In Defence of Dogs

by John Bradshaw

  The first evolutionary break within the Canis genus occurred in North America, and eventually (about 1 million years ago) gave rise to today’s coyote, still confined to that continent. Another group emerged in South America, where they live to this day, and are classified as Dusicyon rather than Canis. Rather misleadingly, they are collectively known as South American foxes, though they are only distantly related to the much better known red fox of hunting fame. The other six species of Canis all evolved in the Old World, most likely in Eurasia, although some possibly in Africa. Four of these are jackals, although one of these, the Simien jackal, is sometimes confusingly referred to as the Ethiopian wolf; they include the golden jackal that Lorenz thought might have been the origin of some breeds of dog. Another is the grey wolf Canis lupus, the ancestor of our domestic dogs. Of the Eurasian canids, only the grey wolf reached North America, migrating across the Baring land bridge some 100,000 years ago during one of the periods when Alaska was joined to Asia.

  Many of these species superficially seem to be potential candidates for domestication, thanks to a number of social tools that they share with the domestic dog. All can, when conditions are favourable, live in family groups or ‘packs’. All seem to be able to adapt their lifestyles – specifically, whether they live alone or in small or large groups – to the circumstances they find themselves in.3 (Nowadays, the most important such ‘circumstance’ is often the activities of our own species, whether direct persecution, or incidental provision of food at rubbish-dumps.) The current consensus is that the canid genome is rather like a Swiss Army knife,4 a social toolkit that has remained resistant to evolutionary change and which can be used to cope with a wide variety of circumstances, ranging from solitary living when times are hard, to complex societies when food is plentiful and persecution is at a minimum. The success of the domestic dog in adapting so successfully to life with humans can therefore be seen not as a specific set of changes that began only with the grey wolf, but rather as a new use for this ancient canid social toolkit – one that allowed the dog to socialize not just with other members of the same species, but also with members of ours.

  While we are now certain that the grey wolf is the domestic dog’s one and only direct ancestor, the dog shares its earlier ancestors with many other still-living relatives, each of whom may offer us a new perspective on these ancient forebears. The dog’s lineage, after all, goes back much further than that of the grey wolf, to canids that are now extinct, but were themselves the ancestors of all of today’s living canids Each of the latter has something to tell us about the ways that canids can adapt to fit different circumstances – that is, how they construct their social groups – and therefore each provides a different set of clues as to what the canid ‘toolkit’ may have looked like, as it emerged some 5 million years ago. As all of these canids carry the same ‘toolkit’, the fact that none apart from the wolf has been permanently domesticated will also need to be accounted for.

  The golden jackal, Canis aureus, is one of the dog’s most social relatives, and therefore a seemingly ideal candidate for domestication. It is the only jackal to be found in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization, where many other domestications, including sheep, goats and cattle, occurred; all the other jackals are restricted to Africa. Like many of the other canids, the golden jackal shows considerable flexibility in its social arrangements. A few hunt alone, but most live in male-female pairs, often bonding for life, which in practice can be six to eight years. If one partner dies, the other rarely finds a new mate. Very often, some of the first litter that a pair produces will stay with their parents until the next litter is born the following year, and will then help to bring them up, before leaving to find their own mates a few months later. They protect the young at the den while their parents are off hunting or, if they catch something themselves, will often bring it back to share with the cubs. Cubs are more likely to survive if their elder brothers and sisters stay on to help, so their contribution is valuable. Jackals often hunt in pairs, enabling them to tackle larger prey than they could alone, and sometimes the helpers may hunt with them to make up a pack of three or four. The family members have a rich vocabulary for communicating with one another, just as wolves do. Based on its wealth of social skills, there seems little reason why the golden jackal could not have become domesticated as the grey wolf did.

  Golden jackals

  In fact, a recent archaeological find provides hints that the golden jackal may, indeed, have been domesticated in Turkey. Gobekli Tepe, an Early Neolithic hilltop site to the south-east of that country, appears to be a temple, an arrangement of huge stones erected a staggering 11,000 years ago, more than twice as old as Stonehenge. These stones, which predate agriculture and metal tools, are covered in highly stylized carvings of people, animals and birds. Some of the stones are T-shaped, with the head of the T representing the head of a person, and the upright part the body. Many of the animals portrayed are potentially menacing – lions, snakes, spiders, vultures, scorpions. The absence of domesticated animals is unsurprising; these stones were carved by hunter-gatherers, long before any animal was domesticated for food. A few of the carvings clearly depict dog-like animals, which archaeologists have labelled as foxes, just another sort of potentially harmful animal. Yet on one stone, a ‘fox’ is depicted in the crook of a man’s arm, more the place for a pet than an enemy, making it unlikely that the drawing depicts a red fox, as that animal is solitary and therefore a very unlikely candidate for domestication. And although it is hard to be sure, the carving does not look much like a wolf, either; its fox-like features and bushy tail make it much more likely to be a jackal, and the only jackal native to that area is the golden jackal. Perhaps Konrad Lorenz’s idea of a jackal origin for dogs was only half wrong: maybe jackals were domesticated once, more than 10,000 years ago, but were less well adapted to living with humans than wolves were, and so died out or returned to the wild.

