Science has, unwittingly, done the most damage to dogs by applying the comparative zoology approach to studies of dog behavior. Comparative zoology is a well-established and generally valuable way of understanding the behavior and adaptations of one species through comparisons with those of another. Species that are closely related but have different lifestyles can often be better understood through comparative zoology, because differences in the way they look and behave mirror those changes in lifestyle; so, too, can those species that have come to have similar lives but are genetically unrelated. This method has been highly successful in helping to disentangle the mechanisms of evolution in general, especially now that similarities and differences in behavior can be compared with differences between each species’ DNA, so as to pinpoint the genetic basis of behavior.
Yet although the applications of comparative zoology are usually benign, it has done considerable harm to dogs, as one expert after another has interpreted their behavior as if they were, under the surface, little altered from that of their ancestor, the wolf. Wolves, which have generally been portrayed as vicious animals, constantly striving for dominance over every other member of their own kind, have been held up as the only credible model for understanding the behavior of dogs.1 This supposition leads inevitably to the misconception that every dog is constantly trying to control its owner—unless its owner is relentless in keeping it in check. The conflation of dog and wolf behavior is still widely promoted in books and on television programs, but recent research on both dogs and wolves has shown not only that it is simply unfounded but also that dogs who do come into conflict with their owners are usually motivated by anxiety, not a surfeit of ambition. Since this fundamental misunderstanding has crept into almost every theory of dog behavior, it will be the first to be addressed in this book.
Despite the misapplication of comparative zoology, more recent scientific discoveries could, if applied properly, benefit dogs considerably. Although canine science went into eclipse in the 1970s and ’80s, the 1990s saw the field’s resurgence, which has continued to the present day. After nearly fifty years of almost total neglect, this extraordinary uplift in scientific interest in the domestic dog has been driven partly by the increasing role that dogs play in detecting substances such as explosives, drugs, and other illicit substances (which they still sniff out more effectively than any machine) and the attendant realization that humans need to better understand how dogs perform these tasks. It has also been due to the shift in attention from the chimpanzee to the domestic dog on the part of a few primatologists who have attempted to gain fresh insights into the way that animal and human minds work. A further contribution has come from veterinarians and other clinicians who wish to improve the therapies available for treating dogs with behavioral disorders. Finally, it should not be forgotten that many biologists are dog lovers too. Once the professional stigma of working on so-called artificial animals has been overcome, such scientists are often keen to apply their skills to improving dogs’ lives.
By further pulling back the curtain on dogs’ inner lives, the new school of canine science has the potential to provide everyday dog owners with new ways of thinking about—and relating to—their pets. Thanks to the efforts of this new community of scientists, we now have a vastly improved understanding of how dogs’ minds work—specifically, how dogs gather and interpret information about the world around them, and how they react emotionally to varying situations. Some of this research has revealed startling differences between dogs and people, suggesting that it is both desirable and possible for dog owners to “think dog” rather than simply assuming that whatever they themselves are sensing and feeling, their dog must be sensing and feeling too.
Although the new science about dog behavior has the potential to put the dog’s role in human society back on track, little of the research has been made available outside of obscure academic texts until now. In this book, I attempt to translate for the general readers—and dog lovers—the exciting new developments in canine science. Doing so requires me to overturn a great deal of conventional wisdom about dogs and how we should interact with them. In the first half of the book, I show that the most up-to-date account of the dog’s origins, while confirming that the wolf is indeed the dog’s only ancestor, reveals a very different image of dog’s nature than seemed to be the case only two decades ago. Dogs may be constructed from wolf DNA, but this does not mean that they are compelled to behave or think like wolves; indeed, domestication has changed dogs’ minds and behaviors to the point where such comparisons can be a hindrance, rather than an aid, to any genuine understanding of our pets.
The new science of dog behavior has dramatic implications for humans—and for our choice of the best and most humane ways to train our dogs. A word of caution here, though: This book is not a training manual. Rather, its purpose is to show where modern ideas about dog training have come from, so that owners themselves can effectively evaluate whether the training manuals or trainers they have chosen really know what they are talking about.
After revising the story of the dog’s origins, I will explore what might loosely be referred to as dogs’ “brainpower.” Scientists have recently turned their attention to the kinds of beliefs that owners have about their dogs’ emotional and intellectual capabilities, and their findings are demonstrating how accurate—but also how mistaken—these beliefs can be. It’s an integral aspect of human nature to attribute feelings not just to animals but also to inanimate objects—to speak, for example, of “an angry sky” or “the cruel sea”—and yet, until a few decades ago, it was anybody’s guess as to what emotions different animals might have. Many scientists, moreover, used to regard emotions as simply too subjective to be accessible to serious study. While animal intelligence has been studied for more than a hundred years, hardly anyone considered dogs worthy of study until perhaps the end of the twentieth century. Since then, research has significantly changed the ways in which we think about dogs’ minds. The new canine science reveals that dogs are both smarter and dumber than we think they are. For example, they have an almost uncanny ability to guess what humans are about to do, because of their extreme sensitivity to our body language, but they are also trapped in the moment, incapable of projecting the consequences of their actions backward or forward in time. If owners were able to appreciate their dogs’ intelligence and emotional life for what it actually is, rather than for what they imagine it to be, then dogs would not just be better understood—they’d be better treated as well.
