| Written by Jean Donaldson |
| Tuesday, 11 December 2007 09:03 |
Every morning I take Buffy to a beautiful off-leash area on San Francisco Bay. It has acres and acres of hiking trails and a fair density of small mammals like ground squirrels, field mice and jackrabbits. Not every dog chases critters but Buffy is among those who do. She’s never caught one, or even come close, but this in no way dampens her riotous enthusiasm. (If she ever starts getting close, incidentally, I’ll cut off her access.) Anyway, the first few weeks we began going to this place, she’d dash after any hint of movement without hesitation, this way and that. Great exercise but not a very nuanced strategy. Then I noticed her regularly pausing. When she previously would have dashed she froze. “Hmm. This is new.” I couldn’t tell if this small bit of apparent circumspection was getting her any closer but it was most certainly there where it had not existed before. Then, after a few more weeks, another new thing popped out: sneaky walking. Walking?? In the presence of a ground squirrel???? Then, with tail down. Buffy?? Tail down??? I admit the first time I saw her walking with tail down I was going to call the veterinarian until I realized what she was doing. She was stalking.
This new little routine - stalk stalk stalk...raise head slightly and check the playing field…stalk stalk stalk...up periscope again…RUN RUN RUN - became the norm for a while. Then she started anticipatory stalking. Before eyeballing any critter, but in the places where she normally got lucky, she’d duck down like a Border Collie on sheep and do her stealth approach. She even started using cover, taking some small advantage of the meager brush and rocks. These new additions unquestionably got her closer and so could fall under the domain of a behavior that worked and so by the rules of operant conditioning, would be strengthened: the sneaky stalking got her closer, so she then does more of it.
What I marvel more at is how she came up with it in the first place. There wasn’t much of a gradual successive approximation of stalking. Out it popped, after the pausing period. And the style of the stalking had that stereotypic look to it. Having previously been in Border Collies for about twenty years I like to think I can spot a genetic eye-stalk when I see one. And yet, there’s also no doubt the behavior worked. What a splendid intersection of the selection of behavior over evolutionary (or selective breeding, evolution on fast-forward) time and selection of behavior in real time, that (evolved-in ) fabulous behavior-morphing capacity we call learning. Makes the head spin.
Buffy has also had a couple of other behaviors pop out at this wonderous place. One is post-defecation rear-foot scraping, thought by some to be the unique province of males, but seen in many females too. She had done it occasionally and briefly before but since becoming a regular at this area, now does it consistently and with ever-increasing vigor. Whereas it had been (finish the business, then…) scrape-scrape-scrape, now it’s scrape-scrape, SCRAPTEY-SCRAPE-SCRAPE-SCRAPE (entire body levitating off ground while grinning), vogue-for-a-full-second-or-two-with-a-ready-to-burst-with-how-good-it-is-to-be-Buffy-expression, final vertical hop, mid-air flip or veritable end-zone dance, then on to next agenda item. I’m not much fascinated by pottying, as a rule, but I’m on the verge of videotaping this stuff.
The final little piece of behavior that seems to have bubbled to the surface is a dare-I-say semi-methodical digging style. There are zillions of ground squirrel holes and, occasionally, perhaps smelling recent or current occupation, Buffy will have a go at excavating one. This had seemed a wild abandon affair and I didn’t pay much attention until the other day, when I happened to be standing there sipping coffee right next to her as she labored. Dig-dig-dig, insert head, dig-dig-dig, backwards hop, front and rear-leg backwards displacement of accumulated pile of earth, hop forward, back to dig-dig-dig. It looked as though she was removing some of the pile to facilitate the next round. If that’s the case, if indeed it was functioning the way I think it was, it makes me giddy, a bit lightning struck, which is one of my favorite feelings: that slack-jawed sense of awe at how organized behavior can be, and the stuff that can still be in there (apparently dormant for years) inside a domesticated species. Wow.
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