War Dogs by Rebecca Frankel Page A

the family, and was called his hot-house face. This consisted in the head drooping much, the whole body sinking a little and remaining motionless; the ears and tail falling suddenly down, but the tail was by no means wagged. . . . His aspect was that of piteous, hopeless dejection.” 9
    Indeed, as Bekoff writes, “All mammals (including humans) share neuroanatomical structures, such as the amygdala and neurochemical pathways in the limbic system that are important for feelings.” 10 Canine feelings are actually quite complex. And in fact, dogs are uniquely complex in that they have a startling emotional intelligence, especially as they relate to humans.
    In 2006, Dr. Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, conducted a study that sought to compare “the use of causal and communicative cues in an object choice task” between dogs, chimpanzees, and bonobos. 11 Footage taken of the same kinds of trials conducted during this study shows Dr. Kaminski at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany, her long brown ponytail hanging down her back, as she sits facing a chimpanzee. There is a plastic divide between them as well as a table. On the table are two banana-yellow cups turned over, bottoms up. The objective here is for the chimp to reachthrough two circular holes in the divide and find the food hidden beneath one of these cups.
    Dr. Kaminski is there to help; she points to the cup containing the food. Her signals offer reliable and consistent information: all the chimp has to do is watch Dr. Kaminski and follow her movements, and she will find the food. Only she doesn’t. The sweet face, with its deep wrinkles framed in wispy black hairs, hardly turns in the direction of Kaminski, even as the doctor speaks directly to her, conveying not just words but emotions, with her face as well as her hands. Each time the experiment is repeated, the chimp continues to make her own choices without acknowledging Kaminski’s exaggerated gestures, often making her choice before the doctor even attempts to point out the food.
    During another test, Kaminski is in a different room, and this time there isn’t a plastic wall or a table, just two over-turned blue bowls on the floor. The experiment is the same, only now she is standing in front of a dog. From the moment the exercise begins the dog’s eyes are trained on her face. And this time, when Kaminski points to the food, the dog’s response is immediate: he moves directly to the blue bowl that she indicated, and the food is found.
    The dog was able to use Kaminski’s direction—what she calls “informed” gestures—while the chimpanzee did not. This experiment shows, she says, that the communication between human and canine is “in its essence a very cooperative interaction.” For dogs, this kind of “following, pointing seems to be very natural, and it makes dogs extremely interesting.” It is proof, she believes, of their extraordinary social intelligence, a grasping of something akin to a second language. They’ve learned “to interpret human communication which is different from dog communication.” 12
    There is further evidence now that shows that dogs not only have the ability to read and register our gestures, but also to interpret the emotional expressions on our faces. At the University of Lincoln in England, Daniel Mills, professor of veterinary behavioral medicine, conducted a study using eye-tracking technology to better understand how dogs and humans interact with each other.
    Humans reveal emotions more prominently on the right side of our faces. Which means that when we talk to each other, whether we realize it or not, we gaze left at the faces of our lovers, our friends, and our judgmental superiors in order to best assess their mood.
    With this in mind, Mills set up his experiment by placing dogs in front of a screen onto which he