Just as canine science can inform human attitudes about dogs’ minds, it can also tell us how dogs experience and interpret the world around them. Physically speaking, a dog and his or her owner live in the same house, visit the same park together for exercise, travel in the same car, meet the same friends and acquaintances. However, the types of information arriving at the dog’s brain and the owner’s brain in each of those situations are profoundly different. We are visual creatures; dogs primarily rely on their sense of smell. We refer to high-pitched noises that we can’t hear (e.g., the squeaking of bats) as “ultrasound”; dogs would, if they could, scoff at our inability to hear such sounds, which they pick up perfectly. To fully appreciate our dogs’ world, we need science to tell us what they can and can’t detect, what they find pleasant and what they would object to if they could. For example, I don’t suppose your dog has ever been bothered by the colors you’ve picked out to decorate your house, but his or her delicate nose was very likely insulted by the odor of the drying paint.
Although our lack of understanding of dogs’ nature often compromises their well-being, it pales into insignificance beside the problems we have generated for pedigree dogs through excessive inbreeding. Rigid breed standards encourage breeders to eliminate all traits that don’t fit the “perfect” type. In theory this should allow breeders to select for traits that would create healthy and well-adjusted, if rather uniform, animals—but in practice it has led to the appearance of an extensive
range of inherited defects that compromise the welfare of large numbers of dogs in many, many breeds. Science, thankfully, can help to get dog breeding back on track. While it is beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed manual of canine genetics, the penultimate chapter addresses the underlying principles that breeders should be following, emphasizing what it is about pedigree breeding that directly affects dogs’ well-being.
In the final chapters of the book, I look at how science can help dogs to adjust to twenty-first-century life. Currently, most of the attention given to dogs’ breeding has focused on endowing them with superficial, rather than practical, traits. Many pet dogs are essentially breeders’ rejects, deemed unlikely to reach the perfection demanded by the breed standard; puppies who look as though they’re never going to become champions in the show-ring are the ones who become pets. Surely the needs of the pet dog deserve more attention than that? As dog owners and dog lovers, we need to think constructively about how to breed dogs whose primary purpose is not to herd sheep, retrieve game, or win prizes at dog shows but, rather, to be rewarding, obedient, healthy, happy family pets.
In writing this book, I have tried to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the special place that dogs hold in human society. If these aims can be achieved, they should go a long way toward sustaining and reinforcing our relationship with our beloved companions as the next decades unfold.
CHAPTER 1
Where Dogs Came From
“The wolf in your living room”—a powerful image that reminds dog owners that their trusted companion is, under the skin, an animal, not a person. Dogs are indeed wolves, at least as far as their DNA is concerned; the two animals share 99.96 percent of their genes. Following the same logic, you might just as well say that wolves are dogs—but, surprisingly, no one does. Wolves are generally portrayed as wild, ancestral, and primeval, whereas dogs tend to be cast in the role of the wolf’s artificial, controlled, subservient derivatives. Yet dogs, in terms of sheer numbers, are far more successful in the modern world than wolves are. So, what do we gain from knowing that wolves and dogs share a common ancestor? Many books, articles, and TV programs about dog behavior have claimed that understanding the wolf is the key to understanding the domestic dog. I disagree. My view is that the key to understanding the domestic dog is, first and foremost, to understand the domestic dog, and it’s a view I share with an increasing number of scientists worldwide. By analyzing the dog as its own animal rather than as a lesser version of the wolf, we have the opportunity to understand it—and refine our dealings with it—as never before.
To be sure, it’s undeniable that dogs share many of their basic characteristics with other members of the Dog family (the Canidae) of which the wolf is a part. Dogs evolved from canids, and they owe such qualities as their basic anatomy, their refined sense of smell, their ability to retrieve, and their capacity to form lasting social bonds to this evolution. To some extent, then, comparing dogs to their wild ancestors can be illuminating—but when the wolf is taken as the only available point of reference, our understanding of dogs suffers.
At the most fundamental level, dogs are distinguished by the fact that, unlike wolves or other canids, they have adapted to live alongside human beings, the result of the process of domestication. As dogs have been altered by domestication, many of the subtleties and sophistications of wolf behavior appear to have been stripped away, leaving an animal that is still recognizably a canid but no longer a wolf. Domestication has altered the dog considerably, more than any other species. It’s self-evident that dogs come in a wide range of shapes and sizes; indeed, there’s more size variation among domestic dogs than in the whole of the rest of the Dog family put together. Yet this is by no means the only profound effect of domestication. Perhaps the most important one, for both us and our dogs, is their ability to bond with us and understand us, to an extent that no other animal can match. Understanding what has happened during domestication is therefore a key element in understanding the dog.
