WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND, PET?

All dog owners know the feeling of gazing into their adored pet’s eyes and wondering what on earth he or she is actually thinking. When he leaps up as you enter the room, is it because he actually loves you – or is it because he just wants food? When you reprimand her for munching your sock, does that sad expression betray guilt or are we simply projecting our own feelings on to her?

For centuries, philosophers argued that animals had no emotions, because they lacked souls, something anyone with a pet would find hard to credit. Aided by vast advances in brain-scanning techniques, neuroscientist Professor Gregory Berns set out to discover what exactly does go on in dogs’ minds. He spent five years patiently persuading 20-odd ex-service dogs in specially designed earmuffs to sit – voluntarily, he’s very big on the ethics of animal testing – in a noisy MRI scanner so he could scan their brains. Berns, who works at Emory University in Atlanta, explains how the brain scans helped him prove what dog owners already knew: that pets definitely have feelings, discovering, for example, that positive emotions made the same areas of both human and canine brains light up. Be warned, the title is misleading. Berns lovingly describes the personalities of the different dogs he worked with, but most of the book consists of potted histories of n euro imagery and philosophy and descriptions of other scientists’ experiments with dolphins, rats and sea lions, while a long, final chunk is devoted to his studies of the pickled brains of the nowextinct Tasmanian tiger. It’s a fascinating overview of a fledgling field, which could lead to seismic shifts in the way animals are treated. But if you hope this book will help you decode your pooch’s soppy looks and daft behaviour, you’ll be disappointed.