Dog Sense (13 page)

Medieval dogs

The mtDNA of some modern breeds shows that their identity extends back in an unbroken line at least five hundred years, and possibly much longer. Some of these ancient breeds are oriental, including the shar-pei, Shiba Inu, chow chow, and Akita. Others, including the Afghan hound and saluki, have Middle Eastern origins. A third group (malamute and husky) are Arctic dogs, while an African breed, the basenji (recently confirmed from its Y-chromosome DNA as both unique and ancient), forms the fourth. Some of the North Scandinavian breeds, such as the Norwegian elkhound, have probably been derived from interbreeding wolves with dogs, several hundred and possibly as many as a few thousand years ago.

Speciality breeds may have originally had other uses besides the standard ones, such as tracking and hunting. Several types of dog, such as the chow chow and the fat Polynesian types, were developed specifically
for food; others, such as the Manchurian long-haired types, were probably bred for their fur as well. Breeding dogs is not a particularly efficient way to obtain nourishment or something to wear, so we have to presume that there was always some social significance attached to these uses: Dog meat may have been prized as a delicacy, and dog fur may have carried a higher social cachet than the hide of hunted animals such as gazelle.

Whatever one may think of such uses for dogs, they are a testament to the dog's extreme adaptability to the twists and turns of human civilization. Dogs have been adapted, or have adapted themselves, to all kinds of roles, in a way unmatched by any other domestic animal, and such flexibility must lie at the heart of the enduring power of the human-canine relationship. Although today most dogs are valued primarily for their companionship, at least in the West, we must also remember that historically many dogs were kept first and foremost because they were useful. Some of these functions must have come and gone in just a few centuries; just a footnote to the dog's association with man, they are now almost forgotten (see the box titled “
The Turnespete
”). Others—such as hunting, shepherding, and guarding—persist today.

European breeding restrictions were comparatively lax at first and developed relatively late. The fact that the few genetically isolated “ancient” breeds come from such far-flung locations (and none from Europe) suggests that they are relics of dogs that were carried, by human migration, out of Asia and southeastern Europe and subsequently not interbred with more recent migrants, the most notable of which would have been the diverse types of dog developed in Europe in the Middle Ages and subsequently spread by colonialism. Such genetic isolation indicates a greater degree of human intervention in reproduction than for many other types of dog, although it is not possible to tell how much of this would have been achieved by selecting purebred partners for mating and how much by culling or simple neglect of accidentally crossbred puppies. By contrast, the DNA of modern dogs indicates that crossbreeding between different types of dog was commonplace in Europe and America. While much of this crossbreeding was probably accidental, historical records also indicate some deliberate breeding of unlikely combinations of types, just to see whether some useful new type might emerge.

Aside from the few “ancient” breeds, crossbreeding of dogs continued apace in Europe and North America until the middle of the nineteenth century. The idea that a dog should be mated only with other identical dogs is a comparatively new one, dating back only about 150 years in Europe, the same notion then spreading rapidly to other countries. Nowadays, if a dog is to be registered as a particular breed, his or her parents, grandparents, and so on for many generations must also have been registered as the same breed—a restriction known as the “breed barrier.” Although many mongrels and crossbred dogs continue to be born in the West, they are much less likely than pedigree dogs are to find homes and leave offspring of their own.

Pedigree breeding is the third phase of the transition from wolf to modern dog, each phase having been abetted by a different selective pressure. The first was the initial selection for tameness, from wolves that were already pre-adapted to scavenging from man. As we have seen, this process must have been essentially passive: The wolves that could tolerate interaction with man gradually isolated themselves reproductively from their wild cousins and became proto-dogs. In the second phase, deliberate selection by man for specific functions began to become a factor, through attempted isolation of one type of dog from another. However, this was rarely, and then only locally, the factor controlling which dogs had descendants and which did not, given that deliberate selection occurred as isolated exceptions against a background of some deliberate (and much accidental) interbreeding. By contrast, the third and most recent phase of the transition from wolf to dog has seen an explosion of deliberate selection: Dogs are mated with other, virtually identical dogs in an attempt to create “ideal” breeds—most of which are cherished for their appearance, not their functionality.

