Your dog is learning from YOU!

Even more interesting than learning commands would be the ability to learn by merely watching others—other dogs or even people. We know dogs can learn from our instruction, but can dogs learn from our example? It would seem to behoove a social animal like the dog to look to others for information about how best to negotiate the world. In many cases, though, the answer to this question is clearly no: dogs have plenty of opportunity to see us eating politely at the table—yet they never
spontaneously pick up knife and fork and join us.
Overhearing us talking is insufficient to get them talking; their only interest in clothes seems to be chewing them, not donning them. Amply exposed to our activities, dogs don’t seem to know
how to imitate us.
This is not a failing, though it would distinguish them from members of our own species, consummate imitators that we are.
As children and into adulthood, we goggle at each other to see what to wear, what to do, how to act, and how to react.
Our culture is built on our keenness in observing others act to learn how to behave ourselves. I need only see you opening a tin can with a can opener once before I can do it myself (one hopes). The stakes are higher than they might first seem, for success at imitation not only gets you the contents of the opened can, it is an indication of a complex cognitive ability. True imitation requires that you not
merely can see what another is doing, not simply that you see how the means lead to an end, but also that you translate others’ actions into your own actions.
In that case, dogs are not true imitators, for even after thousands of demonstrations with the can opener, no dog has shown an interest: the opener’s functional tone is mute for them. But this is not a fair comparison, you might complain: dogs simply haven’t the thumbs, nor the dexterity they allow, to operate can openers or cutlery. Similarly, they haven’t the larynx for speech nor the need for clothing. And your complaint would be fair: the question is really if the dogs can be taught, by demonstration, how to do something new—not whether they are mini-humans.

Watch dogs interact for ten minutes and you will see what looks like imitation: one dog flaunts a gloriously large stick; the other finds a stick of his own and flaunts it back. If one dog finds a spot for digging, others will soon join him at the growing hole; one dog’s discovery that he can swim leads another dog to self-baptize, suddenly finding himself swimming, too.
By watching others, dogs learn the special pleasures of mud puddles and of bushwhacking through brush. Pump uttered nary a peep until one of her regular dog companions began barking at squirrels. All at once, Pump too was a squirrel-barker.

The question, then, is whether these are cases of true imitation, or of something else. The something else that it might be is opaquely called stimulus enhancement.
A minor incident involving birds and home-delivered milk in mid-twentieth-century Britain demonstrates this phenomenon best. At the time, doorstep milk delivery was commonplace in Britain, and homogenization was not. Thus dawn found foil-capped bottles of separated milk idling unattended on front porches, the cream nearest to the top of the bottles. Up at dawn with the delivery men is much of Britain’s bird population, for dawn is a propitious time to sing. One bird, the small blue tit, made a discovery: the foil on the bottles was susceptible to being pecked through, revealing a rich creamy drink just below.
A few reports of vandalized milk bottles were lodged, soon a spate more, then a plague of them. Hundreds of birds had learned the milk-bottle trick. Cross with their skimmed milk, the Britons were
not long in finding the culprits. For us, the question is not who but how: How did this discovery spread among the blue tits? Given the rapidity with which it spread, it seemed likely that some birds observed others getting the cream, and imitated them doing so. Clever, pudgy little birds.

By providing a captive population of chickadees with a similar setup, one groupof experimenters observed the phenomenon recur step-by-step.
Their studies suggest a more likely explanation than imitation. Instead of carefully observing and
assimilating all that the first, cream-pilfering bird was doing, other birds simply saw that he was atop the bottle. This may have attracted them to the bottles.
Once landed on the bottle tops, by doing a natural behavior—pecking—they discovered the foil’s
puncturability themselves. In other words, they were drawn to a stimulus, the bottle, by the first bird’s presence. Its presence enhanced the likelihood that they too would become cream stealers, but it did not demonstrate how to do so.
This may seem nitpicky, but there is an important difference at work here. In a case of stimulus enhancement, I see that you are acting in some unspecified way on the door, after which it opens. If I amble over to the door and kick it, hit it, and otherwise maul it, I might get it to open, too. In a case of imitation, I watch exactly what you are doing with the door and reproduce just those actions—the seizing and turning of the knob, the application of pressure after turning, and so on—that lead to
the desired outcome. I can do that because I can imagine that what you are doing is somehow related to your goal, your desideratum: to leave the room through the door.
The blue tits, on the other hand, need not have been thinking about what the milk bottle tits wanted—and probably were not.