Ever Wonder What Dogs Think About All Day? Here’s the Answer

Not long ago I was sitting on the porch of a little Italian restaurant having lunch with a good friend named William. Joining us for lunch was Greta, his eight-year-old Whippet dog. Greta is about 40 pounds, and she and I get along quite well. To be honest, I’m drawn to Greta’s personality; she’s a great example of what attracts me to dogs.

“...and that’s the answer to what dogs think about all day. ”

— Scott Sheaffer

As I was finishing my Lasagna lunch special, William looked at me and asked a question that most dog owners probably think about but never seem to ask out loud. He asked, “Scott, you’re the dog expert; what do dogs think about all day?”

To divine the truth in that question, you might think that we need to be able to converse with dogs to discover what’s going on in their canine craniums. But fortunately, that’s not necessarily true. I told William that dog behaviorists, in fact, do have an answer to that question, and it centers on the primal or basic nature of how dogs interact with the world.

Just as I was about to go on with what I thought was my brilliant and scholarly discourse on dog behavior, Greta decided that she was tired of just hanging out underneath our table and that she wanted some human attention, pronto.

She then proceeded to calculate how to backtrack her leash and unwind herself from the legs of the table, giving herself more space. She then jumped on William’s legs to get his attention – and it worked! Both of us loved on Greta a little – everyone enjoyed all of this.

Greta’s timing was ideal because it gave me a perfect example to show William what dogs think about all day and what drives their behavior moment by moment.

The steps she took demonstrated some of the divergent things dogs can mentally process. For example, she

felt an emotional need for attention.
problem-solved by unwinding herself from the table legs.
calculated how to get William’s attention by jumping on his legs.

What was Greta trying to accomplish with these behaviors in that moment? She was simply maximizing her pleasure while minimizing her pain. It’s really that simple, and that’s the answer to what dogs think about all day.

While dogs can do all kinds of cool and complex behaviors (e.g., tricks, scent work, rescue, etc.), they are fundamentally consumed with their primal need to make the world as pleasurable for themselves as possible while simultaneously eliminating or minimizing pain. Dogs really do live “in the moment” with these principles. One might even say they are selfish in their motives by human standards.

However, never forget that pet dogs are canids (i.e., member of a biological family that includes wolves, foxes, coyotes, jackals, etc.) that have evolved from ancient animals. For their predecessors to survive on their own in the wild, they had to constantly be on the lookout for food (maximizing pleasure) while being hypervigilant about prey animals that wanted to have them for dinner (minimizing pain).

These early ancestors of today’s companion dogs needed to do these things in order to just survive. Nature gave them this mindset so they could survive individually and as a species. Our family dogs have these same live-for-the-moment instincts baked into their genetics too; they just express them in different ways.

As I told all of this to William, he was looking at Greta as she sat by his feet. When I finished, he said, “Dogs are closer to humans in what they think about all day than what I thought – maybe dogs are just less sophisticated than people in how they go about it, and their timeframe is much shorter.”

My response? “Exactly.”