  A T-shaped stone pillar, thought to represent a man’s head and torso, at Gobekli Tepe, an archaeological site on the borders of modern Turkey and Syria. The arm carved into the vertical stone appears to be holding a canid.

  To find a similar example of a failed domestication, but one that survived into recorded history, we need to travel to South America. Coincidentally, this example also involves a ‘fox’, one of a group of fox-like dogs that evolved in South America some 3 million years ago. One of these, the culpeo fox Dusicyon culpaeus, was domesticated – or at least tamed (living with people, but still only breeding in the wild). These animals came to be known as Aguara dogs. At the end of the eighteenth century, the English soldier turned scientist and explorer Charles Hamilton Smith noted that these dogs could be found in hunter-gatherer villages. They would accompany the men on hunting trips, although they appear not to have made themselves particularly useful, and would often come home on their own after a few hours. In the villages they would scavenge for food, or go off on short hunting expeditions of their own, where they would eat almost anything they could find, including fish, crabs, limpets, lizards, toads and snakes. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Aguara dogs had disappeared, replaced by the much more biddable and useful dogs that the Europeans had brought with them to the continent. It is difficult to work out why the Aguara dog did not progress to full domestication, because very little is known about the habits of its wild ancestor, the culpeo fox. However, none of the South American foxes regularly form groups of more than two, so it is likely that their social abilities were simply too undeveloped to be adapted to include relationships with humans.

  Culpeo fox

  In North America, the most likely candidate for domestication, apart from the immigrant grey wolf, is the coyote (Canis latrans). The traditional image of this member of the dog family is that of a solitary hunter, but the coyote is in fact a highly social animal, whose appetite for livestock has led it to be persecuted by humans. Left to their own devices, coyotes live in pairs, and, as with the go
lden jackal, these can turn into small packs when one year’s offspring remain with their parents to assist with the next litter. This is most likely to be possible when large prey, such as elk and white-tailed deer, are available, providing both the necessity and the opportunity for the coyotes to hunt as a pack. In this, they may rival the wolf in terms of the sophistication of their social lives; nevertheless, neither they nor, as we shall see, the wolves of North America, ever appear to have been domesticated. The reason may simply be that by the time humans colonized North America they already had dogs and thus no need for any alternative. It is possible, however, that some coyote genes have found their way into modern American dogs. The reverse has certainly happened, inasmuch as about 10 per cent of ‘wild’ coyotes carry genes from domestic dogs. Although it is possible that these are the progeny of matings between female coyotes and male dogs, it is unlikely that a domestic dog would be sufficiently bold to impress a wild coyote bitch. More likely, they are the result of male coyotes forcing themselves on female dogs, whose puppies then escaped and joined the local coyote population. The more tractable of these offspring might have subsequently bred with other dogs, inserting coyote genes permanently into the dog population.

  A family of coyotes

  Finally, our journey takes us to Africa, the birthplace of our own species, and an area in which domestication would therefore seem highly plausible. This continent is rich in canids, including four species of jackal (the golden jackal among them), as well as the African wild dog, undoubtedly a rival for the grey wolf’s claim to be the most sociable of the canids. The African wild dog’s packs are larger than the wolf’s; up to fifty individuals have been seen hunting together, although the typical number of adults in a pack is eight. In the open grasslands which the African wild dog favours, co-operative hunting is essential for survival. Only a pack can defend kills against other large predators, such as lions and hyenas. (Not that African wild dogs are particularly small themselves – they are the size of a small German shepherd, but with a brindled coat and huge upright ears.) After they have made a kill, the food is shared amicably between all pack members; if there are cubs back in the den, each dog will eat more than usual and regurgitate some to feed the young upon returning home.

  A pack of African wild dogs

  For most of the year, relationships between the members of a pack of African wild dogs are friendly. Every morning and evening, they engage in a greeting ritual, running around excitedly, thrusting their noses into each other’s faces (a mimicry of the begging behaviour that they used when they were cubs), and producing a squeaking noise that make them sound more like a troop of monkeys than a pack of dogs. Once the adults have become sufficiently hyped up by all this chatter, they run off together on the hunt. Pack members will occasionally quarrel with one another, but serious fighting is rare – until one of the females comes into season. When she is ready to mate, the dominant female becomes seriously aggressive towards the other adult females, and it is not unknown for her to inflict serious injuries on them. As a result, she is usually the only female in the pack to produce a litter each year; if one of the other females also produces a litter, the dominant female may try to kill her cubs, though sometimes all the cubs get mixed up together and both mothers look after them.

