A Small Furry Prayer (8 page)

17

In early July, a writing assignment sent me back to the sunshine and star maps of Los Angeles. It had been three months since I'd been away, and I was excited about getting a break from the dogs. A little quiet, a few nights in a bed by myself, not having to share my dinner with a dozen roommates—you know, the standard stuff forty-one-year-old men are usually excited about. Even the timing seemed fortuitous: a friend of mine had just had a baby, and my plan was to spend five days reporting the story and one day meeting his baby and, well, so much for my plan.

The problem was the dogs. Forget needing a break—even before my plane departed Albuquerque, I was missing them. By the time I was in Los Angeles, I was certain a small hole had been augered through my chest. No one was more surprised by this than me, but the feeling continued to grow. Later that evening, despite being out to dinner with old friends, it expanded into something I hadn't felt since high school—sort of the
I know I'm going to always be alone because I'll never get a girlfriend because my hair is weird and I can't catch a baseball and who would ever like me anyway so I'll probably kill myself when done listening to the Sisters of Mercy sing “This Corrosion” three hundred times in a row
blues. The next day, it was worse.

It wasn't just loneliness. There was also an awkward vulnerability, a weakness of sorts. For three months I hadn't been anywhere without my posse. Sure, my posse was mostly crippled Chihuahuas, but you'd be surprised how much ass a crippled Chihuahua can kick. In a very real sense, the dogs had become extensions of my senses. I no longer had to look for danger; all I had to do was listen for their barks. Because dogs have better hearing, the natural division of labor made security their job. On top of which, there's no denying a certain
Reservoir Dogs
je ne sais quoi that comes from traveling as a pack. All I can tell you is that with the pack gone, my whole kung fu was off.

I lasted until the middle of my second morning in LA before I found myself canceling a couple of meetings, turning my rental car around, and driving directly to the nearest dog park for some therapy. The nearest dog park happened to be the same one that Ahab and I used to frequent. When I arrived, no one I knew was around, but even the sight of other people's pets calmed me down. I spent the next few hours trying to fondle these pets—and trying not to be too creepy about it—before a friend and his pit bulls showed up. I was so happy to see familiar dogs that I choked up at the sight, then canceled a couple more meetings so I could spend the next few hours in their company.

But after leaving the dog park, the bad feelings came rushing back. I felt a little lost, a little underwater, and very far from normal. Besides the loneliness, I found myself unable to stop worrying about the dogs. Scenarios were forming in my mind. I imagined earthquakes, tornados, nuclear wars. I started calling Joy three times an hour. All night I dreamed dogs were in trouble and I was too far away to help. By morning I knew what was going on. The symptoms were unmistakable. I had seen this problem in other rescuers … and in my own mom. I was turning into an overprotective mess. This was Jewish mother syndrome gone doggie-style.

And that was the end of my trip. I just didn't want to be in LA anymore. It was back to New Mexico on the next flight out. I never met my friend's baby and never finished that assignment, and both were pretty unusual for me. Not meeting his kid was just bad form, and having been raised in the Midwest—proud standard-bearer of the work-hard-and-don't-lie ethos—I'd never not finished an assignment before. I hadn't ever felt this out of sorts before, though, truthfully, I wasn't all that surprised.

I'd always assumed there'd be emotional fallout from doing dog rescue. There's just too much history between our species and too much biology woven through that history. At the core sits a question that has bugged ethologists for years: why did humans pick wolves to turn into man's best friend? We hung out with a lot of other species before we started hanging out with wolves, but we never bothered intertwining our lives with theirs. So what happened? Did one of our forebears happen to glance over at the one-hundred-and-eighty pound man-eater and think, This guy—with the fangs and the snarl and the drool—he's the one I want as my best friend? Did we instinctively know our two species would bond so well? And if we knew this instinctively, then why did we know this instinctively?

For a long time the answer has been tangled up in supposition. Archeologists have fourteen-thousand-year-old skeletons of humans and dogs sharing the same grave sites and so adopted 12,000 BCE as the start date for our cohabitation. Then we discovered that the mitochondrial strand of DNA, a sort of genetic constant inherited from one's mother, allowed for deeper analysis. Since mutations are also passed along with the mitochondrial DNA, scientists use these mutations to track backward through time. If two different species share a common mutation, they also share a common ancestor, allowing researchers to estimate how far back that common ancestor lived.

In 1997, UCLA biologist Carles Vilà used this technique to discover that all domestic dogs are direct descendents of the wolf, rather than the motley assortment of previously suspected canids. Since the split between wolf and dog was the direct result of our cohabitation, he used this new information to figure out how long humans and dogs have been living together. The results were startling. It now appears we've been cohabitating with dogs for longer than we've actually been human.

Vilà dates the emergence of human-canid cohabitation to the end of the last ice age, more than a hundred thousand years ago. This was the period when climate change drove our small-brained, low-browed predecessors out of the African veldt and onto the Eurasian steppe. And what they found there were wolves. A lot of wolves.

Wolves were the top predator in Eurasia, able to keep pace with giant herds of ungulates, able to become what University of Vienna zoologist Wolfgang Schleidt calls the first “mammalian pastoralists”—meaning the first species to herd another species—and our ancestors quickly adopted their methods. They too started chasing large herds of ungulates across the wide-open terrain. That must have been a sight to see, and wolves, ever curious, came to watch the show. Pretty soon we had teamed up with those wolves, coordinating our hunting efforts, sharing our kills, forming the beginning of an alliance unlike any we'd made before.

