Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  Additional proof for early domestication came during the same year when the geneticist Peter Savolainen and a team of Swedish researchers used mtDNA analysis to determine that the domestication of dogs took place between fifteen thousand and forty thousand years ago in several locations in East Asia. The genetic evidence also led Savolainen to conclude that "the first domestication of wolves would not have been an isolated event, but rather a common practice."

  Savolainen's findings flew in the face of some of the most accepted notions about the origins of dogs, specifically that North American dogs were domesticated from North American wolves, European dogs from European wolves, and so on. However, when Robert K. Wayne and his colleagues analyzed the mtDNA of ancient domestic dogs from the New World—skeletal remains from archaeological sites in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as the remains of Alaskan dogs that predate the first arrival of European explorers—their findings confirmed Savolainen's. The lineages of all these North and South American dogs could be traced back to Old World wolves. It was the domesticated descendants of these wolves who subsequently trekked over the Bering land bridge with humans, between thirty thousand and thirteen thousand years ago, and eventually became the dogs of the Western Hemisphere. Traveling in the opposite direction, these early dogs also accompanied humans to western Asia and Europe, where they founded some of today's breeds.

  Dogs and people, it's now clear, have been partners for a long, long time.

  When I opened my eyes in the morning, the first thing I saw was sunlight streaming through the windows; the second was Merle. His chin lay on the edge of the bed and he was staring directly at me. The instant he saw that I was awake, his tail, which had been wagging steadily at about 120 beats per minute, doubled in velocity.

  "Good morning," I said. "Did you sleep well?"

  He wagged his tail harder. When I went to pet him, he whirled and went to the front door. He had not forgotten the coyotes.

  When I opened the door, he burst outside, cocked his leg for a quick pee, then sprinted into the sage where the coyotes had been singing. He coursed through the bushes, unraveling their story. I went back inside, and as I brushed my teeth he came into the bathroom.

  "You are really wasting time," his impatient look said. "You can't believe what's out there."

  I had some breakfast and gave him the last of the Purina, after which we walked down the hill to the trailer. Where the dirt road made a bend, following the buckrail fence along the boundary of the National Elk Refuge, Merle came to a stop and raised his right paw, his head extended in the classic pose of a Pointer. I doubted Merle had any Pointer genes, but most dogs will point—a behavior seen in wolves, who, when hunting together, will often extend their noses toward their prey, alerting other pack members to what they've spied.

  Following Merle's nose, I saw a Uinta ground squirrel standing near its burrow, thirty feet ahead of us. Commonly called "chiselers," these squirrels are ten inches high and live by the thousands in and around Kelly, emerging from their underground dens each April.

  Merle began a slow and deliberate stalk toward the ground squirrel, pausing after a few steps. I could see him turn the corner of his eye back to me. Seeing that I remained motionless, he took a few more gliding steps toward the chiseler, lifting his paws in a fluid motion that was hypnotic. The chiseler, its tiny paws raised to its mouth, its black eyes shining in the morning sun, didn't move.

  There was no warning. Merle charged. The chiseler squealed and dashed. Merle emerged from a cloud of dust, the squirrel in his jaws. He shook it violently, pinned it to the ground, ripped it open, and swallowed it in half a dozen gnashing gulps.

  I was stunned.

  By the time I reached him he was slurping the blood off the dusty shoulder of the road. He gave me a satisfied wag of his tail and licked his lips with his long pink tongue.

  "You've done that before," I said.

  His tail beat harder.

  Looking very proud of himself—glowing, in fact, with the sleek fullness of a well-fed diner—he trotted down the road, tail high, shoulders thrown back, head swiveling left and right as chiselers popped up and spied us.

  If the squirrels were more than thirty feet away, Merle trotted by them with only a cursory glance. If they were less than thirty feet away, he went into point-and-stalk mode. Most of these chiselers whistled and disappeared down their burrows like miniature submarine commanders who have spotted a destroyer. One, however, let him get too close. Merle sprinted. The chiseler bolted, reversing course at the last second. Merle's jaws snapped on thin air. The chiseler squirted between his legs and dove into its hole.

  Merle looked up at me with a self-effacing grin. "Hey—a dog can't get all of them."

  "No," I answered, "he can't."

  We continued down the hill and started along the alfalfa field that the Teton Valley Ranch cultivated for horse feed. There, directly in the road and blocking our path, stood a large male bison, more than likely the one who had left his calling card near the cabin. His fur was a deep chocolate brown; his head was massive.

  Merle stopped. He did not point. He did not wag his tail.

  "No," I told him.

  The tip of his tail, still held high, wagged a tiny bit, acknowledging that he'd heard me.

  Before I could get out another word, he charged the bison, who lowered his head and hooked Merle with his horn. Merle leapt aside—narrowly missing being disemboweled—planted his front paws, lowered his head, and woofed at the bison. If I hadn't been so worried for Merle, the scene would have been comical: a fifty-five-pound dog taking on a two-thousand-pound bison. The bison promptly hooked at him again, brushing Merle's left hip with his horn, and then, having become annoyed at this gadfly, charged.

