Dog Sense

by John Bradshaw

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - Where Dogs Came From

  CHAPTER 2 - How Wolves Became Dogs

  CHAPTER 3 - Why Dogs Were—Unfortunately—Turned Back into Wolves

  CHAPTER 4 - Sticks or Carrots? The Science of Dog Training

  CHAPTER 5 - How Puppies Become Pets

  CHAPTER 6 - Does Your Dog Love You?

  CHAPTER 7 - Canine Brainpower

  CHAPTER 8 - Emotional (Un) sophistication

  CHAPTER 9 - A World of Smells

  CHAPTER 10 - Problems with Pedigrees

  CHAPTER 11 - Dogs and the Future

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  Copyright Page

  To Alexis

  (1970–1984), a Real Dog

  Preface

  The first dog I became attached to was one I never met. He was my grandfather’s Cairn terrier, Ginger—a typical long-legged Cairn of the early twentieth century, only a few generations removed from his working forebears. Ginger had died long before I was born, and I grew up in a pet-free household; stories about Ginger were, for a while, the nearest I came to having a dog of my own.

  My grandfather, an architect, liked to walk. He walked to and from his office in the industrial city of Bradford and to and from the churches and mill buildings he specialized in; but especially he walked for recreation, whether in the Yorkshire moors or in the Lake District or in Snowdonia. Whenever he could, he took Ginger with him. The family maintained that Ginger, who was taller than he should have been for his breed, had acquired his longer-than-average legs through all this exercise. Actually, in the photographs I have of him he looks quite typical of his breed, and not unlike the Cairn chosen to play Toto in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. It was not until much later on, when I became professionally interested in pedigree dogs, that I was struck by how much the breed had changed over the intervening decades, including becoming significantly shorter in the leg. I doubt many modern Cairns would enjoy the amounts of exercise that my grandfather evidently relished, although Cairns today are less prone to inherited diseases than many other breeds are.

  Ginger was a genuine Yorkshire “character,” and the family had a fund of stories about him, but what amazed me the most was the freedom he had been given, even though he lived within sight of the city center. Every lunchtime, when my grandfather was at work, Ginger was allowed to take himself for a walk around the neighborhood. Apparently he had a routine. First he would cross the road into Lister Park, where he would sniff lampposts, interact with other dogs, and, in summer, try to persuade the occupants of the park benches to part with one of their sandwiches. Then he would cross the tram tracks on Manningham Lane and amble to the rear of the fish and chip shop, where a scratch at the back door would usually elicit a handful of scraps of batter and some misshapen chips. Then he usually headed straight for home, which involved crossing a busy junction. Here, according to family legend, there was usually a policeman, directing the lunchtime traffic, who would solemnly stop the cars to allow Ginger safe passage across.

  I’ve not been to Bradford for many years, but if other cities are anything to go by, Lister Park is probably now ringed with poop-bins, most of the dogs walked there are at the end of a leash, and the Bradford dogwardens are called out to catch any dog that routinely roams the park, let alone the nearby streets. The trams are long gone, of course, and traffic lights have replaced policemen on point duty, but I doubt that one of today’s body-armored community support officers would dare to stop a car to allow a small brown terrier to cross the road, even if he or she wanted to.

  Seventy-odd years have passed since Ginger was allowed to roam the streets and charm his way into the affections of everyone he met, including the local law enforcement officers. During that same period, almost unnoticed, there have been enormous changes in society’s attitudes toward man’s best friend.

  Such attitudes were still quite relaxed when I was growing up in 1970s’ Britain. My first dog, a Labrador/Jack Russell cross named Alexis, was also a roamer, although he was more interested in the opposite sex than in lunchtime snacks. Despite our best efforts to keep him in sight he would manage to get away once in a while, and so, unlike Ginger, he did end up in police kennels a few times (in those days the police in the UK still had responsibility for stray dogs). But no one seemed to mind much. Nowadays such tolerance of dogs and their ways is hard to find, especially in cities, and dog ownership is showing signs of retreating to its roots in the countryside. After many millennia in which the dog has been man’s closest animal companion, cats are taking over as the most popular pet in many countries, including the United States. Why is this happening?