For a long time, this alliance puzzled people. After all, we'd already lived alongside dozens of other primates—whom we are related to—yet never managed to find a way to cohabit with any of them. As Jane Goodall once pointed out:

Chimpanzees are individualists. They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty. If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bonds between siblings. Other relationships tend to be opportunistic … even after hundreds of years of selective breeding, it would be hard if not impossible to produce a chimpanzee who could live with humans and have anything like such a good relationship we have with our dogs.

In his paper “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids,” Schleidt addresses this good relationship from a different angle: “There is something in the bond among wolves and between dogs and humans that goes beyond that between us and our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees. Here
we are not talking about intelligence
, but about what we may poetically associate with
kindness of heart
.” Why this bond is so strong becomes one obvious question, but how we learned to bond like this in the first place is the better place to start.

When early hominids first arrived on the Eurasian steppe, socially—which is to say emotionally—we were much more like primates, but we left more like wolves. Schleidt feels this happened not just because we liked the kindness we saw in wolves; rather, we liked it because we lacked it ourselves. What Schleidt is pointing out is that we are here, because we were first there, a fairly selfish animal confronting a hostile, new territory in the Eurasian steppe. Wolves were the steppe's top predator, and we wanted to share that spot. So we adopted wolflike strategies, and this decision not only changed the course of human history but also may have been the starting point for human history.

Scientists can trace intelligence, self-awareness, and long-term planning to our chimpanzee ancestry, but as Schleidt points out in “Apes, Wolves, and the Trek to Humanity,” traits such as patience, loyalty, cooperation, and devotion both to one's immediate family and to a larger social group are not prevalent among primates. “The closest approximation to human morality we can find in nature is that of the gray wolf,
Canis lupus
,” he writes. He then explains further in “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids”: “Wolves' ability to cooperate in a variety of situations, not only in well coordinated drives in the context of attacking prey, carrying items too heavy for one individual, provisioning not only their own young but also other pack members, baby sitting, etc., is rivaled only by that of human societies.”

So how did humans become more like wolves and less like primates? Researchers believe the first portion of the answer comes down to similarities. Unlike primates, both wolves and humans are nomadic, omnivorous, social species, which produces a certain sameness in our hierarchy of needs and, by extension, a shared commonality in behavior. Here was the common ground that allowed us to form our evolutionary partnership, but that didn't happen overnight.

In the beginning, before flight distances dropped, our partnership meant sharing the same camp without too much contact between species. This was the era when wolves were our garbage disposals—they ate our leftovers—and security guards—they barked at danger. Flight distances dropped next, and they became our hot-water bottles, keeping us warm when we slept (this is where the phrase “three-dog night” comes from: a night so cold it takes three dogs in the bed to stay warm). Then the real change: we started hunting together. Wolves had better hearing and smell, so they handled the tracking; we had opposable thumbs and bipedal stances, so we took over the killing. Finally, as we started noticing the attention they paid their young, we began trusting them with ours. The men went off hunting, the women gathering, leaving the elderly and the children behind with a bunch of wolves standing guard. And as each of these categories represent the fulfillment of basic needs—food, shelter, security—each of these stages exerted evolutionary pressure.

Then, like now, there were some people who were better with animals then others. Until we started hanging out with wolves, these folks probably helped track game, but otherwise didn't play too much of a role in community life. But once we began cohabitating with wolves, such skills were greatly in demand. Those who were better with animals—who felt deeper empathy, responded more to neoteny, and—considering this is wolves we're talking about—had a greater tolerance for risk had an advantage. Tribes who had these folks around had an advantage. Thus the moment we began cohabitating with wolves became the moment evolution began selecting for those traits that made us better wolf lovers.

And then it began selecting for other things. If we wanted to cohabit with wolves, we needed to learn to live with wolves. In simple terms, the size of our pack grew. A bigger pack is a stronger pack, but only if that pack is united toward a common goal. This type of unity requires more patience, wider loyalty, and better cooperation than existed in our primate past, so once we teamed up with wolves, evolution began selecting for these traits as well. What all this really means is that what we call our “humanity” is actually is a collection of traits borrowed from wolves.

This may also solve the mystery of cross-species altruism. The wolves not only taught us to expand the boundaries of community beyond kin—a lesson chimpanzees have yet to learn—but also taught us to expand beyond kind. And this may be the reason we still need ephemeral phrases such as “kindness of heart” to describe the bond between humans and dogs—because it was dogs who taught us how to bond like that in the first place.

This bond has had measurable effects, specifically on the size of our brains. A large brain is an expensive habit. Our version makes up two percent of our body weight but consumes twenty percent of our energy. For this reason, the brain is always looking for ways to conserve resources. This is why domestication, essentially the process of outsourcing basic survival needs, affects brain size. When horses were tamed they no longer needed to know everything they needed to know to survive in the wild, so their brains shrunk by 16 percent. In pigs, the reduction was thirty-four percent; in dogs estimates fall between ten and thirty percent. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that human brains have also contracted by about ten percent—and this contraction happened not long after we began cohabitating with wolves.

The effect of the dog-human bond also explains what University of Maryland professor of nursing Erika Friedmann discovered in mid-1970s. Friedmann was the first to examine the rumored relationship between furry companionship and cardiovascular health. Her findings involved a group of patients who had undergone heart surgery: those patients who had dogs were much more likely to be alive one year after being discharged from the cardiac care unit than those without. Her results were independent of whether these patients had other people around to talk to, and independent of the severity of their condition. People who lived alone, had no friends, and had a terrible heart condition but who had a dog had better survival rates than those who were surrounded by friends and family, had a mild heart condition, but lacked a canine companion.