Pets: How Much Do They Understand Us and the World?

When I wink at my cat, he winks back, sometimes he shuts and opens both his eyes, sometimes exactly one eye, which is oddly cute. My dog wails as if in great pain if I see him and still ignores him. I start wondering what they think. All pet owners think that their pets understand them, to a certain degree. Most of us believe that our pets understand us more than they do. We have this psychological inclination to attribute agency to even inanimate objects and hence it is no surprise that we often believe that animals have more ‘human’ kind of agency than they have. Despite these rationalisations, sometimes, animals, especially pet animals, surprise us with their understanding.

We often fail to understand that as life forms on this planet, we share many common features with other living things; a fact truer than we imagine it to be. If we learn how to listen and watch, we can begin to understand how other animals see the world and the unique awareness it will be, to see the world through their eyes. When happy or stressed, the same hormones cause the same kinds of emotions in both humans and many other animals. When frightened, the same flight or fight reaction follows. The social and sexual bonding behaviour of us all, humans and other animals is driven by chemicals such as Oxytocin. The basic brain structure of humans and animals does not differ as greatly as we think it does. So, what we need to understand is that ‘human emotions’ are not merely human; sometimes they can be called rightfully, ‘animal emotions’.

A few years ago, rescuing and nurturing back to health a fallen Barbet chick, until it could fly and be released into the wild, I realised the above. The communication skills and patterns of the bird were nothing less than that of a dog though it belonged to a lower rung of the living world. It could tell me through its specific sounds when it was hungry; the bird was extremely playful. It responded quite naturally when I called it by the name that I gave it. It was delighted to take its baths in cold water; it loved the morning sunlight. A cool breeze was exhilarating for this winged friend of mine. The fragrance of ripe fruits made it wake up in joyful expectation. This was the first time I realised that a bird is not that different from myself.

Cats have a wider field of view than us. A human field of view is 180 degrees while a cat’s field of view is 200 degrees. For humans, a cat’s view will be like looking through a wide-angle camera lens. Cats also have pretty good night vision, many fold stronger than what humans can see during the night. The saturation of colours is far lesser for a cat’s eye than for a human eye. So, cats live in a less colourful world than us.

I remember arriving back home from a work assignment of about 10 days. My cat was stretched on the boundary wall of our house. He strained his eyes to see who I was when I appeared at the end of the lane that leads to our house. He was trying to make out who the approaching human was. Suddenly, a flash of realisation and he became vibrant and lively and stood up and started yelling at me as if complaining for leaving him for so long. I imagined his vision experience to be that of a shift focus camera in a movie where blurred objects and people slowly gain focus in the field of view. However, this kind of shot is used often when a character in a movie wakes up from a drowsy state of mind because otherwise, an alert human eye has more than 200 miles of sharp focus.

Dogs see colours contrary to common belief. They identify colours but only fewer numbers than we humans do. If a dog is looking at a rainbow, the colour spectrum that he/she sees is dark blue, light blue, grey, light yellow, brownish yellow, and dark grey. It is a world of yellow, blue, and grey. Scent and sounds dominate their sensory system and vision is just an additional faculty to confirm what they smell or hear. However, when it comes to chasing prey, the dog is eyes first and foremost. When you operate a lawn mower or vacuum cleaner near dogs, it can cause intolerable discomfort to them because they are more sensitive to sounds in high notes than us humans.

It is proven that cats and dogs have dreams in their sleep in a similar way as us. But how do they dream and what kind of dreams do they have?

Animals Undergo REM Sleep

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is a stage in sleep when humans dream most and this eye movement is observed in cats and dogs too. However, it will be far from reality to expect them to be experiencing dreams like we do. It is an entirely new and strange terrain out there and we are yet to fully understand the nature of it.

David M Pena Guzman, the author of the famous book, ‘When Animals Dream’, quotes so many similar and equally fascinating books to point out that octopuses, cats, horses, monkeys and all such higher life forms dream. Incidentally, Guzman calls the world as experienced by animals, “Worlds without human contours; Worlds with non-human centres.” When we think about animal dreams, we need to think out of the box, of an experience outside the realm of human dream experiences.

I often see my cat dream in his sleep and when he feels threatened in his dream, his whole body jumps up into the air with his claws drawn out and if sleeping near him, I am always in danger of getting clawed. As a kitten, he used to make a sucking mouth movement as if he was suckling his mother’s milk. He does that in his dreams even now, at the age of six, though very infrequently. I feel sad for him when I realise this because it might mean that whatever memories he is capable of about his childhood and his mother, are almost faded.

