In Defence of Dogs

by John Bradshaw

  The dog’s evolution did not occur all at once, and the forces driving it have themselves altered over the dog’s long period of coexistence with man. Indeed, over the same span of many thousands of years, we have changed almost as much as dogs have. The dog’s history is bound up in our transition from hunter-gatherer to modern city-dweller, and its roles have changed during that time, as well. Unlike that of some other species, the domestication of the dog has served more than just a single purpose. Dogs have fulfilled many functions within human society, and so the story of their domestication is necessarily complex: a series of steps without a coherent underlying plan, but each one significant to our understanding of the dogs we have today.

  Unfortunately, the early stages of the dog’s domestication occurred so long ago that we know little of how they occurred. Given that the dog was the first domestic animal of all, deliberate domestication seems far-fetched – where, after all, would such a radical idea have come from? The most likely scenario is that associations between man and wolf appeared spontaneously, in several places, over thousands of years, long before the archaeological record shows any dogs that were distinct from wolves in appearance. Many of these associations would have died out, perhaps as environmental conditions or human customs changed. Others – probably only a small minority – lasted long enough for the ‘village wolves’ to turn themselves into the prototypes for domestic dogs. The ‘village wolf’ would have looked so much like a wild wolf that the two would be indistinguishable in the archaeological record.

  Despite the difficulties of understanding the process by which dogs became domesticated, we can gain some insight by studying the process in other animals, where the evidence is more detailed and better preserved because domestication occurred later. The history of the pig is one instructive example. Our modern domestic pigs are descended from the wild boar: while the archaeological record points to a single domestication in Turkey, the DNA indicates six other domestications, each independent of the next and stemming from a different population of boars. Did seven different civilizations each domesticate the pig independently of one other, or did one think of it first, after which the idea of domesticating pigs spread from one area to another, each turning to its local population of wild boars for the raw material? It turns out that this is the wrong question, because both alternatives are based on the concept that domestication is a deliberate and cumulative process.

  The first few domestications appear, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been haphazard affairs, progressing in fits and starts and occasionally going into reverse. This scenario certainly applies to the domestic pig. More than 2,000 years elapsed between the first pigs that were distinguishable from wild boars, and the pigs that showed clear evidence of being farmed (for example, a high adult female-to-male ratio, since culling of males when they are young maximizes productivity). That it took nearly a hundred generations of humans to accomplish a single domestication doesn’t suggest much of a plan. Rather, the gradual changes in the bones of the pigs recovered during this period suggest that, initially, pigs were scavengers around human settlements, where they would also have served as a useful walking larder when hunting failed. They may also have been useful in cleaning up human wastes, including faeces: the ‘pig-toilet’ is still found in some parts of Goa (India) and China, and was probably once widespread throughout Asia.

  The likely origins of the pig’s domestication shed important light onto the process in general; domestication is almost certainly as much the agency of animals as of humans. In the case of the pig, every human settlement near to a population of wild boars was a potential source of domestication: once the settlement had grown to a suitable size, a few boars with the right temperament to tolerate the proximity of humans moved in, exploited the new food source, and were themselves exploited as food. In many cases these arrangements would have died out temporarily, perhaps when food shortages resulted in the consumption of all the pigs in the village. But the whole cycle could easily have started again in better times, if there were still wild boar in the vicinity. Domestication could have followed much later, presumably when the conditions were right among the local people – for example, when their culture allowed for individual or family (rather than communal) ownership, which would protect the animals against slaughter when food was in short supply. The next stage would have been the evolution of husbandry methods such as enclosure to protect the captive pigs from predators, and the selective culling of the more belligerent males, reducing the risk of injury to their human captors.

  Since there is no indication that dogs were initially domesticated as food animals, the details of their story are likely to be different from those of the pig, but the transition from wild to domesticated was probably just as piecemeal and haphazard. If the pig took 2,000 years to change from hanger-on to agricultural animal, most likely the dog took just as long, perhaps even longer. With no prior experience in domestication, humans are unlikely to have deliberately begun the process of domesticating wolves; a much more probable scenario is that the wolves themselves started the process. Indeed, I am firmly of the opinion that the pioneers of the long road to today’s dogs were wolves that were simply exploiting a new niche, a new concentration of food provided by man, as humans began to live in villages rather than being constantly on the move. These wolves then evolved to fit our new lifestyle, which would have demanded capabilities very different from hunting on the open range.

  Living near human settlements would have required a tolerance of the proximity of humans that no modern wolf can manage, and probably few ancient wolves could have either – but humans would almost certainly have aided in selecting for this trait. Initially, those wolves that were suited to scavenging from man would have prospered and produced offspring, whereas those wolves that were unsuited either did not, or left to rejoin their wild cousins. It is difficult to imagine how hunter-gatherer humans could have actively intervened in this process; selecting which male would breed with which female, for instance, would have been unlikely at such a tenuous stage. However, humans probably did intervene, in a much less deliberate way – one that nevertheless speeded up the separation between village and wild wolves.

