Looking into the future, I predict that dogs will need all the help they can get, from scientists and enthusiasts alike. Dogs were first domesticated to live in small villages and rural communities, and there is no doubt that tensions arise, both between dog and owner and between owner and non-owner, when dogs live in modern cities. As the globe becomes progressively more urbanized, such unease may spread.
Dogs in the West will never be able to return to the freedoms they enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, when many were allowed to roam city streets during the day, meeting (or avoiding) other dogs as and when they chose, before returning to their owners in the evening. Society requires much more of dogs, and dog owners, than it did then. The public’s attitudes towards hygiene in particular have hardened in the past twenty years, with poop-scoop laws becoming almost universally adopted, and more people openly expressing a dislike of touching or being licked by a dog. More people also seem to be allergic to dogs than ever before (although, paradoxically, scientists now think that contact with dog allergens in infancy is actually protective against the development of this allergy). Dogs are now expected to behave well at all times, especially in public, and the number of places where owners can exercise dogs off-leash has been considerably reduced. If this trend continues, pet dogs could potentially turn into a barely tolerated minority interest, especially in cities.
There was a time in the early years of this century when it looked as though the dog populations in both the United Kingdom and United States were beginning to shrink, as though every dog had, indeed, had its day; the best estimates now suggest that the dog population may be at least levelling off. Cats are now at least as numerous as dogs in both countries, mainly because they suit modern lifestyles whereby all members of a household work, and the time and space for exercising a dog are restricted. How popular will dogs be at the end of the twenty-first century? Addressing the twin pressures of misguided breeding and poor understanding of canine psychology is crucial to ensuring that dogs remain as significant a part of human life as they have been for the past ten millennia. My hope is that this book will make some contribution towards that goal.
Further Reading
Most of the source material for this book has consisted of papers in academic journals, which are often difficult (and often expensive!) to access for those without a university affiliation. I’ve included references to the most important of these in the notes, but in addition I can recommend the following books, most of them written by knowledgeable academics but with a more general audience in mind.
Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), provides detailed up-to-date information on wolf biology from a host of experts. Older books on wolves are less useful because they contain misconceptions about the organization of wolf packs.
Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition, by Ádám Miklósi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), is currently the standard textbook on dog behaviour and contains a great deal of detailed information on domestication, on canine cognition, and on the way dogs perceive people, although Miklósi’s conclusions are not identical to mine.
There are few readily accessible accounts of social behaviour in dogs that draw on up-to-date science, apart from Ray and Lorna Coppinger’s Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution (London: Crosskeys Select Books, 2004).
Carrots and Sticks: Principles of Animal Training (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) by Professors Paul McGreevy and Bob Boakes from the University of Sydney, Australia, is a fascinating book of two halves: the first half explains learning theory in accessible language, and the second contains fifty case-histories of animals (twelve of them dogs) trained for specific purposes, ranging from film work to bomb detection, each illustrated with colour photographs of the animals and how they were trained.
Karen Prior, Gwen Bailey and Pamela Reid are among the dog-training experts whose many books are worth looking out. Paul McGreevy’s A Modern Dog’s Life: How to Do the Best for Your Dog (New York: The Experiment, 2010) is full of indispensable advice for dog-owners.
For more information on the effects of early life events in humans and animals, I can recommend Design for a Life: How Behaviour Develops by Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin (London: Vintage, 2000). If you’re looking for practical advice on choosing and raising a puppy, I suggest Before and After Getting Your Puppy: The Positive Approach to Raising a Happy, Healthy, and Well-Behaved Dog by Ian Dunbar (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2004), or The Perfect Puppy: How to Raise a Well-Behaved Dog by Gwen Bailey (London: Hamlyn, 2008).
Patricia McConnell’s For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007) is an excellent and accessible account of current understanding of canine emotions. Alexandra Horowitz provides an enlightened integration of recent research into dogs’ sensory and cognitive abilities in Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). Sophie Collins’s Tail Talk: Understanding the Secret Language of Dogs (Chichester: Bonnier Books, 2007) is a good pictorial guide to canine body-language. David McFarland’s Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008) is more about robots than dogs, but covers the various and highly complex philosophies of self-awareness and consciousness.
The sensory worlds of animals is a rather neglected topic. For a general introduction into how the sensory worlds of animals affect their behaviour, the late Professor Chris Barnard’s textbook Animal Behaviour: Mechanism, Development, Function and Evolution (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2003) is excellent. Tristram Wyatt’s Pheromones and Animal Behaviour: Communication by Smell and Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) provides a thorough coverage of odour communication across the whole of the animal kingdom.
The pioneering work on breed differences in behaviour, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller’s Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, has been reprinted (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). More up-to-date information can be found in Kenth Svartberg’s chapter on personality in Per Jensen’s multi-author textbook The Behavioural Biology of Dogs (Wallingford: CAB International, 2007).
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Including, I have to confess, by myself – an article I wrote for a Waltham Symposium in 1990 takes this approach. At that time, there was no research contradicting it. The situation is very different today.