  Merle cast honor to the wind and galloped toward me, doing a 180 behind my legs and peering at the bison from around my knees. The bison, of course, had stopped after a few feet. If you weigh two thousand pounds, you're not going to waste energy chasing a dog who can't hurt you.

  "So," I said, kneeling and putting an arm around Merle's shoulder. "That's a bison." I pointed at the animal, looking at us malevolently from about seventy-five feet away. "Bison," I repeated. "Bison you leave alone. Bison will kill you."

  Merle didn't shiver with excitement, as he had when I told him he couldn't chase the coyotes, his electric shiver having implied "Just let me at them." Instead, he studied the bison with sober concentration. I stood. "Come on," I said, gesturing with my hand, "this is how you get around a bison."

  Making a wide circle, I climbed the barbed-wire fence that surrounded one of the ranch's horse pastures, holding the bottom two strands apart for Merle. He jumped through the opening, but kept looking back at the bison as we skirted him. Eventually we recrossed the fence and stood on the dirt road, a hundred yards away from the huge animal. As we had walked around him, the bison had turned to face us, wheeling as steadily as the arms of a clock.

  "That's how you get around a bison," I told Merle. "Let's go." I gave another motion with my hand and simultaneously walked away at an increased pace. Merle made one of his "ha-ha-ha" pants—indicating "I get it, don't mess with bison"—and fell in by my side.

  That he did get it—that he was a quick study both of hand gestures and big, dangerous animals—became apparent over the ensuing days, weeks, and years. With little prompting he learned the signals for no, come, sit, lie down, go away, and be quiet. And as for bison, he never confronted another for as long as he lived.

  The sort of unregimented training I was giving Merle is how dogs have learned to live with humans for thousands of years. Its loose methods are different from those employed in dog obedience school, where a dog is taught stylized behaviors by issuing commands that, when obeyed, are rewarded, often with food. However, the aim of both loose and strict dog training is the same: to create a well-socialized dog. Obedience school (whether done on one's own or in a formal group) uses top-down management to get results. The loose method doesn't use bottom
-up management, leaving everything to the dog, but joint management. Its underlying assumption is that dogs are clever and quickly "get it" by simply watching and listening.

  Once—when most of our learning took place outside of schools—this easy communication between dogs and people was taken at face value, a phenomenon to which the Victorian scientist Francis Galton paid homage when he wrote, "Every whine or bark of the dog, each of his fawning, savage, or timorous movements is the exact counterpart of what would have been the man's behaviour, had he felt similar emotions. As the man understands the thoughts of the dog, so the dog understands the thoughts of the man, by attending to his natural voice, his countenance, and his actions."

  Galton goes on to say that this relationship is exclusive. A man, he declares, has to work to communicate his thoughts to an ox or a sheep, but he "irritates a dog by an ordinary laugh ... frightens him by an angry look ... calms him by a kindly bearing." Over most other life forms we have no power whatsoever. "Who for instance," he asks, "ever succeeded in frowning away a mosquito, or in pacifying an angry wasp by a smile."

  Galton didn't investigate what underlying factors predispose dogs and humans to communicate so easily, other than saying dogs had an "inborn liking" for us. More than a century had to go by before Brian Hare, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, sought the roots of this "inborn liking." He asked human volunteers to gaze at, point to, or tap on containers in which food had been hidden. (Odors were controlled, so smell wasn't a factor.) Wolves raised by humans, chimpanzees, and domestic dogs were all tested to see if they could then identify the container that contained the food. Ironically, the chimps, our closest genetic relatives, did the poorest; the wolves didn't do much better. Dogs, on the other hand, almost inevitably chose the correct container.

  Hare then tried to answer the question that logically grew out of his experiment: Had each dog learned to read the social cues of people by living with them, or was the skill hardwired? He tested puppies from nine to twenty-six weeks of age, some of whom had been reared in human families, others in litters. They were all able to choose the correct container by observing the gestures given by humans: a nod, a stare, a tap. Hare concluded that sometime during their domestication, dogs had evolved the ability to read us extremely well.

  The reverse is also true. Sometime during our history, we evolved the ability to read dogs with as much precision as they read us. In 1950, Konrad Lorenz suggested that the key factor underlying this ability was our almost universal love of dogs. This love, he claimed, has its roots in how we feel about our own infants, their juvenile features triggering what he called "innate releasing mechanisms." These releasing mechanisms then express themselves in nurturing behavior. The important juvenile features he noted are a relatively large head, large and low-lying eyes, pudgy cheeks, short and thick extremities, clumsy movements, and a generally pliant body. Lorenz might have been describing wolf puppies as well as human babies, and this was precisely his point: We often transfer our evolved responses to our own infants to substitute objects like dogs.