  Humans must have at least tolerated the wolves that were gravitating to their settlements, because otherwise such a transition could never have taken place. There must have been times, of course, when having a large well-armed carnivore hanging around would have been dangerous. The very young and the infirm would have been at particular risk from an animal, perhaps only a few generations removed from a wild hunter, that had run out of food to scavenge. Any wolf that threatened to injure a human must have been driven away or even killed; only wolves that posed no apparent threat would have been allowed to remain in the village for very long.

  The domestication-by-scavenging hypothesis is a start, but it cannot be the whole story, for it seems unlikely that wolves would have been able to survive entirely on the by-products of early human settlements. Modern village dogs can get most of their food by scavenging, but they are much smaller than wolves, and modern villages are a lot bigger and more productive than hunter-gatherer villages must have been. The scavenger theory depends, critically, on whether hunter-gatherers regularly produced enough surplus food to make scavenging worthwhile. Wolves are large and require a great deal of energy – about 2,000 calories a day, equivalent to two-and-a-half pounds of meat. It seems unlikely that, 20,000 years ago, any human settlement would have produced that much surplus meat day after day. It must be remembered, however, that wolves are not strictly carnivorous; they are perfectly capable of subsisting on a diet of plant material supplemented with the occasional bone or scraps of meat. They may even have contributed to village hygiene by performing the same function as today’s toilet pig; however unsavoury this idea may seem to us today, it would explain the unfortunate penchant that some modern dogs have for eating faeces.6 Whether or not the village wolves exploited this insalubrious source of calories, ho
wever, it is hard to imagine that several wolves, even a pair, would do well enough – and survive for long enough to produce offspring – by relying entirely on scavenging. Indeed, it seems illogical that any animal would give up hunting, a way of life for which it had evolved over millions of years, for the uncertainties of scavenging from a species that was not yet as skilful at obtaining meat as it was.

  Thus scavenging, while a plausible contributor, is not nearly sufficient by itself to account for a transition from hanger-on to domestication. Scavenging around hunter-gatherer encampments is unlikely to have provided a reliable source of food even for small wolves, and I strongly suspect therefore that there must have been some deliberate feeding by the hunter-gatherers themselves. Of course, such behaviour on the part of humans requires explanation: why would humans give up their own resources to animals that served no clear purpose within the community?

  If humans encouraged wolves to stick around by deliberately feeding them, then part of the motivation behind this might possibly lie in the apparently universal human trait of keeping animals as pets. Pet-keeping is not just a modern phenomenon; it is widely practised among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and was probably a feature of many pre-agricultural societies as well. In contemporary contexts, these ‘pets’ are usually obtained as very young animals from the wild, perhaps when a nest or den is discovered by the hunters, and are brought back to the village and hand-reared by women and children. As they grow, some of these animals will escape back into the wild; others will become too large or boisterous for comfort and will be driven out, or even killed and eaten. It is apparently rare for the ‘pets’ to breed successfully within the village, so each generation has to be newly obtained from the wild. These are therefore not really ‘pets’ in the usual of the word, but the hunter-gatherers lavish on them the same level of care when they are young as does the owner of a new kitten or puppy in the developed world.

  Modern hunter-gatherers have remarkably varied pet-keeping tastes. In some of today’s hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Penan of Borneo and the Huaorani of the Amazon rainforest, there seems to be no particular preference for one animal over another. Virtually any young bird or mammal of manageable size may be adopted, such that at any given time there may be dozens of different species within a single village – parrots, toucans, wild ducks, raccoons, small deer, assorted rodents, opossums and monkeys. Other societies may attach particular importance to one particular species. For example, the Guaja of Amazonia are a matriarchal society, in which all the women keep monkeys as pets; the headwoman will have several, while adolescent girls will usually look after just one. They treat their monkeys at least as well as, possibly even better than, their own children. The newly collected infant monkeys are suckled at the breast, are constantly fed choice titbits, and are carried everywhere – the matriarch will usually have two or three draped over her head and shoulders as a sort of living robe of office. In other such cultures, for example in Polynesia, Melanesia and the Americas, it is dogs that are treated in this way, including the nursing of puppies alongside human infants.

  Thanks to contemporary evidence, the most direct of which comes from the indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia, we can guess that our ancestors found puppies just as appealing as we do today. There are no grey wolves or other wild canids in Australia; in their place there are dingoes, which are actually the descendants of dogs that reverted to the wild several thousand years ago. Aboriginals were hunter-gatherer-cultivators until recently; they had no domesticated animals, but do have a long tradition of taking dingo puppies from the wild, and keeping them as pets. Some were collected from litters found accidentally, during hunting trips, others were taken deliberately, as part of religious ceremonies. These puppies were highly valued and well cared for, but as they grew into adults they became a nuisance, stealing food and becoming over-boisterous, and were usually driven away soon after they had become sexually mature. So a separate population of domesticated dingoes never emerged – and yet the tradition continues to this day.

