In this blog I have written that in order to be an expert it will take you at least ten thousand hours to do so. Well over the last 30 years that I have been working with and studying the canis lupus familiars, the canis lupus and other canids I have come to realize that I know absolutely nothing about them.
In my adolescent years I remember my history teacher mentioning Aristotle famous words: “ The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” Other ancient Philosophers like Socrates who said : “I know that I know nothing” and Cicero with the famous latin phrase: “ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat” - translated - “ He himself thinks he knows one thing, that he knows nothing” are a good reminder that we actually don’t know much at all.
In animal behavior and ethology that is especially so as many of our knowledge gained about the behavior is observed and very subject to the interpretation of the individual observer. Yes, over the last 90 decades science has come a long way in the better understanding on how animals learn, including myself. In the last 2 and a half decades I have studied operant conditioning, classical conditioning and many other effects that affect learning. I have observed thousands of dogs in my career and interacted with and trained at least half of them. I used to think I knew a thing or two about them, I even published a video series about animal behavior.
This has given me factual experience in the field and with the experience the confidence of what I know and of my analysis of observed behavior. The more experience one has, the more things there are that you know, but also so things you don’t know.
This reminded me of a phrase United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave to a question at a D.oD briefing on February 12, 2002 about the lack of evidence linked to the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction: He stated: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
The thing I learned about Rumfeldian knowledge is that when observing animals and in particular dogs, there are a lot of behaviors we know, things we know, but there are also many things we don’t know and then there are things we don’t know we don’t know. And that should put our EGO right back on the floor.
It’s funny the less I knew about animal behavior and dogs the more certain I was. When a client would ask me question my answers were mostly binary, yes and no. The more I learned and the more experience I got, the lesser I knew and my answers would start changing to “well, it depends”, “maybe”, “possibly” to “I have to think about that one” and now after almost 30 years of working and training with dogs I realize that I know absolutely nothing about them and answer my clients with “I don’t know”, “ I don’t think I have an opinion about that” or wat I do most of the time, I will ask them a lot more questions.
And so I will continue to bask in my incompetence, in my deficiencies, knowing full well that only the canine is perfect in being and that with every book I read, with every observation I do, exposure to my own ignorance grows.
So please dear people give your dog the benefit of the doubt.
Bart de Gols