  Despite this occasional violence within groups of African wild dogs, the high level of co-operation in wild-dog packs suggests that they should be easy to domesticate. For example, they have a complex vocabulary of vocalizations – twitters, begging cries, gurgles, yelps, squeals, whimpers, whines, moans, ‘hoo’s, growls and barks — that would seem ideally suited for communication with such a vocal species as ourselves, far more so than the rather more taciturn wolf. Yet there seems to be no evidence that any attempt was ever made to domesticate this species. Considered in the broader context of domestication as a whole, however, this failure may be less surprising. Despite mankind having evolved in Africa and therefore having a much longer history there than anywhere else, almost all the significant domestications of animals have taken place on other continents. It has been suggested that the human race needed to get outside its evolutionary ‘comfort zone’ before becoming sufficiently motivated to domesticate animals (or indeed plants). Perhaps the African wild dog was simply in the wrong place to become part of our world.

  While the histories of the canids vary from place to place and species to species, two of the dog’s distant cousins – the golden jackal and the South American culpeo fox – provide tantalizing glimpses of domestications that seem to have been begun but never completed. Each occurred on a different continent – one in Eurasia, the other in South America – and in very different societies. This points again to the importance of the 5-million-year-old canid ‘toolkit’ – a flexible sociality, a good nose, expertise in hunting – as being the key to the suitability of canids for domestication. And yet neither of these experiments in domestication was, in the long run, successful.

  Domestications only occur when a human need meets a suitable species, and the need is backed up by sufficient resources to see the process through. Such conditions seem to occur only very rarely, as attested by the tiny number of mammalian species that mankind has fully domesticated, a number which barely scrapes into double figures. It seems entirely possible that all the species discussed so far could have been domesticated, except that the conditions for domestication were never as ideal, or could not be sustained for long enough, as those of the domestic dog.

  Finally, we must turn to the grey wolf, as the only one of the canids to have been domesticated successfully – if by successfully we mean surviving into the modern world. Indeed, the domestic dog is very successful: the 400 million or so dogs in the world outnumber wolves over a thousandfold. A few hundred years ago there were probably about 5 million wolves in the world; today there are only 150,000 to 300,000. If we set aside the artificial distinction of ‘domestication’ for a moment, we could say that the wolf has evolved into the dog, leaving behind a few, highly totemic vestiges of its past that hang on by a thread in the wild. Some wolves were able to take advantage of man’s domination of the globe, and became dogs. Others were not, and stayed wolves.

  A family of grey wolves

  No account of dog behaviour can afford to ignore the wolf, if only because many books on dogs place such emphasis on the dog’s wolf-like nature – but wolves themselves have, as it turns out, been fundamentally misunderstood. A great deal has been written about the grey wolf, but much of that is either misconceived, or at least unhelpful when it comes to understanding the behaviour of modern domestic dogs. In the past, the wolf has been portrayed as the quintessential pack animal, and its packs have been portrayed as being essentially despotic, rigidly and aggressively controlled by an alpha pair. Logically, therefore, as a descendant of the wolf, the dog was thought to be the same under the skin, undoubtedly less aggressive in nature but nevertheless born with the expectation that it must eventually seek to ‘dominate’ all those around it, canine and human alike. The past decade has seen a radical reappraisal of the wolf pack, however – regarding both how it constructs itself, and the evolutionary forces that drive it. Our conception of the dog is therefore overdue for revision. If wolves are not despots, as we now know, then why should we assume that domestic dogs are impelled to take control of their owners?

  Like most other canids, grey wolves are highly social animals, and have a strong preference for living in groups. This is not to say that individuals do not live alone from time to time, but it is not usually from choice. A lone wolf may have been driven out of its pack, or may have been forced to forage on its own when there was not enough food available to feed two wolves travelling together. But wherever possible wolves try to live collectively. Even wolves that scavenge from rubbish-dumps do so in groups, usually with between three and five members. (The wildcat, the domestic cat’s ancestor, has also occasionally been observed feeding on rubbish, but always alone.) It is undoubtedly this thirst for co
mpany that, among other factors, made it possible for wolves to be domesticated.

  Although they are fundamentally sociable animals, wolves are also remarkably adaptable when it comes to their living arrangements – another trait that, perhaps even more than sociability itself, makes them especially good candidates for domestication. Wolves come together when local conditions permit, and go their own ways in times of adversity. They can live alone or in small groups; when conditions are right, larger groups comprising from six to ten adults can form. As a rule, these larger groups occur only when the main prey available is also large, typically moose, caribou or bison. Although a solitary wolf could probably kill a caribou, especially one that was old, young or sick, the wolf would risk getting injured itself, and would thus be more apt to seek smaller, less dangerous prey. Pack hunting is most likely a safer and more efficient way of hunting large animals, but this appears not to be the key to why packs can exist. What is probably more important in determining the formation of large packs is that a kill of one of these large animals provides far more food than a single wolf could consume. In summer, when alternative prey is often available, these larger packs tend to fragment into smaller units, perhaps coming back together again in autumn. It is flexibility such as this that is now seen as a second crucial factor allowing wolves – at least, a few of them – to adapt to living with humans.