  The persistence of the dingo-keeping tradition in Australia suggests that, in the absence of (or sometimes in spite of) practical considerations, humans will keep puppies purely for their cuteness. Dingoes are clearly a drain on human resources, not an asset. Originally, scientists speculated that Aboriginal Australians kept dingoes to serve as hunting companions, but in fact dingoes interfere with hunting, to the point that Aboriginals bring home more meat if they leave their dingoes behind. Furthermore, dingoes often outnumber the human inhabitants of a village, and accordingly have to compete for food; their scavenging can be so intense that they have to be deliberately excluded from mealtimes. Nevertheless, the habit of taming large numbers of these animals has persisted for hundreds, probably thousands of years, so they must have some redeeming features in the eyes of their hosts. Indeed, dingoes feature more in the Aboriginals’ art and spiritual narrative than any other animal, with the possible exception of snakes. Although respect for dingoes of all ages has long been encapsulated in Aboriginal culture, the habit of keeping young dingoes must surely have started as an exaggerated susceptibility to the cuteness of puppies.

  It seems entirely possible, therefore, that, in one or two locations, perhaps 20,000 years ago, there were hunter-gatherer groups in which wolf cubs taken from the wild came to have a social significance similar to that of contemporary hunter-gatherers’ pets. The feeding and care of the young wolves, so difficult to account for if their parents had been merely scavengers, would instead have been performed by the villagers, initially for their own enjoyment, and subsequently to gain social esteem, much as, for example, the keeping of monkeys as pets brings status to women of the Guaja. Additionally, the intimate relationship between the cub and its carer would have enabled the cub to become socialized to people, as well as to its own kind – provided, of course, that it had the capacity to do both.

  There is one very important way in which the dog is different from other hunter-gatherer pets. Whereas the dog eventually became domesticated, these other ‘pets’ – from rodents to parrots to monkeys – are really just tame animals, many of which have been raised in isolation from their own kind and probably would not know how to breed even if given the opportunity: hence the need for these ‘pets’ to be continually replenished from young born in the wild. The wolf, however, became domesticated because it stayed near humans by choice, forming a reciprocal relationship. For domestication to begin, a wolf would need to be raised by humans from a cub, and then stay in (or return to, but that seems unlikely) the village to produce its own first young. (Village habitation would be necessary only for the females; the cubs could just as well be fathered by wild wolves, but it would be essential for the females to be completely tame so that the cubs could be born in the village.)

  In fact, by comparing today’s wolves and dogs, we can see that dogs have adapted to the human presence in a remarkable way. Perhaps the most striking difference between dogs and wolves today, apart from their appearance, is the ease with which domestic dog puppies adopt a dual identity, something today’s wolf cubs seem incapable of. This capacity for the dog to adopt a dual identity – part human and part wolf – is essential in accounting for the transition from primitive pet to truly domesticated animal. Perhaps it is the key attribute that singled out the grey wolf, from all the other possible candidates among the canids, for successful domestication. Perhaps its unique transformation to domestic animal has little to do with its ability to form packs, or to communicate by body-language (neither of which, as we have already seen, are traits unique to the grey wolf anyway). Perhaps the grey wolf was simply able to form social bonds with humans, whereas other canids were not.

  It is entirely possible that some accident of genetics – some sort of mutation – gave a few wolves the ability to socialize to two species simultaneously, to direct their social behaviour to mankind and to other wolves, while their sexual preferences remained steadfastly directed at
their own species. Until man came along, this hereditary change would have been of no advantage (or disadvantage) to the wolves that carried it. But as hunter-gatherer societies in places where there were also wolves developed to the point where the ‘pet’-keeping habit became established, those local wolves with the altered socialization mechanism would have been pre-adapted for coexistence with mankind. On the one hand, then, societies that serendipitously happened to adopt wolves in the locations where their socialization mechanisms had been altered, were presented with animals that could breed successfully within a man-made environment.7 On the other hand, societies that fixed on other canids – such as the golden jackal – as their prototype pet of choice, could tame them as individuals, but could never succeed in breeding them, because their socialization mechanisms were still suited only to their original wild lifestyle.

  What evidence is there for the existence of these special, easily socialized wolves? Simple – it is all around us, in the form of modern dogs. They are the only living descendants of the socializable wolves that, I suspect, existed 20,000 years ago. Modern wolves are, of course, quite different from the earlier wolves I am describing; today’s grey wolves are very difficult to tame, let alone socialize to people. Even tame wolves do not seem to form specific attachments to individual humans. Modern wolves, however, are not the descendants of the wolves that became dogs.

  Today’s dogs are, if my hypothesis is correct, the descendants of a small fraction of the original wolf population, products of a mutation that separated these wolves from the majority of their species by allowing them to socialize with both humans and other wolves. While this small fraction of wolves went on to live among humans and eventually turned into dogs, most wolves could never follow this path, because they displayed a natural wariness of man. In essence, what I am suggesting is that this ability to socialize to humans is not, as it is usually assumed, a consequence of domestication. Instead, I conceive it as the crucial, if accidental, pre-adaptation that opened the door to domestication in the first place.