To understand the domestic dog fully, we need to look beyond the process of domestication—beyond even the wolf—to examine the dog’s entire history. We need to know where the dog came from and what all its ancestors were like—not just its closest living relative, the wolf. Of course, it is ultimately impossible for us to know precisely how the domestic dog’s ancestors behaved, whether we are examining its immediate forebears (wolves that lived more than ten thousand years ago) or its more distant ancestors (social canids, the precursors of the wolf, in the Pliocene era several million years ago). They are all extinct. We can, however, get some idea of how they might have behaved by examining the range of behavior that is characteristic of today’s social canids. Indeed, a detailed examination of the behavior of those species would not only shed light onto the dog’s earliest ancestors but also help us work out why it was that, apart from the wolf, none of the canids were successfully and permanently domesticated.
DNA analysis leaves no doubt that the dog is descended only (or at least almost entirely) from the grey wolf, Canis lupus. The first comprehensive sequencing of the maternal DNA of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals, published in 1997, produced no evidence that dogs had ancestors in any species other than the grey wolf.1 None of the dozens of investigations performed since then have contradicted this; however, there is still a relative lack of data on paternal DNA, which is more difficult to analyze, so it is still possible that a few types of dog could claim descent from other canids through their paternal line.
Genetically, dogs and wolves have a great deal in common—but the mere fact that two species have considerable overlap in their DNA doesn’t mean that their behavior will be the same. Indeed, many animals with similar DNA are drastically different from one another, especially in terms of behavior. We know this thanks to the DNA “revolution,” which has led to the sequencing of the genomes of humans, canines, felines, and an increasing number of other species. Many of these sequences exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity. For example, your DNA and your dog’s are identical for about 25 percent of their length, which is perhaps not surprising given that you are both mammals; roughly the same 25 percent is also found in mice. The other 75 percent accounts for why dogs, mice, and people look—and behave—very differently from one another.
Species that are much more closely related to one another than we are to dogs can share almost their entire DNA sequences, and it’s tempting to assume that they must therefore be restricted to the same range of behavior. But DNA doesn’t control behavior directly; rather, it specifies the structure of proteins and other constituents of cells, such that a tiny change in DNA can lead to a huge change in behavior. For example, there is no “blueprint” for the brain; each nerve cell in the brain emerges out of interactions between thousands of DNA sequences. A change in one “letter” in those sequences could have an enormous effect on the way the brain functions, or none at all—we simply don’t know enough yet about how DNA and behavior interact. Take two closely related apes: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Common chimps share 99.6 percent of their DNA with bonobos, and yet the social behavior of these two kinds of great ape couldn’t be more different. Common chimps are omnivorous, often hunting other kinds of monkey, and their social groups are based on coalitions between males, who are highly aggressive toward outsiders and may even murder them if they get the chance. Bonobos, on the other hand, are vegetarian, live in societies centered on groups of related females, rarely show aggression, and have never been seen to murder in the wild. Genetically almost identical, the two species are vastly different in behavior.
Like bonobos and chimpanzees, dogs and grey wolves share most of their DNA—but there seems little reason to presume that, based on this fact, they must inevitably share the same social systems as well. In fact, domestication appears to have dissolved away much of the detail of wolfspecific behavior in dogs, leaving them with a behavioral repertoire that has much in common with that of slightly more distantly rel
ated species, such as the coyote Canis latrans, and even some more distant relatives in the same family, such as the golden jackal Canis aureus.
Even to early biologists, the differences between dogs’ behavior and that of wolves were obvious. Many of these differences are manifested socially: Dogs, for instance, are clearly not pack animals (although they do occasionally form groups), and they are much more adept than wolves at forming relationships with people. Over the years, many eminent biologists, including Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz and even Charles Darwin himself, have been struck by the flexibility of the dog’s behavior as well as by the enormous size difference between the smallest and largest breeds. Both suggested that domestic dogs must be some kind of hybrid between two or even several of the canids. Lorenz, in his charming book Man Meets Dog, was convinced that wolves were far too independent in nature to explain the indiscriminate friendliness shown by many dogs, and proposed that most of the breeds that had originated in Europe were predominantly jackal in origin. He later retracted this idea, having realized that there was no evidence for spontaneous crossbreeding between dogs and jackals (as readily happens between dogs and wolves) and that the details of jackal behavior didn’t fit that of the dogs (the jackal’s howl, for example, is nothing like any dog’s).
Despite these scientists’ best efforts to determine why dogs are so different from wolves in their behavior, the puzzle was not resolved and remains largely unanswered to this day. Yet perhaps some clues can be gathered if we look further back in evolutionary time, thinking of our domestic dog as a product not of one species, the grey wolf, but of a whole family, the Canidae (also referred to as the Dog family, as noted above, but hereafter referred to as canids to avoid confusion with the domestic dog). Many of the canid species have sophisticated social lives, which—when they overlap with those of dogs—can potentially shed light on the origins of dog behavior; coyotes, for instance, are much more promiscuous than wolves, a characteristic shared with dogs. Although the behavioral traits of other canids are not as well understood or well publicized as those of the grey wolf, they nevertheless have a great deal to tell us about when—and how—dog behavior may have originated.
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