  First of all, dogs are expected to be much better controlled than they used to be. There has never been a shortage of experts telling owners how to take charge of their dogs. When I took on my second dog, a Labrador/Airedale terrier cross named Ivan, I was determined that he would be better behaved than Alexis. I decided I ought to find out something about training but was then shocked to discover the approach adopted by the trainers of the day, such as Barbara Woodhouse, who seemed to see the dog as something that needed to be dominated at all times. This simply didn’t make sense to me—the whole point of having dogs as pets was for them to become friends, not slaves. As I researched, I found that this approach to training had stemmed from the ideas of Colonel Konrad Most, a police officer and a pioneer in dog training who, more than one hundred years ago, had decided that a man could control a dog only if the dog was convinced that the man was physically superior. He derived this idea from contemporary biologists’ accounts of wild wolf packs, which at that time were considered to be controlled by one individual who ruled the others through fear. Biology, by then my profession, seemed to be at odds with my gut feeling as to how my relationship with my dogs ought to work.

  To my relief, this dilemma has resolved itself over the past decade. The wolf pack, always the touchstone for the interpretation of dog behavior, is now known to be a harmonious family group except when human intervention renders it dysfunctional. As a consequence, the most enlightened modern trainers have largely abandoned the use of punishment, relying on reward-based methods that have their roots in comparative psychology. Yet for some reason, old-school trainers continue to dominate the media—largely, I suspect, because their confrontational methods make for a more exciting spectacle.

  While a more sympathetic understanding of dogs’ minds is being applied to training, albeit patchily, their physical health has been progressively undermined. As more and more demands have been placed on the family dog in terms of hygiene, control, and behavior, the breeding of dogs who might be suited for this ever more demanding niche has been left in the hands of enthusiasts whose primary goal is to produce dogs that look good. Ginger, although he came from pedigree stock, was only ten or so generations away from Scottish and Irish rat-catchers of no particular breeding and, as a result, led a long and healthy life. Now, the Cairn terrier is in danger of becoming the victim of inbreeding for the show-ring, plagued by over a dozen hereditary complaints such as the exotically named but apparently excruciatingly painful Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease.

  Biologists now know far more about what really makes dogs tick than they did even a decade ago, but this new understanding has been slow to percolate through to owners and, indeed, has not yet made enough of a difference to the lives of the dogs themselves. Having studied the behavior of dogs for over twenty years, as well as enjoying their company, I felt it was time that someone stood up for dogdom: not the caricature of the wolf in a dog suit, ready to dominate his unsuspectin
g owner at the first sign of weakness, not the trophy animal who collects rosettes and kudos for her breeder, but the real dog, the pet who just wants to be a member of the family and enjoy life.

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve spent the best part of thirty years studying dog behavior, first at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, then at the University of Southampton, and finally at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. Some of what I’ve learned about dogs has come from direct observation, especially in the early days, but much has been informed by collaborations and discussions with many, many colleagues and graduate students. The original research described in this book owes much to them, though of course I take full responsibility for the interpretations presented here. In roughly chronological order, they are: Christopher Thorne, David Macdonald, Stephan Natynczuk, Benjamin Hart, Sarah Brown, Ian Robinson, Helen Nott, Stephen Wickens, Amanda Lea, Sarah Whitehead, Gwen Bailey, James Serpell, Rory Putman, Anita Nightingale, Claire Hoskin, Robert Hubrecht, Claire Guest, Deborah Wells, Elizabeth Kershaw, Anne McBride, Sarah Heath, Justine McPherson, David Appleby, Barbara Schöning, Emily Blackwell, Jolanda Pluijmakers, Theresa Barlow, Helen Almey, Elly Hiby, Sara Jackson, Elizabeth Paul, Nicky Robertson, Claire Cooke, Samantha Gaines, Anne Pullen, and Carri Westgarth—and many more too numerous to list. Two deserve a special mention: Nicola Rooney, who, in addition to producing consistently world-class research on dog behavior and welfare for the past dozen years, has been the social life and soul of my research group; and Rachel Casey—arguably the UK’s leading veterinary behaviorist and unarguably an indefatigable champion of evidence-based dog training and behavioral therapy. My thanks also to the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and especially professors Christine Nicol and Mike Mendl, and Dr. David Main, for nurturing the Anthrozoology Institute and its research.

  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.

  Introduction

  The 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 con
sidered 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.