CHAPTER 1. WHERE DOGS CAME FROM
1. Carles Vilà et al., ‘Multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dog’, Science, 276 (13 June 1997), pp. 1687–9.
2. Biologists often name whole groups of animals after their best-known member. Hence the Roman name for the domestic dog – ‘canis’ – is used to refer to all the domestic dog’s relatives – Canis for the closest, canid for the extended family. (The confusion that this causes isn’t deliberate, honest.)
3. Michael Fox, one of the pioneers of dog behaviour in the 1960s, thought that for each species there was a distinct limit on how large and complex a pack could become, with the wolf at the pinnacle. His theories still linger on even today in books about dogs, but since he formulated his ideas a great deal more has been discovered about the behaviour of many of these species.
4. This term appears in Hungarian expert Dr Ádám Miklósi’s book Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
5. Randall Lockwood, ‘Dominance in wolves: useful construct or bad habit?’, in Erich Klinghammer, Behaviour and Ecology of Wolves (New York: Garland STPM Press, 1979), pp. 225–43.
6. See Dr David Mech’s illuminating article on the new conception of wolf biology at http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/alstat/alpst.htm. Accessed 25 August 2010.
7. There is some controversy about just how many kinds of wolf occur in the wild in North America today but only the grey wolf is sufficiently widespread for its social behaviour to
have been studied. The number of types of grey wolf on the American continent is constantly being reappraised; there may be five (Northwestern, Plains, Eastern, Mexican and Arctic), but I’ve referred to the first two generically as the ‘timber’ wolf. A sixth, the red wolf, is often considered a separate species. Although it is sometimes called the ‘Texas’ red wolf, certainly in the early part of the last century its range centred on North Carolina. Some people maintain that it is a unique and endangered animal, and a great deal of effort is being put into captive breeding and conservation. However, the red wolf looks suspiciously like a mixture between a grey wolf and a coyote, and the red wolf’s DNA appears to back the idea that it is a hybrid. Wolves and coyotes can mate and produce offspring, certainly in zoos and probably also in the wild; the Eastern or Algonquin wolf that occurs in Ontario and Quebec is most probably such a hybrid, although it has also been posited as a third true species of wolf. To confuse the picture further, the DNA of red wolves suggests that they may have hybridized with coyotes for a second time in the nineteenth century, as changing agriculture and ranching practices began to favour coyotes over wolves in the south-eastern USA. And given that many apparently pure-bred coyotes also contain wolf (as well as domestic dog) DNA, interbreeding between wolves and coyotes appears to have been going on for thousands of years – leading to the coining of the tongue-in-cheek term Canis soupus to describe coyote, eastern wolf and red wolf alike.
8. As is most likely the story for the domestic cat – see Science, 296 (5 April 2002), p. 15, for a summary of my research group’s study into this.
CHAPTER 2. HOW WOLVES BECAME DOGS
1. This international team, led by Carles Vilà at the University of California in Los Angeles, published its findings in the journal Science, 276 (13 June 1997), pp. 1687–9.
2. With the notable exception of the Egyptians, who mummified a wide range of animals, including vast numbers of domestic cats.
3. Indeed such long-distance translocations were rare until comparatively recently, when European dogs were introduced as part of colonialization. However, it turns out that, in most areas, pet dogs that escape, as well as hybrids between pets and local dogs, tend not to prosper; evidently they are less effective than the local street dogs at exploiting local conditions. The DNA of many local populations is thus largely preserved in its original form.
4. See Peter Savolainen et al., ‘Genetic evidence for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs’, Science, 298 (22 November 2002), pp. 1610–13; also, Adam Boyko et al., ‘Complex population structure in African village dogs and its implications for inferring dog domestication history’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (19 August 2009), pp. 13903–8.
5. See, for example, Nicholas Wade’s article ‘New finding puts origins of dogs in Middle East’, New York Times (18 March 2010).
6. More gruesome still is the Zoroastrian practice of allowing dogs, regarded as sacred animals, to dispose of human corpses.
7. This scenario, conveniently, would also explain why the mitochondrial DNA sequences of dogs and wolves appear to have diverged at an unfeasibly early date. The divergence would have to predate the genetic changes that split the ‘normal’ wolves from the ‘socializable’ wolves, because today there are no survivors of the latter, apart from the few that changed into dogs. Matings between ‘socializable’ females and ‘normal’ males might well have continued for many millennia after the split, but would be undetectable in the (maternally inherited) mtDNA of modern dogs.
8. Ludmilla Trut, ‘Early canid domestication: the farm-fox experiment’, American Scientist, 87 (1999), pp. 160–69.
9. A few anthropologists have toyed with the rather romantic notion of man–wolf co-evolution, suggesting that wolves taught us how to hunt in groups, even how to form complex societies. However, it seems highly unlikely that any two-legged human could ever have ‘adopted’ the wolf’s lifestyle. The wolves would have outrun him before he had time to blink. When he finally caught up with them after they had made their kill, why would they have let him share it with them? The primitive spears and knives that he had at his disposal would have hardly been adequate to drive off a pack of hungry wolves. Moreover, depictions of men hunting with dogs do not feature in cave paintings until 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, almost halfway through the history of domestic dogs as revealed by the archaeological record. It is certainly true that wolves feature prominently in the symbolism of recent hunter-gatherer societies, but myths do not recapitulate origins; they merely invent a framework for explaining the uncontrollable.