  The anthropological evidence bears out Lorenz's theory. Virtually everywhere that explorers and anthropologists have encountered aboriginal people, they have found that they treat dogs, especially young dogs, with great affection. The Norwegian Carl Lumholtz, for instance, noted how the dingo was an important member of an Aborigine's family. "It sleeps in the huts and gets plenty to eat," he wrote, "not only of meat, but also of fruit. Its master never strikes, but merely threatens it. He caresses it like a child, eats the fleas off it, and then kisses it on the snout."

  The diarist George Forster, who accompanied Captain James Cook to the Society Islands in the late 1700s, also observed a close bond between native people and their dogs when he wrote that Polynesian women nursed puppies at their own breasts with what he called "ridiculous affection." A memorable illustration of such affection can also be seen in the American painter George Catlin's 1844 pen-and-ink drawing Sioux Moving Camp. It shows men, women, and children mounted on horses. The horses pull travois, and the dogs run alongside them, dragging their own travois. Leading the entire band is a woman on foot, a child slung on her back and a puppy at her waist, perched in her shawl and looking out at the world with an eager and happy expression on its face.

  Yet, as any parent who has watched a baby grow into a teenager knows, cuteness wanes with age. So, too, with wolf pups. As adults, they're no longer cuddly. They have long pointy snouts, big canines, and alert ears. By contrast, domestic dogs don't lose as much of their babyish cuteness when they grow into adults. Their ears stay floppy; their snouts remain relatively short; they still love to play; and, most important, they're willing to roll over on their backs and remain subordinate to those who raised them. The retention of such childlike characteristics into adulthood is called neoteny, and it's why so many people find dogs endearing—we are genetically predisposed to nurture the young. Such behavior, Lorenz observed, would have high survival value for any species.

  The Dog Genome Project, an international effort based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, may eventually discover whether some wolves have a similar predisposition to find us likable. The gene or complex of genes that underlies this trait may have helped to turn some wolves, thousands of years ago, into astute, human-reading dogs. The project may even be able to fix a date to that transformation, one stretching back to the time before our direct ancestors left Africa. After all, wolf and human remains—dated to 400,000 years before the present—have been found side by side in Kent, England. These wolves may be the very first "dogs," even though, as Robert K. Wayne has pointed out, they "may not have been morphologically distinct from their wild relatives." Dogs in wolfish clothing, they may already have begun an alliance with early primates—an alliance that became so valued that people chose their dogs to accompany them not only on their earthly journeys, but also on their final ones.

  The most remarkable of these memorials was discovered in northern Israel, where, twelve thousand years ago, the Natufian culture began the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Natufians lived in circular dwellings, and in one of these structures, under a limestone slab, the skeletons of an elderly person and a puppy were found. The person lay on its right side, its knees drawn up, its head bowed forward. The person's sex couldn't be determined because its pelvis had been damaged. Researchers later determined that the puppy was a transitional animal—a newly domesticated wolf.

  We will never know whether the puppy and the human died at the same time and were buried together or whether the human died and the puppy was then sacrificed. What is known—and can be readily seen in a photograph of the grave—is that the fingers of the person and the paws of the puppy touch, the person's and the puppy's heads so placed that they are nodding toward each other in a final gesture of mutual regard and affection.

  The grave wasn't unique. Two other dogs and a human skeleton were later uncovered in a nearby burial site, arranged similarly. The forehead of the human nods to the forehead of one of the dogs—no better symbol of our thoughts passing so easily between us.

  On our arrival at the trailer, Merle did a thorough exploration of its interior as I listened to my phone messages. After he had sniffed every room, he stood in front of me, giving his tail a clipped little beat that I had come to understand meant that he wanted something. Then he made a lisping noise by slightly opening his mouth. I went to the kitchen and filled a bowl with water. I had been correct in my read of him. He slurped it up immediately.

  "Hey," I said to him. "We'll go to town later, and I'll get you some bowls of your own and also your shots."

  He wagged his tail enthusiastically.

  "Let's see if you feel that way after we're done at the vet's," I told him. "In the meantime, would you like to go outside and do some exploring? I've got some work to do before we go."

  I let him out and he stood on the porch a moment, surveying the fields and mountains bef
ore setting off.

  A couple of hours later, as I was working at my desk, I heard him jump on the porch. Looking over my shoulder, I saw him standing patiently by the door.

  "Want to come in?"

  "Ha!" he panted.

  I let him in and he immediately pumped his paws up and down in his excited little dance.

  "What did you find?"

  He whirled around, clearly enthused by what he had smelled and seen during his excursion.

  I knelt and gave him a hug, and he sank into my hands, groaning in pleasure. Then he lifted his head, regarded me tenderly, and sat back on his haunches, putting his paws on my shoulders. We held each other's gaze.

  Many modern dog trainers would view this moment as a red flag, claiming that a dog who puts its paws on your shoulders and looks you in the eye is trying to assert its dominance. This may be the case with some dogs, but not all of them. In fact, David Mech, one of the world's most eminent wolf biologists, has watched wolves behave in just this fashion and has called their "hugging"—the two wolves facing each other on their haunches or lying on their sides and placing their front legs around the opposite wolf's head and shoulders—"a deliberate display of friendliness and affection."