by Hal Herzog
In addition, like other forms of cultural change, pet memes can spread rapidly. For centuries, the pets of choice in Japanese homes were goldfish and caged birds. After World War II, however, as the Japanese began to emulate aspects of American culture, dogs became more popular, and a quarter of Japanese homes now include a dog. In China, Chairman Mao felt that pet-keeping was a bourgeois affectation and so pets were banned during the Cultural Revolution. When the prohibition on pets was lifted in the 1990s, companion animals rose nearly as rapidly as the number of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Beijing. Presently, 10% of urban Chinese homes include a pet, and the amount of money the Chinese people spend each year on pets went from nearly zero to a billion dollars in a decade.
PET LOVE AND THE MYTH OF SINGLE CAUSATION
Many scientific disputes result from the erroneous belief that if one explanation of a phenomenon is correct, all the others must be wrong. I prefer simple explanations to complex ones, and I would like to think there is one correct answer to the question “Why do humans keep pets?” But, alas, this is not the case.
In explaining animal behavior, ethologists talk about two different types of questions: proximate and ultimate. This distinction also applies to understanding human-animal relationships. Proximate questions focus on the hows of behavior—how they work and develop, their underlying neurological and psychological mechanisms. The idea that attachment to pets is affected by levels of the hormone oxytocin in your bloodstream is a proximate-level explanation of pet-keeping. So is the theory that people love pets because they make us feel needed. Ultimate explanations, in contrast, focus on the whys of behavior—what their function is, how they evolved, and whether and how they helped our ancestors survive and pass on their genes. The idea that pet-keeping is the result of the misfiring of human maternal instincts is an ultimate-level explanation.
The important point is that both proximate and ultimate explanations of pet-keeping can be correct. I like having Tilly around for lots of reasons. I initially found Tilly adorable because her giant eyes and infantile features triggered parental instincts that helped my forebears pass their genes on to me. This is an ultimate explanation of pet-keeping. But she is fun to play chase-the-laser-pointer-light with, she makes the house feel less empty when Mary Jean is away, and her athleticism sometimes take my breath away (she can shimmy up a dogwood tree in three seconds flat). She has just plain weaseled her way into my heart. These are proximate explanations of Tilly-love.
Different perspectives on why humans keep pets also reflect the biases of different academic disciplines. Clinical psychologists believe that we live with pets because they make us feel loved. Some biologists say pet-keeping is a form of nest parasitism. And some sociologists claim that pets are purely a human social construction; that’s why a puppy can be a family member in Kansas, a pariah in Kenya, and lunch in Korea. The bottom line is that our love for pets, the closest of human-animal relationships, is complex and multilayered. Our pets make us feel needed and can provide psychological support when times get tough. But they can also be social constructions and parasites.
Don’t feel bad, Tilly. I love you even if you are a socially constructed parasite. I am, after all, infected with the mental virus that tells people to bring cats and dogs into our homes and think of them as children.
Want another little treat, sweetie?
4
Friends, Foes, and Fashion Statements
THE HUMAN-DOG RELATIONSHIP
I love playing with dogs. As we age, so many people lose the capacity to play, to have fun and enjoy the moment. I am seventy-eight and dogs keep reminding me how to stay in the moment and to enjoy it. Their smiles, wagging tails, and kisses say it all.
—DR. RUBY R. BENJAMIN, PSYCHOTHERAPIST
If dogs could talk, it would take all the fun out of owning one.
—BOB DYLAN, SONGWRITER
“Don’t get so close to the fence. He will bite you in the ass.”
I moved away from the fence.
“He” was Maverick, an animal whose genetic heritage runs 98% wolf and 2% dog. The speaker was Nancy Brown, owner of Full Moon Farm, a sixteen-acre sanctuary for wolf-dogs (she never calls them “wolves”) near Black Mountain, North Carolina. Some were rescued from abusive homes, others were brought to Nancy by wildlife officials or animal control officers. One was given to her by a Maryland couple after their bottle-fed wolf-dog puppy grew up and in one afternoon inflicted $10,000 worth of damage to their condo.
