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 behaviour as if it 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 behaviour 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 behaviour is still widely promoted in books and on television programmes, but recent research on both dogs and wolves has shown not only that it is simply unfounded, but also that dogs that 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 behaviour, 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 1980s, the 1990s saw a 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 we need to understand better how dogs perform these tasks. It has also been due to a few primatologists turning their attention from the chimpanzee to the domestic dog, in an attempt 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 behavioural disorders. Finally, it should not be forgotten that many biologists are dog-lovers too. Once the professional stigma of working on a so-called ‘artificial animal’ 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 the average dog owner with new ways of thinking about – and relating to – their pet. Thanks to the efforts of this new community of scientists, we now have a vastly improved insight into how dogs’ minds work, how they 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 of dog behaviour has the potential to put the dog’s role in human society back on track, little of the research has been made available outside obscure academic texts until now. In this book, I attempt to translate for the general reader – and dog-lover – 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 an image of the dog’s nature very different from what 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 behaviour to the point where such comparisons can become a hindrance, rather than an aid, to any genuine understanding of our pets.
The new science of dog behaviour 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 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 showing how accurate – but also how mistaken – these beliefs can be. It is an integral part 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 kinds of 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 over a century, 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 instinctively 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 backwards or forwards 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 would 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 its 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 cannot hear (for example, 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 cannot detect, what they find pleasant and what they would object to if they could. For example, I do not suppose your dog has ever been bothered by the colours you have chosen to decorate your house, but his or her delicate nose was very likely insulted by the odour of the drying paint.
Although our lack of understanding of dogs’ nature often compromises their well-being, such offences pale into insignificance beside the problems we have generated for pedigree dogs through excessive inbreeding. Rigid breed standards encourage breeders to eliminate all traits that do not 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 a extensive and widespread range of inherited defects that compromise the welfare of large numbers of dogs in 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 that look as though they are never going to become champions
in the show ring are the ones most likely to 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 towards sustaining and reinforcing our relationship with our beloved companions as the next decades unfold.
1
Where Dogs Came From
‘The wolf in your living room’ is 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 per cent 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 derivative. Yet dogs are, in terms of sheer numbers, far more successful in the modern world than wolves. So, what do we gain from knowing that wolves and dogs share a common ancestor? Many books, articles and television programmes about dog behaviour 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 is a view I share with an increasing number of scientists worldwide. By analysing 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 is 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 unique because, 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 behaviour 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 is self-evident that dogs come in a wide range of shapes and sizes; indeed, there is actually 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 10,000 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 behaviour that is characteristic of today’s social canids. Indeed, a detailed examination of the behaviour of those species would not only shed light on to the dog’s earliest ancestors, but also help us to work out why it was that, apart from the wolf, none of the canids was successfully and permanently domesticated.
DNA analysis leaves us in 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 analyse, 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 does not mean that their behaviour will be the same. Indeed, many animals with similar DNA are drastically different from one another, especially in terms of behaviour. 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 per cent of their length, which is perhaps not surprising given that you are both mammals – roughly the same 25 per cent is also found in mice. The other 75 per cent 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 is tempting to assume that they must therefore be restricted to the same range of behaviour. But DNA does not control behaviour directly; rather, it specifies the structure of proteins and other constituents of cells, and a tiny change in DNA can lead to a huge change in behaviour. 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 do not know enough yet about how DNA and behaviour interact. Take two closely related apes: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Common chimps share 99.6 per cent of their DNA with bonobos, and yet the social behaviour of these two kinds of great ape could not be more different. Common chimps are omnivorous, often hunting other kinds of monkey, and their social groups are based on coalitions between males, which are highly aggressive to outsiders and may even murder them if they get the chance. Bonobos, on the other hand, are vegetarian, live in societies centred 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 behaviour.
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 wolf-specific behaviour in dogs, leaving them with a behavioural repertoire that has much in common with that of slightly more distantly related 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’ behaviour and that of wolves were obvious. Many of these differences are manifested socially: dogs, for instance, are clearly not pack animals (even when they form groups these do not behave in a coherent way), and they are much more adept than wolves are 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 behaviour, 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 th
e 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 cross-breeding between dogs and jackals (as readily happens between dogs and wolves), and that the details of jackal behaviour did not 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 behaviour, 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, but they will be ‘canids’ here 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 behaviour; coyotes, for instance, are more promiscuous than wolves, a characteristic shared with dogs. Although the behavioural 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 behaviour may have originated.
Tracing the canids back to their origins reveals that their social intelligence was probably one of the early traits that set dogs’ ancient ancestors apart. Canids probably first evolved some 6 million years ago in North America, where they eventually replaced another type of dog-like mammal, the borophagine. This was a large, hyena-like animal that specialized in scavenging and had massive bone-crushing jaws to match. The original canids, which probably looked more like foxes than dogs, must have been little Davids to the cumbersome borophagine Goliaths, out-competing them in speed, cunning and intelligence, and ultimately helping to drive them to extinction. If we then fast-forward a mere 1.5 million years, we find that the surviving canids had spread all over the world, and split into several types, one of which was the ancestor of today’s dogs, wolves and jackals – collectively referred to as Canis.2 Subsequently, further diversification produced three strands of evolution, any one of which could potentially have culminated in a domestic animal, for there is nothing in the behaviour of any of the canid lineages to suggest that they could not have produced an animal that was suitable for domestication. Indeed it is likely that at least two of the three did produce domestic animals, and entirely possible that the wolf was not the only species in its lineage to be domesticated.
In Defence of Dogs Page 2