CHAPTER 3. WHY DOGS WERE – UNFORTUNATELY – TURNED BACK INTO WOLVES
1. Here I am indebted to biologist Dr Sunil Kumar Pal and his colleagues, who have been studying the urban feral dogs of West Bengal for more than ten years.
2. This sanctuary is run by the rehoming charity Dogs Trust, to whom I am very grateful for providing this opportunity.
3. See http://www.inch.com/~dogs/taming.html. Accessed 28 September 2010.
4. See http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance. Accessed 16 December 2009.
5. These RHP-related ideas were first developed with my colleague Dr Stephen Wickens; see my chapter in James Serpell (ed.), The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
6. See, for example, John Bradshaw and Amanda Lea, ‘Dyadic interactions between domestic dogs’, Anthrozoös, 5 (1992), pp. 245–53, confirmed by additional analysis of data presented in Carri Westgarth et al., ‘Dog behaviour on walks and the effect of use of the leash’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 125 (2010), pp. 38–46.
7. These examples are partly based on those included by Rachel Casey and Emily Blackwell in our joint paper, ‘Dominance in domestic dogs – useful construct or bad habit?’, Journal of Veterinary Behavior – Clinical Applications and Research, 4 (2009), pp. 135–44.
8. Specifically, by Ádám Miklósi, in Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
9. For an example of this approach and how it was initially adopted even by specialist veterinarians, see Amy and Laura Marder, ‘Human–companion animal relationships and animal behavior problems’, Veterinary Clinics of North America – Small Animal Practice, 15 (1985), pp. 411–21.
10. Summarized from the entry headed ‘Understanding your dog’ on the BBC’s online encyclopedia H2G2, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4889712. Accessed 20 August 2010.
11. Taken from http://www.acorndogtraining.co.uk/dominance.htm. Accessed 18 March 2010. The author of this site, Fran Griffin, is not herself a supporter of these ‘commandments’.
12. Published in two papers authored by Nicola Rooney and myself: ‘An experimental study of the effects of play upon the dog–human relationships’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 75 (2002), pp. 161–76; and ‘Links between play and dominance and attachment dimensions of dog–human relationships’, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 6 (2003), pp. 67–94.
CHAPTER 4. STICKS OR CARROTS? THE SCIENCE OF DOG TRAINING
1. Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier, Be the Pack Leader (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), p. 11.
2. Colin Tennant, Breaking Bad Habits in Dogs (Dorking: Interpet Publishing, 2002), p. 18. The ‘Expert Dog Trainer and Canine Behaviourist’ tag is from the cover of the same book.
3. Quoted from Louise Rafkin, ‘The Anti-Cesar Millan / Ian Dunbar’s been succeeding for 25 years with lure-reward dog training; how come he’s been usurped by the flashy, aggressive TV host?’, San Francisco Chronicle (15 October 2006), http://articles.sfgate.com/keyword/puppy. Accessed 15 November 2010.
4. In fact, Konrad Most also promoted the idea of shaping dogs’ ‘instinctive’ behaviour using rewards, and discussed the benefits of allowing dogs to make their own decisions – indeed, he went on to become a pioneering guide-dog trainer. But it is his philosophy of the dog–human relationship that is perhaps his biggest and most unfortunate legacy.
6. Ibid., pp. 46–7.
7. Ibid., pp. 202–3.
8. Veterinary behaviour specialist Sophia Yin explains this in detail on her website: see http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance. Accessed 16 December 2009.
9. David Appleby, one of the founders of the UK’s Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors, writes on their website: ‘There seems to be little doubt that programmes introduced to cure a dominance problem can result in depression and withdrawn behaviour.’ See http://www.apbc.org.uk/articles/caninedominance. Accessed 18 March 2010.
10. Fran Griffin, one of the founders of the UK Association of Pet Dog Trainers, writes: ‘Over the years I have heard far too many stories from owners who have followed the “dominance reduction schedule” after taking advice from trainers/behaviourists, only to become very disappointed. Once it has become established that the dog has failed to respond to the regime, the owners became more and more aggressive in their attitude, in the belief that they were “asserting their alpha position over the dog”. Eventually the dog bit them “unprovoked”. For many this resulted in the dog’s demise, whilst others were thrown into the local rescue kennels.’ See http://www.acorndogtraining.co.uk/dominance.htm. Accessed 18 March 2010.
11. Another reason for horses’ trainability in this context has to do with the sensitivity of their mouths. Dogs have plenty of teeth and are happy to carry things clenched between them; horses have a gap between their grazing and chewing teeth, which allows the bit to sit right on their sensitive gums.
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