By Alexandra Horowitz
"These two components - perception and action - largely define and circumscribe the world for every living thing. All animals have their own umwelten - their own subjective realities, what von Uexkull thought of as 'soap bubbles' with them forever caught in the middle. We humans are enclosed in our own soap bubbles, too. In each of our self- worlds, for instance, we are very attentive to where other people are and what they are saying." Pg 21
"A rose is a rose is a rose. Or is it? To a human a rose is a certain kind of flower, a gift between lovers, and a thing of beauty. To the beetle, a rose is perhaps an entire territory, with places to hide (on the underside of a leaf, invisible to aerial predators), hunt (in the head of the flower where ant nymphs grow), and lay eggs (in the joint of the leaf and stem). To the elephant, it is a thorn barely detectable underfoot." Pg 22
"Understanding a dog's perspective - through understanding his abilities, experience, and communication - provides that vocabulary. But we can't translate it simply through an introspection that brings our own umwelt along. Most of us are not excellent smellers; to imagine being a smeller, we have to do more than just think on it. That kind of introspective exercise only works when paired with an understanding of how profound the difference in umwelt is between us and another animal." Pg 23
"Here we begin to see how the dog and the human overlap in our worldviews, and how we differ. A good many objects in the world have an eating tone to the dog - probably many more than we see. Feces just aren't menu items for us; dogs disagree. Dogs may have tones that we don't have at all - rolling tones, say: things that one might merrily roll in. Unless we are particularly playful or young, our list of rolling-tone objects is small to nil. And plenty of ordinary objects that have very specific meaning to us - forks, knives, hammers, pushpins, fans, clocks, on and on - have little or no meaning to dogs. To a dog, a hammer doesn't exist. A dog doesn't act with or on a hammer, so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick." Pg 25
I hope these tid bits whet your appetite for the amazing work this book provides uncovering life through the eyes of a dog.
http://insideofadog.com/
Book 11
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