So, if creative scientists think themselves into the mental worlds of other species to design experiments to probe their impressive mental abilities, we will get a more complete picture of animal intelligence, right? Perhaps, but humanity’s self-absorption seems also to trick us into seeing some animals as more special than they really are. I’m convinced that’s happening with man’s best friend, where some experiments arguably reveal more about the scientists running them than about the mental abilities of the animals involved. Dogs have even been put into MRI machines to see if they love us , prompting the scientist behind the research, Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta, to claim in The New York Times: “ Dogs Are People, Too .”

What’s special about dogs, the theory goes, is that they have been bred over tens of thousands of years to be unusually receptive to interacting with people. For instance, dogs seem exceptionally good at reading human gaze and pointing gestures to locate hidden food. In 2002, researchers led by Brian Hare, then at Harvard University, found that domestic dogs consistently beat both human-raised wolves and chimpanzees on these tasks, strengthening the idea that these skills were the result of many generations of selective breeding.

At Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana, Hare’s findings caused some raised eyebrows. Pat Goodmann, senior wolf handler at the park, was deeply sceptical. “I could remember quite a few instances where I’d been pointing, and I was signalling to another human, but a wolf picked up on it,” she says. Those incidents had stuck in her mind, because often they involved an item – such as a beer can in a lake in the park’s main enclosure – that she really didn’t want the animals to get hold of.

Some years later, word of the doubts at Wolf Park about Hare’s work reached Clive Wynne, then at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who had recently started investigating dog behaviour with his PhD student, Monique Udell. Intrigued, Wynne and Udell flew to Indiana and ran similar pointing experiments, with one key difference: the people doing the pointing were inside the enclosures with the wolves, rather than outside, separated by a fence. Under these circumstances, the wolves outperformed pet dogs, which did well indoors but struggled when tested outside. Shelter dogs, which had less prior experience of interacting with people, were pretty useless. “All these animals have the capacity to notice relationships between things that people do and consequences that matter to them,” says Wynne. “What differs is the kinds of experiences they have in their lives.”

Wynne’s conclusion: Dogs’ skills in social cognition weren’t shaped by humans through selective breeding; they were already present in the wolf pack. He is also unconvinced that these abilities involve anything more sophisticated than simple learning.

When Wynne and Udell ran their initial experiments, they stayed outside the enclosures and let Goodmann and her colleagues do the pointing. But last August, I took the opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the stars of the show, a female wolf named Marion. Already nine years old when put through her point-reading paces, Marion has become the elder stateswoman of Wolf Park. She’s 16 now, almost snow white, and although the companions she once lived with have passed away, she can’t be united with any of the other mini-packs at Wolf Park: her alpha status means she’d tear any rival apart – or die trying.

Unfamiliar people are welcome, though, once they have been instructed in wolf etiquette: let Marion come to you, give her a scratch, but ease up from time to time. It turns out that hand-raised wolves feel compelled to stay put if someone is touching them, but if that’s not what they really want to do, they can get annoyed. I’m delighted to say that my encounters with Marion and the other residents of Wolf Park were entirely amicable. We even tried an impromptu recreation of the pointing experiment – although by that time Marion had realised that the bag attached to Goodmann’s belt contained some tasty treats, so she wasn’t very interested in having her attention diverted to anything else.

My day at Wolf Park reinforced how hard it is to do what Clayton urges and take ourselves out of the picture when considering animal minds. As Marion leant forward to lick my face, I was mentally back home with our dogs. Later, wandering through the main enclosure with the park’s youngest residents – Bicho, Kanti and Fiona – I saw a ferocious display of aggression from the three siblings towards their parents, housed in the neighbouring enclosure. So when Kanti, a powerful male, tested me out by leaning into my legs, I couldn’t help but feel a frisson of fear.

“It’s not about you,” my ex-scientist’s inner voice was saying, reminding me to observe what the animals were doing, rather than being led by my emotional reactions to them. But in my mind, at that moment, it was all about my responses to the wolves, and there was little I could do about that.