The Dogs of Babel

THREE

There’s a talking-dog joke that goes like this: A man walks into a bar with a dog. The bartender says, “Sorry, buddy, no dogs allowed.” The man says, “Oh, but you don’t understand—this is a very special dog. He can talk.” The bartender looks skeptical but says, “Okay, let’s hear it.” The man puts the dog on a bar stool and looks deeply into his eyes. “What do you call that thing on top of a house?” he asks. “Roof, roof!” barks the dog. “And how does sandpaper feel?” the man continues. “Ruff, ruff!” answers the dog. “And who was the greatest baseball player of all time?” the man asks. “Rooth, Rooth!” the dog says. “All right, buddy,” the bartender says, “that’s enough. Out of here, both of you.” The man takes the dog off the bar stool, and together they leave the bar. As they’re walking out, the dog turns to the man and shrugs. “DiMaggio?” he says.

This is what I’m thinking of as I sit on the floor with Lorelei, looking into her deep brown eyes. I’ve been working with her for two hours now, running a few preliminary intelligence tests, and I have to fight the urge to give up my teacher persona and start talking silly puppy-dog talk to her. “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” I want to murmur in baby talk, taking her front paws and lifting them up high until she flops onto her back, a little roughhousing game we have. “Huh, girl?” I want to say, rubbing her belly. “Where’s Joe DiMaggio?” But we’ve got a little more work to do, so I just give her a brief pat on the head and say “Good girl” in an authoritative tone of voice.

Rhodesian Ridgebacks are big dogs; Lorelei’s head comes to well above my knee when we’re both standing up. They were originally bred to hunt lions, and they are extremely strong and agile when in pursuit of rabbits or other small game (lions being rather rare in our small college town), but in domestic situations they are exceptionally earnest and gentle. They get their name from a distinctive ridge of hair running down the middle of their backs, hair that seems to grow the wrong way, standing up like a long cowlick against their sleek brown coats. When you run your hand across it, it feels bristly, like the buzz cuts boys used to get when I was small. More than anything, it reminds me of a very stiff velvet chair my grandmother had in her house; the fabric felt prickly against the skin whichever way you rubbed it—it was impossible to sit in if your arms or legs were bare—but when you flattened a bit of the nap with your finger, you could feel the softness that lay between the individual threads.

We began the morning by going through a list I’ve compiled of all the words I know Lorelei understands. She knows her name, of course; I did a brief experiment by calling out other words—broccoli, water bed, Santa Claus—in the same tone I normally use to call her name. She sat up and stared at me when she heard my voice and appeared to listen in a sort of rapture, but she didn’t get up and come running over until I called out “Lorelei.” Good girl, I told her. Good girl.

Next, we moved on to commands. Come, sit, and stay. Down. Paw and other paw. Come on up (spoken while patting the couch cushion in invitation). Do you want to go out?

In the early days of our marriage, Lexy taught her the command “Where’s Paul? Go get Paul,” and on Saturday mornings when I slept late and Lexy got tired of waiting for me to wake up, I would wake to find Lorelei hovering over me, her front paws up on the bed and her face looking down into mine. Strangely, I was never able to retaliate; I was never able to make Lorelei understand “Go get Lexy.” She responds splendidly to “Go get your ball” and “Go get your giraffe”—this last refers to a stuffed toy she likes because its long neck lends itself perfectly to games of tug-of-war—but never “Go get Lexy.” Did she simply not know Lexy’s name? Or did she understand me perfectly but refuse to obey, not wanting to violate the private joke she shared with Lexy, her first owner and love?

All in all, Lorelei knows the meaning of about fifty different words. Dinner and treat. Car and ride. Good and bad. This corresponds roughly to the number of words a human child understands by the age of thirteen months. This is perhaps not a very useful parallel, since by sixteen months or so, a baby will have doubled or tripled that number and will have begun to form rudimentary sentences like “Mama juice” or “Big truck vroom,” whereas for a dog, the list of known words, once learned, will remain more or less static throughout his life. And, of course, at least to an outside observer, the capacity to link words and concepts into sentences as we know them remains outside the dog’s ability.

What interests me, however, is that in children, language comprehension begins long before language production—between the ages of one and three, children understand about five times as many words as they can speak. By what mechanism does that thirteen-month-old make the leap from comprehension to speech? I believe this is the question that lies at the heart of my project.

The one advantage Lorelei has over human infants is that the sharpness of her senses allows her to pick up on nonverbal cues that we, as humans, are barely aware of. She can hear the tying of shoelaces two rooms away, and she stands and stretches, knowing it means that someone is going to leave the house, and that perhaps she’ll be going with them. She understands the clatter of silverware in a drawer and the sound of someone settling down on the couch to read the newspaper. She knew what it meant for Lexy to stand before the bathroom mirror putting on her makeup, and when she smelled the particular combination of odors that comprised this event—perhaps the hair scent of the bristles on Lexy’s cosmetic brushes, combined with the perfumed clay of her foundation and the thick, painty smell of her mascara—she would appear, out of nowhere, in front of the bathroom, and finding the door slightly ajar, she would poke her nose through the crack, waiting to see if she was going to be invited along on whatever adventure Lexy was preparing herself for.

Continuing my preliminary tests of Lorelei’s intelligence, I get a dog treat, show it to her, then hide it underneath a cup. She noses the cup, overturns it, and retrieves the treat in six seconds, by my stopwatch. This is very good; it demonstrates impressive problem-solving ability. Next, I test her memory by making a show of hiding a treat in a corner while she watches, then taking her into another room for five minutes. When we return to the living room, she goes right for it. I’m very pleased.

Something odd happens during the third test. The test consists of covering the dog’s head with a towel and timing how long it takes her to shake it off. It’s another problem-solving task, and I’m expecting Lorelei to pass with flying colors. But when I put the towel over her head, she merely stands there, her head slightly bowed under the weight. I wait a full minute, then a minute and fifteen seconds. She makes no move to get out from underneath, and the hunched shape of her body, the thick green cloth covering her face as thoroughly as a widow’s veil, seems to me suddenly very sad. I’m about to remove the towel myself when the phone rings. I turn to pick it up, and by the time I’ve turned back—it’s a wrong number, and the call lasts no more than five or ten seconds—Lorelei has shaken off the towel and is sitting up, watching me. It occurs to me that maybe the reason she didn’t try to free herself while I was watching is that she wasn’t sure what it was I expected from her. Perhaps she thought I wanted her to stand quietly with a towel over her head. This was the strangest of all the strange games I’d spent the day playing with her, and for once, she couldn’t figure out the rules.

Suddenly I feel tired; I think we’ve both had enough. I kneel down and put my arms around the dog. “Come on, girl,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”