In Defence of Dogs
Page 1
JOHN BRADSHAW
In Defence of Dogs
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. Where Dogs Came From
2. How Wolves Became Dogs
3. Why Dogs Were – Unfortunately – Turned Back into Wolves
4. Sticks or Carrots? The Science of Dog Training
5. How Puppies Become Pets
6. Does Your Dog Love You?
7. Canine Brainpower
8. Emotional (Un)sophistication
9. A World of Smells
10. Problems with Pedigrees
11. Dogs and the Future
Further Reading
Notes
John Bradshaw is a biologist who founded and directs the world-renowned Anthrozoology Institute, based at the University of Bristol. He has been studying the behaviour of domestic dogs and their owners for over twenty-five years, and is the author of many scientific articles, research papers and reviews, which have not only shed new light on the dog’s abilities and needs but have also changed the way that dogs are understood and cared for all over the world.
To Alexis (1970–1984) – a Real Dog
List of Figures
Ginger
Golden jackals
T-shaped stone pillar at Gobekli Tepe
Culpeo fox
A family of coyotes
A pack of African wild dogs
A family of grey wolves
A wolf performing the affiliation display
The belly-up display
A simplified representation of the evolution of the wolf and the domestic dog
A wolf burial from near Lake Baikal in Siberia
Single footprints of a child and a canid in the Chauvet cave
Village dogs
Native American dog travois
Medieval dogs
A turnspit dog at work
Urban scavengers
Pariah dogs
Linear hierarchy
Circular ‘hierarchy’
Captive wolf-pack hierarchy
Wolf-pack family structure
Clicker-training
Force-fetch training
Inter-species socialization expressed as species-typical greeting behaviour
Sheep-guarding dog with its flock
Chihuahua puppy fostered by a cat
Cat-raised puppy shying away from dog-raised puppies
The three components of emotion
Darwin’s ‘attacking’ dog
Darwin’s ‘submissive’ dog
Bared teeth – an honest signal of fighting potential
Separation distress
Thorndike’s puzzle-box
An experiment demonstrating dogs’ abilities to take short-cuts
The means–end test
A dog demonstrating pulling a handle with its paw, while holding a ball in its mouth
Following a cross-point
Two dogs playing with a tug-toy
Play-bow
Dog watching a game of tug between a person and a second dog
Percentages of UK dog owners who thought their dogs could feel particular emotions
A spatial discrimination task
Bird’s-eye view of an odour plume
Dogs sniffing each other’s necks
‘Squat-raise’ urine-marking
Extremes of size and shape
Wolf-like visual signals performed by a range of breeds
A working collie
A basenji
Pit bull
Figures 1–9, 11–14, 17, 18, 23–8, 32–3, 36–41, 45–7, 49–51 copyright © Alan Peters.
Ginger
Preface
The first dog that I became attached to was one I never met. He was my grandfather’s cairn terrier, Ginger – a typical long-legged cairn of the early twentieth century, only a few generations removed from his working forebears. Ginger had died long before I was born, and I grew up in a pet-free household: stories about Ginger were, for a while, the nearest I came to having a dog of my own.
My grandfather, an architect, liked to walk. He walked to and from his office in the industrial city of Bradford, and to and from the churches and mill buildings he specialized in, but especially he walked for recreation, whether on the Yorkshire moors, or in the Lake District, or in Snowdonia. Whenever he could, he took Ginger with him. The family maintained that Ginger, who was taller than he should have been for his breed, had acquired his longer than average legs through all this exercise. Actually, in the photographs I have of him he looks quite typical of his breed, and not unlike the cairn chosen to play ‘Toto’ in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. It was not until much later on, when I became professionally interested in pedigree dogs, that I was struck by how much the breed had changed over the intervening decades, including becoming significantly shorter in the leg. I doubt many modern cairns would enjoy the amounts of exercise that my grandfather evidently relished, although cairns today are less prone to inherited diseases than many other breeds are.
Ginger was a genuine Yorkshire ‘character’, and the family had a fund of stories about him, but what amazed me the most was the freedom he had been given, even though he lived within sight of the city centre. Every lunch time, when my grandfather was at work, Ginger was allowed to take himself for a walk around the neighbourhood. Apparently he had a routine. First he would cross the road into Lister Park, where he would sniff lamp-posts, interact with other dogs and, in summer, try to persuade the occupants of the park benches to part with one of their sandwiches. Then he would cross the tram tracks on Manningham Lane, and amble to the rear of the fish and chip shop, where a scratch at the back door would usually elicit a handful of scraps of batter and some misshapen chips. Then he usually headed straight for home, which involved crossing a busy junction. Here, according to family legend, there was usually a policeman, directing the lunchtime traffic, who would solemnly stop the cars to allow Ginger safe passage across.