Full Moon is ten miles down Highway 9, a two-lane blacktop that runs though a valley that reminds me of what the Blue Ridge Mountains looked like thirty years ago, before the gated communities started cropping up. Drive by the Clear Branch Baptist Church, then follow Rock Creek past a falling-down barn and the volunteer fire department. Take the left fork, ignore the dead end sign, go a couple more miles, and turn right on a rough dirt drive you can hardly see from the road. You know you are at the right place when you see the sign that says, THIS PRIVATE PROPERTY IS MAINTAINED FOR THE COMFORT AND SECURITY OF OUR ANIMALS. IF YOU DON’T LIKE THAT THEN PLEASE GO AWAY.
I am a quarter of a mile from the sanctuary when the animals hear my car and start to howl—eerie, like an old Western movie. But the howls are intermixed with arf, arf—a sound you would expect to hear from golden retrievers but not from free-range wolves in Montana or northern Italy. By the time I switch off my car’s engine, I am assaulted by a discordant choir—seventy animals, skittish, each one shouting “Stranger!” in a mélange of dialects that reflect their various stations on the twisted evolutionary path that led canids from the wild to the tame.
Nancy comes out, cup of coffee in hand, and introduces herself. The animals are still howling full tilt. She can tell them apart by their voices. Our conversation is peppered with interruptions: Hear that? That’s an argument. That’s Aries. Hi, Guinevere. Shut UP, Autumn! Some of the wolf-dogs sit up and pay attention when Nancy hollers at them. But most of them keep pacing. They are nervous around a stranger, tight as the fifth string on a banjo. They aren’t aggressive, just varying degrees of paranoid.
At first blush, they all look like full-blooded wolves to me. Their coats range from pure white to brown flecked with black and gray, and they have an intensity that gets your attention. But Nancy shows me some of the subtle differences between the high-and low-content animals, and I start to get it. The ones whose genetic heritage leans more toward dog have wider faces, thicker ears, stockier legs. They bark more. Blue eyes are a sure sign that dog blood runs in an animal’s veins. The “98% pures” have the surly James Dean look that wolf-dog groupies love.
Nancy says that the high contents rarely make good companions, that low-content wolf-dogs are easier to live with. If you get a good low-content pup and train it right, you might be able to put it on a leash, take it for a walk, and play with it. Maybe it won’t be constantly on the lookout for a gap in the fence or try to kill your neighbor’s cat. In other words, your wolf-dog might make a good a pet.
But Nancy cautions me against stereotyping her babies. Even a high-content animal can make a good pet if paired with the right person. She makes her point by entering the enclosure that Maverick (98% wolf) and his pal Mikey share. In a flash, the big animals turn puppy, romping around Nancy, playing with her, cuddling. The chemistry between the three of them is magical. But even with these, her favorites, Nancy has rules. She never lets them get in a position above her head, and she never plays tug-of-war with them. I ask Nancy how many of her animals have the potential to be rehabbed for family living. She looked up and thought for minute, mentally ticking them off, and said, “Four.” Not good odds out of six dozen.
The legal status of wolf-dogs is murky. In North Carolina, anyone can own a wolf-dog, but in some states, they are banned outright. They are classified as wildlife in Pennsylvania, and you need a special permit to keep one on your property. Sandra Piovesan of Salem, Pennsylvania, thought of her nine wolf-dogs as pets rather than exotic wild
animals, so she registered them as dogs and treated them like her children. A few weeks after she told one of her neighbors that her wolf-dogs gave her “unqualified love,” Sandra’s body was found in their enclosure, mauled by her pets.
This was not an isolated incident. Nineteen people were killed by wolf-dogs between 1982 and 2008 in North America, compared to nine by German shepherds. There are, however, a lot more German shepherds than there are wolf-dogs. Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, an independent newspaper that covers animal issues, says that a wolf-dog is sixty times more likely than a German shepherd to maim or kill a child. Wolf-dog fans don’t buy it. To them, wolf-dogs are misunderstood, their reputation undeserved.
Driving home from Full Moon, I was keyed up. The animals were magnificent and I admired Nancy’s commitment to them. If not for her, these animals would have been euthanized. Instead, their lives are as good as it gets for creatures whose heritage is an amalgam of predator and pet. But their edginess rubbed off on me. I felt like a journalist who had spent the day riding with an outlaw motorcycle gang.
