On the Chihuahua Who Was Faking the Limp

There is a video, viewed by an honestly impressive number of strangers, of a chihuahua limping. Three legs, a soulful look, the universal posture of canine suffering. The owner books the vet. The vet finds nothing. The chihuahua walks home four-legged. At dinner, the limp resumes. At the dinner bell, it ends.

This is the situation. This is also, possibly, my own household, where a six-pound chihuahua named Doris has been running the place for nine years.

The incident, as filed

It started, as these things do, with a soulful expression. Doris approached me on three legs across the kitchen tile in the manner of a small dog who has just received tragic news from the universe. The fourth leg was tucked. She looked up. She looked down. She sighed in a way that, if I am being honest, was performance art.

I am not a veterinarian. I am, however, an idiot. I cleared my afternoon. I called the clinic. I drove the 14 minutes to the clinic with Doris on a folded towel in the passenger seat in the manner of a Civil War casualty being escorted home from Gettysburg.

The veterinarian, who has met Doris before, examined the leg. She watched Doris walk. She palpated. She checked the joint. She looked at me with the patient expression of a professional who has done this before. "There is no injury," she said. "She is a chihuahua." She said this without judgment, the way you tell someone the weather.

The bill was eighty-seven dollars.

Who, exactly, is training whom

Here is where it would be tempting to write a sentence about how clever dogs are, the small-dog-big-brain genre. I am not going to do that. The truth is more interesting and a little funnier, which is that I am, by any reasonable measurement, the slow learner in this relationship.

Researchers who actually study this kind of thing point out that the human tendency to read complex emotions and motives into dog behavior is more about us than about the dog. Alexandra Horowitz’s 2009 study on the so-called "guilty look," published in Behavioural Processes, found that dogs who had been scolded looked guilty whether they had done anything wrong or not; the look was a response to the human’s tone, not to a moral inventory.

This does not mean Doris is incapable of learning that limping produces a treat. It means that what looks to me like Doris running a long con is more accurately Doris running a short feedback loop ("the leg goes up, the man’s face changes, the food appears"), and the long con is the one I am running on myself, where I sit on the kitchen floor every evening at 5:47 p.m. asking a small dog whether her shoulder feels okay.

Why this keeps happening (to all of us)

There is a respectable amount of behavioral science on what dogs are and are not doing when they "act injured." The short version: dogs are very good at reading our faces, very good at noticing what produces what outcome, and not very good at lying in any conscious sense, because lying requires a theory of mind the research community has not fully established in canines. What dogs are very good at is operant conditioning, which is the polite name for "the leg went up and the cheese came out and now the leg goes up at five forty-seven."

I want to be clear that this is not a column about clever fakery. It is a column about how my dog has, through no malice and considerable patience, taught me to deliver dinner exactly twelve minutes earlier than I used to. She did not plan this. I did not notice. The system arrived, fully assembled, in my kitchen.

The actual rules of the household

If your chihuahua produces an unexplained limp that resolves at dinner, here is what I have, after extensive lived research, concluded.

1. Take the dog to the vet the first time. The eighty-seven dollars buys you the right to write columns later. Real injuries hide in toy breeds, especially patellar luxation, which is sneaky and not a joke.
2. Stop reinforcing the limp by accident. If you reach for the treat jar every time the leg goes up, you have signed a contract you did not read.
3. Do something fun together that is not food. A short, tired walk and a couple of games she actually enjoys rebudget the attention economy of the house.
4. Reread the chapter of your life where you assumed you were the responsible adult. There are kinder ways to bond with a chihuahua than running a private daily wellness check on a leg that is, on the available evidence, structurally fine.

The dinner bell

It is 5:47 p.m. as I write this. Doris has just performed a small careful three-legged walk across the kitchen tile. She has paused. She has looked up. She has looked down. The fourth leg is tucked.

The thing is, I know what you are thinking, and you are wrong. The vet has cleared her. The leg is fine. I am about to put dinner in the bowl.

I am, statistically, doing this twelve minutes earlier than I would have otherwise.

If you have a chihuahua running a similar program in your household, do the responsible thing first: rule out the actual injury with your veterinarian. Then, and only then, sit on the kitchen floor and admit you have been outflanked by a six-pound dog. It is fine. We are all fine.