Domestication has been a long and complex process, and despite the self-evident differences between types of dog, every dog alive today is a product of this transition. What was once another one of the wild social canids—the grey wolf—has been altered radically, to the point that it has become its own unique animal. In the course of this change, the dog has shed many of its wolf-like attributes, so much so that there
is no reason to presume that the characteristics that define today's dogs are derived specifically from wolves; most of these are either products of domestication or general features of canids that predate the evolution of the grey wolf.

Whatever the selective pressures governing them, many of the characteristics that separate domestic dogs from the wild canids can be ascribed to changes in the rates at which the body and behavior mature. As noted earlier, dogs are in many respects similar to juvenile canids; although they grow into adults in the narrow sense that they become capable of reproducing, they remain immature in many other respects—a sort of arrested development that neatly accounts for the way they depend on their human owners for the whole of their lives.

Thus despite the differences between breeds, dogs are recognizably dogs—and not just so far as we humans are concerned. Dogs evidently recognize other dogs as such, even when the disparity in size and shape between them makes it seem implausible that they could. Dogs of all breeds, or almost all, must therefore retain some common social repertoire, enabling them both to recognize one another as dogs and to engage in at least rudimentary communication. The question, then, is to what extent are the dog's social capabilities a product of domestication, and what has been inherited directly from the wolf—or possibly from even further back in the canids' evolutionary history?

T
oday's dogs are clearly not wolves on the outside, but their behavior is often interpreted as if they were still wolves on the inside. Indeed, now that we know for sure that the wolf is the dog's only ancestor, it seems impossible to avoid such comparisons. The idea that dogs retain most of the wolf's essential character is not only out-of-date but also reflects some deep-seated misconceptions about wolf behavior that science is only now beginning to overturn. Despite these holes in the dog-wolf theory, however, it is still widely used to inform dog training, with unfortunate consequences for dog and owner alike.

For over fifty years, the concept of dog as a wolf dressed up in a cute package dominated dog training and management, with results that were—to say the least—mixed. Some bits of advice that logically flowed from this misconception are harmless, but others, if applied rigorously, can damage the bond between dog and owner. Moreover, equating dogs with wolves allows trainers and owners to justify physical punishment of the dog, by the analogy that wolf parents achieve control of their offspring through aggression.

The concept that dog behavior is little changed from that of wolves also does not jibe with the self-evident friendliness of the large majority of dogs. Most dogs love meeting other dogs, and most love people. This may seem a blindingly obvious statement, but from a biologist's perspective it's one that demands explanation. After all, neighboring cats often
spend their whole lives avoiding one another, whereas many dogs will try to greet every dog they come across. Where does this general affability come from?

The dog's sociability is even more remarkable when compared to that of its ancestors. Wolves from different packs try to avoid one another; if they do meet, they almost always fight, sometimes to the death. This is not unusual—modern biologists view all cooperative behavior as exceptional, because the default behavior of every animal should be to defend itself and its essential resources—its food, its access to mates, its territory—against all others, and especially against members of its own species, since these must be its most direct competitors. Wolves are no exception to this rule, and any wolf that fails to compete in this way would, all other things being equal, produce fewer offspring than its neighbors. Logically, therefore, any gene that predisposes a wolf to put the interests of other wolves first should eventually disappear. Of course, kin selection means that wolf packs composed of family groups do cooperate, because this cooperation enables them to propagate their genetic material most effectively. But unrelated groups, which share far fewer genes, will either avoid one another or fight, if they do happen to meet.

Dogs, unlike wolves, are extraordinarily outgoing—yet even this trait has been interpreted as fitting into the idea of dogs' underlying wolfishness. Dogs who are self-evidently unrelated—say, from different breeds—are usually perfectly happy to meet when out being exercised by their owners. Yet many old-school trainers and dog experts would argue that dogs are friendly only because they are trained to be so. Within every dog, they maintain, lurks a savage wolf that could spring at any moment for the throat of any dog it meets, unless its owner remains in vigilant control. Despite having being comprehensively discredited by biologists and veterinary behaviorists over a quarter of a century ago, this idea still has a surprisingly wide currency. Many training manuals still emphasize the need for constant vigilance against the moment when young dogs begin their inexorable attempts to dominate or control all around them, dog and human alike. The only answer, they say, is to make sure from day one that the dogs know that their owner is boss—a stance that humans are supposed to be able to achieve by mimicking the way that dominant wolves control their packs.