Opinion The Third Edit: Man’s misunderstood friend

The writer Adam Gopnik once observed that somewhere between dogs’ limitless intuition about people and their inner lives, and people’s limitless imagination about dogs and their inner lives is where the human-canine relationship is formed. There is great solace to be found in the belief that humans — who are lonely despite and because of their uniquely complex communication cultures — can form lasting bonds of understanding with at least one other species, imperfect as such a connection may be. It turns out, however, that even this may be too optimistic, and that people don’t really get dogs as well as they think they do.

The authors of a new study, ‘Barking up the wrong tree: Human perception of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors’, have found that people’s perception of a dog’s emotions is almost entirely based on context cues: Everything but the dog itself, in other words. Complicating this picture is the human tendency to project emotions — a useful quality when it comes to creative, imaginative tasks like writing books and making movies, but one that can hamper other activities like leash training a dog. Here, the problem is not so much the language gulf, but people’s inability to “read” their closest companions on any terms but their own.

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It may be time to consider that dogs don’t process emotions the way humans do. And as with all relationships, human or canine, it comes down to paying close attention to the other party, instead of relying on one’s own imagination of how they might think and feel. The study’s revelations also beg the question: Is it time to reappraise the popular perception of cats as inscrutable, mysterious and standoffish? It may well be that cats are all that — it is likelier, however, that people are simply as clueless about them as they are about dogs.