Dog Sense (2 page)

Our research has relied on the cooperation of literally thousands of volunteer dog owners and their dogs, to whom I express my gratitude. Also, much of our research would have been impossible without the facilities and cooperation offered by the UK's leading animal rehoming charities: Dogs Trust, the Blue Cross, and the RSPCA.

There are many other academics and dog experts I've met only briefly, but whose published work has been an enormous inspiration. Many I have been able to mention specifically in the endnotes. Like any branch of science, the systematic study of dog behavior embraces many approaches and opinions, and sometimes these can be expressed quite forcefully. Yet there is a crucial difference between canine science and canine folklore—scientists are ready to evaluate evidence gathered by others, and to change their opinions if these evaluations indicate that they should. Canine scientists are not in the business of peddling opinion as if it were fact; they contribute to a body of knowledge that, while never complete, continually gains strength from ongoing discussion among numerous experts. I am grateful to them all, even those whose views are now largely discredited or unfashionable. Science advances through the replacement of one hypothesis by another that better fits the data; without the first to act as a stimulus to creative thought, the second might never have been conceived.

Condensing all of this science into a book of reasonable length has not been easy, but my agent Patrick Walsh, and Lara Heimert, my editor at Basic Books, have taught me a great deal about how to aim for a wider audience than the academic community that I have mainly written for in the past.

I've been amazed and delighted by how my old friend Alan Peters' drawings have brought my descriptions of dogs and canids to life. He's not only a wonderful artist but also a skillful gundog trainer (and falconer) and so was able to bring to the task a lifetime's experience of how dogs move and interact.

Finally, to my family. My wife, Nicky, has been an unwavering source of support throughout all the years of my academic career, and especially during the year or so it's taken me to write this book—I cannot thank her enough. Thanks also to my brother Jeremy for giving me the encouragement to start this book in the first place. Netty, Emma, and Pete, thank you for refreshing my brain with music; Tom and Jez likewise but with microbrews, Rioja, and cricket.

T
he dog has been our faithful companion for tens of thousands of years. Today, dogs live alongside humans all across the globe, often as an integral part of our families. To many people, a world without dogs is unthinkable.

And yet dogs today unwittingly find themselves on the verge of a crisis, struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of change in human society. Until just over a hundred years ago, most dogs worked for their living. Each of the breeds or types had become well suited, over thousands of years and a corresponding number of generations, to the task for which they were bred. First and foremost, dogs were tools. Their agility, quick thinking, keen senses, and unparalleled ability to communicate with humans suited them to an extraordinary diversity of tasks—hunting, herding, guarding, and many others, each an important component of the economy. In short, dogs had to earn their keep; apart from the few lapdogs who were the playthings of the very rich, the company that dogs provided would have been incidental; rewarding, but not their raison d'être. Then, a few dozen generations ago, everything began to change—and these changes are still gathering pace today.

Indeed, an ever-increasing proportion of dogs are never expected to work at all; their sole function is to be family pets. Although many working types have successfully adapted, others were and still are poorly suited to this new role, so it is perhaps surprising that none of the breeds that
are most popular as family pets have been specifically and exclusively designed as such. Thus far, dogs have done their best to adjust to the many changes and restrictions we have imposed upon them—in particular, our expectation that they will be companionable when we need them to be and unobtrusive when we don't. However, the cracks inherent in this compromise are beginning to widen. As human society continues to change and the planet becomes ever more crowded, there are signs that the popularity of dogs as pets has peaked and that their adaptation to yet another lifestyle may be a struggle—especially in urban environments. After all, dogs, as living beings, cannot be reengineered every decade or so as if they were computers or cars. In the past, when dogs' functions were mostly rural, it was accepted that they were intrinsically messy and needed to be managed on their own terms. Today, by contrast, many pet dogs live in circumscribed, urban environments and are expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as adults. As if these new obligations were not enough, many dogs still manifest the adaptations that suited them for their original functions—traits that we now demand they cast away as if they had never existed. The collie who herds sheep is the shepherd's best friend; the pet collie who tries to herd children and chases bicycles is an owner's nightmare. The new, unrealistic standards to which many humans hold their dogs have arisen from one of several fundamental misconceptions about what dogs are and what they have been designed to do. We must come to better understand their needs and their nature if their niche in human society is not to diminish.

