See Spot Think : Author Tells How to Get Into Dog’s Head

What do dogs want?

Not to be man’s best friend, best-selling author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas told Westsiders who brought their canines to an unusual book-signing at Dutton’s last week.

“They want each other. Human beings are merely a cynomorphic substitute, as we all know,” she said. “Dogs who live in each other’s company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do. Dogs who live in each other’s company know they are understood.”

As Westside purebreds and mutts munched contentedly on doggie biscuits at the bookstore, Thomas, who has become something of a cult figure among dog fanciers, talked about her life with 10 dogs and a dingo, what they have taught her and how to get into your dog’s head.

“Besides individual things like thunder and gunshots, what dogs fear most is not belonging, being alone,” Thomas said. Like the wolves from whom they are descended, they prefer one another, the pack. But having a single pet doesn’t mean it will feel deprived.

“We humans make excellent surrogate dogs,” she said. “Both species have the ability to substitute, to love outside their own species. That holds us together to the benefit of both.”

And their greatest pleasure? “Dogs like to learn stuff, if not from another dog, then people are OK. . . . They love activity, playing, interesting walks and just belonging, being together.”

Thomas says she never trained her dogs, or even housebroke them, because they learned from their elders. “But I’m not against training; socialized animals have much better lives.”

The anthropologist and ethologist, who authored “The Harmless People,” “Warrior Herdsmen, “Raindeer Moon” and “The Animal Wife,” seems a bit surprised at finding her newest book, “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” on both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller list (Nos. 3 and 4, respectively) and optioned by Disney. She can only surmise, she said, that a slim tome (148 pages) about what dogs are and what is going on in their heads, not a “how-to” guide, has tapped into “a world full of people who love dogs and are great observers and know darn well that what is in the book is true--that they have deep feelings, for example, and readers feel my love for dogs.”

Now living in a New Hampshire farmhouse with only three dogs, three cats “and one primate--my husband” (their two children are grown), Thomas began observing her household “pack” some 30 years ago in Cambridge, Mass., and later traveled to Baffin Island to watch wolves and to Australia to study dingoes. She writes of bicycling behind the husky Misha as he roamed for miles at night, of the love affair between him and Maria, another husky, of a pug named Bingo who risked his life, of the primitive den the pack dug in her back yard, and of macho posturing, status, rape, broken hearts and infanticide in the canine world.

Although scientists may dismiss her memoir as “anecdotal,” Thomas thinks the small-scale interactions she documented between her animals suggest that dogs indeed think and feel, communicate, fall in love, grieve, howl in joy and anguish, make complicated decisions and, through a finely honed sense of smell, garner vast amounts of information.

Her approach is passive; she watches quietly as they bump hips, sniff, mark their territory . . . not interfering but trying to enter dog consciousness:

“To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate . . . (but) at last, as dogs learn to live among our kind, it came to me to live among theirs. In the late afternoon sun we sat in the dust, or lay on our chests resting on our elbows, evenly spaced on the hilltop, all looking calmly down among the trees to see what moved there. No birds sang, just insects. Off in the silent, drying woods a tree would now and then drop something--a pod, perhaps, or a leaf--and we would listen to it scratching down. While the shadows grew long we lay calmly, feeling the moment, the calmness, the warm light of the red sun--each of us quiet and serene. I’ve been to many places on the earth, to the Arctic, to the African Savannah, yet wherever I went, I always traveled in my own bubble of primate energy, primate experience, and so never before or since have I felt as far removed from what seemed familiar as I felt with these dogs, by their den. Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom, but dogs feel it as peace.”

But these days, Thomas--a Margaret Mead-type who journeyed to the Kalahari desert with her parents as a teen-ager--is far removed from canine peace. She is crisscrossing the country to promote her book, petting countless dogs--at her Brentwood stop alone there were Missy and Sarah and Trinket and Muffin and Kelly--and patiently answering their owners’ questions:

How long can a German shepherd live? “Probably 20 years at most.”

How can you prevent jealousy between dogs, cats and babies? “Everybody finds his place eventually; all creatures want goodwill and unity as long as they’re not losing ground and no one is preferred. . . . Just introduce newcomers gently.”

How can I stop my dog from digging? “By training him to dig on command. Then he won’t otherwise.”

Can you retrain an abused dog? “You absolutely can. It just takes patience and waiting and reassuring them a lot. They catch on. It also takes warning other people. In fact, my husband’s favorite dog, Sunday, was mistreated.”

Along the way she voiced some strong--and controversial--opinions about the dog-show industry, neutering male dogs and Westsiders’ apparent preference for purebred pets:

“It is a serious mistake to neuter males,” she said. “It makes them fat and gives them a feminine odor that creates problems with other male dogs. We should put our attention on spaying females. Her sex is a small part of her life; it is a cruelty to do it to male dogs.” (Los Angeles animal shelters and many rescue groups insist that all animals be neutered before adoption).

Praising the mongrel, Thomas said that, “I don’t believe in purebred dogs particularly, or dog shows. I firmly believe that dog shows generate dogs that are just fur coats on legs. They throw away intelligence and character for ‘conforming’ to some standard. It’s a dumb thing and gives rise to unwanted (translation: imperfect) puppies.”

Now Thomas is switching animals midstream. Her next project is a book on cats, “The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture.”

“They are very different,” she says. “Humans’ and dogs’ brains share similarities; cats’ brains are totally different.”