I have not been to Bradford for many years, but if other cities are anything to go by, Lister Park is probably now ringed with poop-bins, and most of the dogs walked there will be leashed. The Bradford dog-wardens are called out to catch any dog that routinely roams the park, let alone the nearby streets. The trams are long gone of course, and traffic lights have replaced policemen on point duty, but I doubt that, even if he or she wanted to, one of today’s stab-vested community support officers would dare to stop a car to allow a small brown terrier to cross the road.
Seventy-odd years have passed since Ginger was allowed to roam the streets and charm his way into the affections of everyone he met, including the local law enforcement officers. During that same period, almost unnoticed, there have been enormous changes in society’s attitudes towards man’s best friend.
Such attitudes were still quite relaxed in 1970s Britain when I was growing up. My first dog, a Labrador/Jack Russell cross named Alexis, was also a roamer, although he was more interested in the opposite sex than in lunchtime snacks. Despite our best efforts to keep him in sight he would manage to get away once in a while, and so, unlike Ginger, he did end up in police kennels a few times (in those days the police in the United Kingdom still had responsibility for stray dogs), but no one seemed to mind much. Nowadays such tolerance of dogs and their ways is hard to find, especially in cities, and dog ownership is showing signs of retreating to its roots in the countryside. After many millennia in which the dog has been man’s closest animal companion, cats are taking over as the most popular pet in many countries, including the United Kingdom. Why is this happening?
> First of all, dogs are expected to be much better controlled than they used to be. There has never been a shortage of experts telling owners how to take charge of their dogs. When I took on my second dog, a Labrador/Airedale terrier cross named Ivan, I was determined that he would be better behaved than Alexis. I decided I ought to find out something about training, but was then shocked to discover the approach adopted by the trainers of the day, such as Barbara Woodhouse, who seemed to see the dog as something that needed to be dominated at all times. This simply did not make sense to me – the whole point of having dogs as pets was for them to become friends, not slaves. As I researched, I found that this whole approach to training had stemmed from the ideas of Colonel Konrad Most, a police officer and a pioneer in dog training who, more than a hundred years ago, had decided that a man could control a dog only if the dog was convinced that the man was physically superior. He derived this idea from contemporary biologists’ accounts of wild wolf packs, which at that time were considered to be controlled by one individual who ruled the others through fear. Biology, by then my profession, seemed to be at odds with my gut-feeling as to how my relationship with my dogs ought to work.
To my relief, this dilemma has resolved itself over the past decade. The wolf pack, always the touchstone for the interpretation of dog behaviour, is now known to be a harmonious family group except when human intervention renders it dysfunctional. As a consequence, the most enlightened modern trainers have largely abandoned the use of punishment, relying on reward-based methods that have their roots in comparative psychology. Yet for some reason, old-school trainers continue to dominate the media, largely, I suspect, because their confrontational methods make for a more exciting spectacle.
While a more sympathetic understanding of dogs’ minds is being applied to training, albeit patchily, their physical health has been progressively undermined. As more and more demands have been placed on the family dog, in terms of hygiene, control and behaviour, the breeding of dogs that might be suited to this ever more demanding niche has been left in the hands of enthusiasts whose primary goal is to produce dogs that look good. Ginger, although he came from pedigree stock, was only ten or so generations away from Scottish and Irish rat-catchers of no particular breeding, and as a result led a long and healthy life. Now, the cairn terrier is in danger of becoming the victim of inbreeding for the show ring, plagued by more than a dozen hereditary complaints such as the exotically named but apparently excruciatingly painful Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease.
Biologists now know far more about what really makes dogs tick than they did even a decade ago, but this new understanding has been slow to percolate through to owners, and, indeed, has not yet made enough of a difference to the lives of the dogs themselves. Having studied the behaviour of dogs for more than twenty years, as well as enjoying their company, I felt it was time that someone stood up for dogdom: not the caricature of the wolf in a dog suit, ready to dominate its unsuspecting owner at the first sign of weakness, not the trophy animal that collects rosettes and kudos for its breeder, but the real dog, the pet that just wants to be one of the family and enjoy life.
Introduction
The dog has been our faithful companion for tens of thousands of years. Today, dogs live alongside humans all across the globe, often as integral parts of our families. To many people, a world without dogs is unthinkable.