Unsettled, I went for a walk that evening and ran into my friend Jeanette and her dog, Bindi, a mellow little mutt she had rescued from an animal shelter. Bindi looked up at me expectantly, and I reached down and scratched her behind the ears. Suddenly I felt relaxed. It was hard to believe that the difference between Bindi and the skittish gray ghosts I had spent the day with boiled down to a few base pairs of DNA.
THE RARIFIED WORLD OF SHOW DOGS
The best way to observe the seemingly infinite variety of forms that humans have sculpted from wolf genes is to spend a couple of days hanging out at an all-breed conformation show sponsored by the American Kennel Club. The Asheville Kennel Club hosts one of these events every summer, and it attracts 1,500 dogs, owners, and professional handlers from around the country. Some fly in, but even more show up in Winnebagos and motor homes. The Western North Carolina Agricultural Center’s parking area quickly fills with lawn chairs, gas grills, and portable pens. Vendors hawk dog paraphernalia—the bite-sized pieces of meat handlers use to make dogs perk up in the show ring; mastodon-sized bones for Great Danes and Saint Bernards; assorted grooming gear, lotions, and shampoos; dietary supplements; bows and hair clips for the little dogs; socks embroidered with breed silhouettes for their owners.
In the main arena, judges, stewards, owners, and casual observers mill around, chatting between events, the owners combing, snipping, and flicking a stray hair on a poodle, wiping slobber off a Newfie’s face. The dog people look perfectly normal—there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, and they range from retirees to kids getting ready for the Junior Showmanship competition. The biggest surprise is how quiet the arena is. There are over a thousand dogs, each waiting for his or her turn in the spotlight, but I don’t see any poop and, with the exception of a couple of yappy Chihuahuas, there is little barking. These dogs are professionals.
I wander around behind the scenes, taking photographs and asking people about their dogs. Like most of the animal people I have met over the years, their eyes light up when they talk about their dogs. It’s like asking parents about their children. Dog people are easy to talk to, and their enthusiasm for their dogs is infectious.
There is, however, the occasional weirdness at these events. I notice a well-dressed woman, a professional handler, sitting next to the tawny Great Dane she will soon be parading around Ring Four. On the table in front of her is a pile of gummy bears—the chewy rainbow candy that kids like. The woman puts a fistful of gummy bears in her mouth and starts to chew. After the candy has transformed into a slimy mess, she reaches in her mouth, extracts the amorphous glob of sugar and spit, and nonchalantly shoves it into the big dog’s open maw. Huh?
That afternoon, I mention the gummy bear incident to another handler, a tall blonde woman from New Orleans who is getting ready to show a lovely white and black Japanese chin. “Oh, sure,” she tells me. “Professional handlers do that all the time. It helps the dogs get to know you. I use chicken.” She points to a four-inch hunk of boiled chicken meat tucked into her armband. As she leads the dog, Fred, into the ring, she tucks the whole thing in her cheek like a wad of Red Man. As the judge approaches her dog, she takes the piece of chicken from her mouth, waves it an inch in front of Fred’s nose, then puts it back into her mouth. Fred perks up.
On this day, I am in luck. I run into a woman named Barb Beisel who is grooming a little Havanese. A highly regarded professional dog handler and breeder, she agrees to take me under her wing for the next two days. Barb introduces me to judges and a couple of top handlers: Jimmy Moses, who has been showing star-quality German shepherds for decades and Chris Manelopoulos, whose world revolves around a white standard poodle named Remy. (Seven months later, I watch both of them on national television running their dogs around the ring at Westminster. Remy took the nonsporting group, but, in an upset that made national headlines, he lost to the energetic Uno, the first beagle ever to win Best in Show.)
Even at the relatively small Asheville dog show, most of the handlers are professionals. It will cost you between $50 and $100 each time a handler takes your dog around the ring. Unless you know what you’re doing, hiring a professional is money well spent. Barb tells me even a really good dog does not have much chance winning without a pro parading it before the judges.
