to influence you.
Written by Nick Barnett. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.
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