And yet dogs today unwittingly find themselves on the verge of a crisis, struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of change in human society. Until a little over a hundred years ago, most dogs worked for their living. Each of the breeds or types had become well suited, over thousands of years and a corresponding number of generations, to the task for which they were bred. First and foremost, dogs were tools. Their agility and quick thinking, their keen senses and their unparalleled ability to communicate with humans suited them for an extraordinary diversity of tasks, hunting, herding, guarding and many others, each an important component of the economy. In short, dogs had to earn their keep, in one way or another; apart from the few lapdogs that were the playthings of the very rich, the company that dogs must also have provided would have been incidental; rewarding, but not their raison d’être. Then, a few dozen dog-generations ago, everything began to change – and these changes are still gathering pace today.
Nowadays, an ever-increasing proportion of dogs are never expected to work in the conventional sense; their sole function is to be family pets. Although many working types have successfully adapted, others were and still are poorly suited to this new role, so it is perhaps surprising that none of the breeds that are most popular as family pets have been specifically and exclusively designed as such. Thus far, dogs have done their best to adjust to the many changes and restrictions we have imposed upon them, in particular our expectation that they will be faithful companions when we need them to be, and unobtrusive when we do not. However, the cracks inherent in this compromise are beginning to widen. As human society continues to change, and the planet becomes ever more crowded, there are signs that the popularity of dogs as pets may have peaked, and that they may struggle to adapt as the current century unfolds, especially in urban environments. After all, dogs, as living beings, cannot be re-engineered every decade or so as if they were computers or cars. In the past, when dogs’ functions were mostly rural, it was accepted that they were intrinsically messy and needed to be managed on their own terms. Today, by contrast, many pet dogs live in circumscribed, urban environments, and are expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as an adult. As if these new obligations were not enough, many dogs still manifest the adaptations that suited them for their original functions – traits that we now demand they cast away as if they had never existed. The collie that herds sheep is the shepherd’s best friend; the pet collie that tries to herd children and chases bicycles is an owner’s nightmare. The new, unrealistic standards to which many humans hold their dogs have arisen from one of several fundamental misconceptions about what dogs are, and what they have been designed to do. We must strive to better understand their needs and their nature if their niche in human society is not to diminish.
Our rapidly changing expectations are not the only challenge that dogs face today. The ways in which we now control their reproduction also represent a major challenge to their well-being. For much of human history, dogs were bred to suit the roles that humankind assigned to them – but whether their task was herding, retrieving, guarding or hauling, dogs’ stability and functionality were considered far more important than their type or appearance. In the late nineteenth century, however, dogs were divided into self-contained breeds, reproductively isolated from one another, and each assigned a single ideal appearance, or ‘standard’, by breed societies. For many dogs, this rigid categorization has not worked out well; rather, it has worked against their need to adapt into their new primary role as companions. Most breeders strive not to breed the perfect pet, but to produce the perfect-looking dog that will succeed in the show ring. These winning dogs are considered prized stock, and make a hugely disproportionate genetic contribution to the next generation – resulting in ‘pure’ breeds whose idealized appearance belies their deteriorated health. In the 1950s, most breeds still had a healthy range of genetic variation; by 2000, only some 20–25 generations later, many had been inbred to the point where hundreds of genetically based deformities, diseases and disadvantages had emerged, potentially compromising the welfare of every pure-bred dog. In the United Kingdom, the growing rift between dog breeders and those concerned with dogs’ welfare finally became public in 2008, resulting in the withdrawal of the humane charities – and subsequently that of BBC Television, the event’s broadcaster – from Crufts, the country’s national dog show. While such protests are a start, the dogs themselves will not feel any benefit until the problems brought about by excessive inbreeding have been reversed, and dogs are bred with their health and role in society, not their looks, in mind.<
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Ultimately, people will have to change their attitudes if the dog’s lot is to improve. So far, however, neither the experts nor the average owner have had their preconceived notions challenged by the wealth of new science that is emerging about dogs. Much of the public debate so far, whether it is about the merits of out-breeding versus inbreeding, or the effectiveness of training methods, has amounted to little more than the statement and restatement of entrenched opinions. This is where scientific understanding becomes essential, for it can tell us what dogs are really like and what their needs really amount to.
Science is an essential tool for understanding dogs, but the contributions of canine science to dog welfare have, unfortunately, been somewhat mixed. Canine science, which originated in the 1950s, sets out to provide a rational perspective on what it is like to be a dog, ostensibly more objective than the traditional human-centred or anthropomorphic view of their natures. Despite this attempt at detachment, however, canine scientists have occasionally misunderstood – and even given others the licence to cause injury to – the very animals whose nature they have endeavoured to reveal.
Science has, unwittingly, done the most damage to dogs by applying the comparative zoology approach to studies of dog behaviour. Comparative zoology is a well-established and generally valuable way of understanding the behaviour 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 behaviour can be compared with differences between each species’ DNA, so as to pinpoint the genetic basis of behaviour.