Barb worked in insurance until she took to the dog circuit full-time. She has silver hair and twinkling eyes and looks a bit like the fairy godmother in Cinderella. But when she leads a dog into the ring, she is all business. A lot rides on each animal’s performance. High-rollers in the elite world of international dogdom hire Barb to “finish off” their prize pooches. When Barb takes on a new client, a dog she thinks has star power, she first teaches it how to show its stuff in the ring—to look alert, to follow her hand as she waves a morsel of meat in front of its nose, to patiently put up with judges who poke their withers and peer at their gums. Then she carts the dogs around the country until they earn the points needed to be awarded the title Champion. Barb is always on the move, traveling to dog competitions in her motor home along with an entourage that includes a dozen show-quality terriers, her assistant Marie, and an aging ferret.
Barb loves dogs, but not all breeds equally. She is partial to the toys—cute, energetic little animals with high-pitched yips and bows in their hair. While Barb was showing me the fine points of grooming a six-pound Yorkie, another handler walked by leading a mastiff the size of a pony, its testicles nearly as big as the Yorkie’s head. Barb glanced at the slobbering brute and muttered, “I just don’t know how anyone can love a creature like that.” I suspect the mastiff’s owner may have been thinking the same thing about the lap dog whose lustrous coat Barb was brushing for the twentieth time that afternoon.
THE PATH FROM WOLF TO WHIPPET
How did wild creatures that looked exactly like Nancy Brown’s gang of lupine bandits become transformed into animals as different as a giant mastiff and an elfin Yorkie? How did the descendents of gray wolves become the most variable mammal on earth? A mastiff can reach 200 pounds while an adult tea cup Yorkie can tip the scales at 2 pounds. This difference in size is proportionally larger than that between me and a full-grown African elephant. Molecular biologists Heidi Parker and Elaine Ostrander of the National Institute of Health call the domestication of dogs the most complex and extensive genetic experiment in human history. Remarkably, this morphological miracle took place in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
Charles Darwin thought the modern dog was a mix of coyote, wolf, and jackal. He was wrong. If we know anything for sure about canine evolution, it is that the ancestor of the dog living in your house—whether Pekinese or rottweiler—was a gray wolf. It makes sense that the wolf was the first domesticated animal. Like us, they are social, active during daylight, and good at figuring out who is the boss. Hooking up with odd-looking and hairless two-legged creatures was a strategy that worked out well for Canus lupus familiaris;
an estimated 400 million dogs are running around the planet right now, compared to a couple hundred thousand gray wolves. But when, where, and why did our ancestors first invite a predator into their lives?
First, when. The answer is not very long ago. Every dog owner I know has a slew of pictures of their pets around the house. If our Stone Age ancestors cared as much for dogs as we do, they probably would have made pictures of them too. But they didn’t. Paleolithic cave art is rife with stunning images of reindeer, buffalo, horses, mammoths, ibex, rhinoceroses, bear, lions, deer, and even a few fish and birds. But creatures that look like dogs do not appear in the early Stone Age bestiary. To learn how dogs and humans came to throw in their lots together, we must turn to bones and genes.
Members of the genus Homo have lived alongside wolves for 500,000 years, but there are no signs that wolves and early humans were on friendly terms. Evidence of relationships between man and wolfish-looking dogs shows up only recently in the fossil record. Domestication changes a species. First, they get smaller. Juliet Clutton-Brock of the Natural History Museum in London believes this is an adaptation to malnutrition during pregnancy, the result of selection for larger litters of smaller babies. The earliest dogs had smaller jaws with more crowded teeth, wider faces, and shorter snouts than wolves do. Like most domesticated animals, they also had smaller brains than their progenitors. In short, the original dogs looked like puppified wolves.
The fossils suggest that the domestic dog appeared sometime between 14,000 and 17,000 years ago. The first convincing evidence of a human-canine bond is a 12,000-year-old skeleton of an elderly woman unearthed in northern Israel who appears to have been carefully buried cradling a puppy. Dogs quickly became fixtures of late Stone Age cultures in Europe and Asia. By 10,000 years ago, dogs were romping around the New World, having accompanied humans who made their way across the land bridge from Siberia to North America. It only took 4,000 years for dogs to make the long journey from Alaska down to Patagonia.