Our rapidly changing expectations are not the only challenge that dogs face today. The ways in which we now control their reproduction also represent a major challenge to their well-being. For much of human history, dogs were bred to suit the roles that humankind assigned to them—but whether their task was herding, retrieving, guarding, or hauling, dogs' stability and functionality were considered far more important than their type or appearance. In the late nineteenth century, however, dogs were grouped into self-contained breeds, reproductively isolated from one another, and each assigned a single ideal appearance, or “standard,” by breed societies. For many dogs this rigid categorization has not worked out well; rather, it has worked against their need to
adapt into their new primary role as companions. Each breeder strives not to breed the perfect pet but to produce the perfect-looking dog who will succeed in the show-ring. These winning dogs are considered prized stock and make a hugely disproportionate genetic contribution to the next generation—resulting in “pure” breeds whose idealized appearance belies their deteriorated health. In the 1950s, most breeds still had a healthy range of genetic variation; by 2000, only some twenty to twenty-five generations later, many had been inbred to the point where hundreds of genetically based deformities, diseases, and disadvantages had emerged, potentially compromising the welfare of every purebred dog. In the UK, the growing rift between dog breeders and those concerned with dogs' welfare finally became public in 2008, resulting in the withdrawal of the humane charities—and subsequently that of BBC Television, the event's broadcaster—from Crufts, the country's national dog show. While such protests are a start, the dogs themselves will not feel any benefit until the problems brought about by excessive inbreeding have been reversed and dogs are bred with their health and role in society, not their looks, in mind.

Ultimately, people will have to change their attitudes if the dog's lot is to improve. So far, however, neither the experts nor the average owner have had their preconceived notions challenged by the wealth of new science that is emerging about dogs. Much of the public debate thus far, whether about the merits of outbreeding versus inbreeding or the effectiveness of training methods, has amounted to little more than the statement and restatement of entrenched opinions. This is where scientific understanding becomes essential, for it can tell us what dogs are
really
like and what their needs
really
amount to.

Science is an essential tool for understanding dogs, but the contributions of canine science to dog welfare have, unfortunately, been somewhat mixed. Canine science, which originated in the 1950s, sets out to provide a rational perspective on what it's like to be a dog—a perspective ostensibly more objective than the traditional human-centered or anthropomorphic view of their natures. Despite this attempt at detachment, however, canine scientists have occasionally misunderstood—and even given others the license to cause injury to—the very animals whose nature they have endeavored to reveal.

Science has, unwittingly, done the most damage to dogs by applying the comparative zoology approach to studies of dog behavior. Comparative zoology is a well-established and generally valuable way of understanding the behavior and adaptations of one species through comparisons with those of another. Species that are closely related but have different lifestyles can often be better understood through comparative zoology, because differences in the way they look and behave mirror those changes in lifestyle; so, too, can those species that have come to have similar lives but are genetically unrelated. This method has been highly successful in helping to disentangle the mechanisms of evolution in general, especially now that similarities and differences in behavior can be compared with differences between each species' DNA, so as to pinpoint the genetic basis of behavior.

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 behavior as if they 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 behavior 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 behavior is still widely promoted in books and on television programs, but recent research on both dogs and wolves has shown not only that it is simply unfounded but also that dogs who 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 behavior, 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 '80s, the 1990s saw the field's 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 humans need to better understand how dogs perform these tasks. It has also been due to the shift in attention from the chimpanzee to the domestic dog on the part of a few primatologists who have attempted 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 behavioral disorders. Finally, it should not be forgotten that many biologists are dog lovers too. Once the professional stigma of working on so-called artificial animals 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 everyday dog owners with new ways of thinking about—and relating to—their pets. Thanks to the efforts of this new community of scientists, we now have a vastly improved understanding of how dogs' minds work—specifically, how dogs 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 about dog behavior has the potential to put the dog's role in human society back on track, little of the research has been made available outside of obscure academic texts until now. In this book, I attempt to translate for the general readers—and dog lovers—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 a very different image of dog's nature than 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 behaviors to the point
where such comparisons can be a hindrance, rather than an aid, to any genuine understanding of our pets.

The new science of dog behavior 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.