Scientists beginning with Scottish physician William Lauder Lindsay and luminaries such as Charles Darwin and natural historians as early as the time of Seneca and Lucretius have observed that animals dream.

Zebra Finches even sing in their dreams, says Guzman. However, an argument ensued on whether these birds sing in their sleep just as a mechanical process embedded into their system or whether they experience their singing, while they sing in their sleep. If the first is correct, then we cannot call it a dream.

Guzman says that though we do not recollect experiencing a smell in our dreams, dogs might be “dreaming in smells” as the smell is a prominent driver of their bodily experiences. They of course could be heavy dreamers because they spend almost half of their day sleeping. Similarly, cats often dream about chasing and hunting their prey.

Does it comfort you to think that cats might see us humans as odd, clumsy, and oversized cats or does that make you feel like a complete idiot who thought yourself superior to your cat? The cats actually might see us as bigger and stranger cats, says John Bradshaw, who wrote the book, ‘Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet’ in 2013. He arrived at this theory because he observed that cats approach other cats and us in the same way, rub their body in the same manner on us as on other cats, and sometimes try to groom us just like they do with other cats.

It is easier to comprehend a dog’s mind as dogs more visibly experience a range of emotions and express them well too. One might remember Jack London’s legendary book, The Call of the Wild, narrating chapters and chapters of the complex thoughts of a dog, Buck, who reconnects with his wild ancestral past through the travails of his acquaintance with the harsh realities of life, and the entire story feeling like one is living inside the head of this Shepherd-Saint Bernard cross breed dog.

It was in the Stone Age, approximately 14000 years ago, that humans befriended dogs. 14000 years of evolution together has made humans and cats natural companions. The animal that Plato called a “lover of learning”, Diogenes adored and empathised so much that he called himself a dog, sharing our species’ destiny in many ways. Undoubtedly, they have learnt to share our thoughts as well.

It is interesting to delve into the world of dog thoughts. All of us have at least once looked into those expressive eyes and pondered the question, how much does she understand? There is a similarity between the nervous system of humans and dogs. The problem is that we do not have a reference point, to begin with, to understand how a dog thinks because all our reference points are human ones. Even the word, thinking, has meaning only in a limited context, being a feature of the human brain.

Research has shown that dogs can count, in a limited sense. They read human expressions. The size of the brain to the size of the body ratio decides the level of intelligence of any animal. For humans, it is 1:50. For dogs, 1: 125. This figure becomes important when we know that the ratio for lions is 1:550 and for horses, 1:600. In other words, dogs are far closer in intelligence to us than horses and lions. They can distinguish between words that we utter and understand many of our expressions.

The latest study published in 2024 March in Current Biology shows that dogs can understand the reference that a sound makes to an object, just like humans. This is a human ability that cognitive scientists call referential understanding. Dogs also can be trained to remember the names of more than 100 objects.

There are also many things that dogs and cats grasp quickly where we would have no clue at all. For the first thing, dogs indeed know how to befriend a human and make that person devoted for life. They are sensitive to certain information that we are not privy to. For example, if trained, they can smell and detect explosives, track criminals, and even detect afflictions of cancer or Covid 19 in humans.

The bond between pet animals and humans is proof that life never ceases to intrigue. Is it not a true wonder that another species like a dog or cat trusts us that they trust us with their lives? Even cows, pigs, donkeys, elephants, and horses learn to give that kind of complete trust to humans after some period of pleasant familiarity. However, is this trust fulfilled and rewarded? We know that the answer is not always a yes. Still, in the march of evolution, they stand shoulder to shoulder with us and stride along.

References

Cat view- Nickolay Lam. livescience.com

What Do Dogs and Cats Dream About?, Meghan Bartels, March 2, 2024, Scientific American.

Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet’, John Bradshaw, 2013, Thorndike Press/Cengage Learning.

How Dogs Think, Stanley Coren, 2008, Simon & Schuster UK.

TIME How Dogs Think: Inside the Canine Mind, The Editors of Time, 2018.

Neural Evidence for Referential Understanding of Object Words in Dogs, Boros et al., 2024, March 22, Current Biology.

Trichromatic Theory, oxfordreference.com

The Genetic and Evolutionary Drives Behind Primate Colour Vision, Carvalho et al., April 26, 2017, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol.5.