Dogs may share 99.6 per cent of their DNA with wolves, but they are far from the pack animal we once thought they were, according to a new book on understanding canine behaviour
ONE OF the things you hear most often when you get a dog is how you have to teach them right away who’s Top Dog. Top Dog is you, of course, even though you’re the one without a tail and two extra legs.
Among the rituals recommended to be performed is that you don’t let the dog go out the door before you, let them sit higher than you on your sofa or stand on the stairs over you. It’s all to do with the theory that dogs are like wolves of old, operating in packs and obeying only their leader. You must be the dominant one in the canine-human relationship is the message from trainers and dog-handling books.
Peter Bradshaw, a biologist, has now written a book that discounts this theory. It's a book with two titles, depending on what side of the Atlantic you reside in. Stateside, the title is Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behaviour Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet; and in Europe, it's I n Defence of Dogs: Why Dogs Need Our Understanding.
Bradshaw is an academic at the University of Bristol, where he founded the wonderfully named anthrozoology department. (Anthrozoology is the study of the interaction between humans and animals.) He disputes the long-accepted theory that dogs are “nicely brought-up wolves”.
Dogs apparently share 99.6 per cent of the same DNA as wolves. It’s a closer match to the wolf than the human is to chimps. Despite this match, Bradshaw argues that a dog’s brain operates in very different ways, mostly due to the lengthy process of domestication over time.
His key argument is based on the fact the scientific work that has been done in the past was based on cohorts of the “wrong wolves”, ie wolves living in captivity rather than in the wild.
When in the wild, Bradshaw says, the wolves are tolerant of each other and operate as a kind of co-op. Wolves held in captivity are already in an unnatural environment to begin with, he says, and thus organise themselves differently to survive. These are the packs that require leaders.
So, who goes out the door first: you or the dog? It makes no difference, Bradshaw says. It won’t be news that while dogs can be clever, they possess no emotional range. If you think your dog is looking guiltily at you after discovering he has a) chewed one of your shoes, b) peed in your kitchen overnight or c) swiped something from your plate while you were not looking, you’re mistaken. Dogs live in the moment, and there is no human-like association of later repentance for earlier naughtiness. They’re just dogs.
What dogs do possess is a fantastically heightened sense of smell. Bradshaw ranges it as between 10,000 and 100,000 times greater than ours. That means if you’re doing some DIY involving repainting, better keep the dog out of the room. It also answers the question as to why there always seems to be so many dead birds in the world when you let your dog off the lead: their sense of smell unerringly finds them.
Their uncanny sense of smell and the fact that dogs can be trained could make dogs useful for, at present, almost unimaginable purposes, such as detecting cancer in a person prediagnosis, says Bradshaw.
But what do dog owners make of all this? The Economist recently reviewed Bradshaw’s book, prompting the following response posted online: “Over 20 years ago, my small daughter gave me a birthday card with a badge attached. It said, ‘The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.’ I should have kept it.”
Another said: “What intrigues me is that dogs seem to have gone from wolf-like to a bewildering diversity of races in a relatively short timespan. (Or did Neanderthal already have curly haired wolf-poodles?)”
And, referring to the the claim that their olfactory ability and trainability could allow dogs to perform “almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early stages of a cancer”, one reader wrote: “I look forward to the day when I go to my oncologist and receive a Cat scan and a dog scan.”
In Defence of Dogs: Why Dogs Need Our Understanding, is published by Allen Lane
