Review of How Dogs Love Us

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

How Dogs Love Us is a story of love, growth, and science. It centers around Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist who normally works with people. The book covers the time period from the death of his heart dog, Newton, to the launch of his project pioneering waking dog mRI’s in The Dog Project.

First, let’s get a few things out of the way. If you expect this to read like scientific literature, you will be disappointed. About 80% of the book talks about the prep work before the project begins and a few family matters indirectly related to The Dog Project. Only about 20% of the book is reserved for the research and conclusions drawn from the scans.

On top of this, the research isn’t as conclusive as the title implies. The only part of the research regarding love shows that dogs have a positive association with familiar people. Is that really love? It’s a step in the right direction, but not necessarily love itself. I have a positive association with the Starbucks Barista, and I’m quite sure my caudate lights up when I see her. Do I love her the way I hope my dog loves me? No.

Fortunately, the beauty of this book isn’t in the science. It’s in the growth of Dr. Gregory Berns as he develops this project. I have no doubts reading this book, that Dr. Berns loved his heart dog Newton, and that Newton loved him back unreservedly. The entire project was founded on searching for proof of this love, and that was the true hook for me.

Dr. Berns wanted conformation that Newton loved him. He wanted concrete scientific proof to show the whole world. This really resonated with me. After all, I founded All Things Chihuahua in honor of a heart dog, and I hope to do great things in his memory just like Dr. Berns did in Newton’s memory. In that way, we’re not so very different.

At first, Dr. Berns thinks it’s impossible to train a dog to get into an mRI scanner while awake, but then he hears the story of Cairo, a magnificent military dog who was on the team who took down Osama Bin Laden.

He reasoned if a dog can be trained to jump out of helicopters, surely a scanner would be a lot easier, right?

Together with a team of wonderful people, he sets out to train the first dog to have a waking mRI scan—a rescue in his own house, Callie.

Although the book is mainly about building the mock scanner, training the dogs, adjusting the scanner and finally getting a valid scan, it’s also about bonding with a dog. Dr. Berns didn’t understand dog body language very well at all in the beginning of the story. He didn’t understand what Callie was trying to tell him.

He learned the basics of training complex behaviors from Mark Spivak, the owner of Comprehensive Pet Therapy. Through Mark, they developed a plan to use positive reinforcement methods to teach a dog to voluntarily walk into an mRI scanner and hold still for up to 30 seconds at a time while they are scanned.

This is a marvelous show of skill, and it’s clear how much the dog is cared for during this experiment.  Care is taken to protect the dog’s hearing, the dog is never forced to be scanned, and consent forms for the owners were made, modeled after human children.

What I found most interesting though, was how much Dr. Gregory grew in his understanding of dog behavior. He went from not noticing anything but the most obvious signals, to discovering Callie’s eyes would dilate when seeing a desirable object or that she pointed at things with her eyes.

Eventually, he came to understand that Callie had been communicating all kinds of things to him all along, and he simply hadn’t noticed.

This divide between people who “see” dog language in all it’s finest detail and those who don’t is relatively common. The person who assures me their dog with flattened ears, lips pulled back in a snarl, hackles raised, tail tucked, is only “playing” and that I should ignore all these cues and cut the dog’s nails anyway comes to mind.

I won’t. The dog clearly doesn’t consent, and I don’t need a consent form to tell me that.

Many of the everyday conflicts that occur between dogs and people are because we misunderstand their signals. In order to understand our dogs, we have to put ourselves in their shoes and try to think like a dog—even if our human imagination makes it hard.

Dr. Gregory Berns set out to figure out the mind of a dog in his own way, with the skills he had, and the results were wonderful. Dr. Berns only shares two of these studies at the time of his writing, but he has gone on to do several more studies since that show a lot more about the canine brain.

Although this book may disappoint some readers, I do recommend it. Read it as a story about a scientist learning to speak dog—and that positive reinforcement is for everyone, not just animals. I truly believe it is a worthy read, and those interested in dogs and people at all will find it interesting.

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