Even if this information is thoroughly disseminated, however, irresponsible breeding is unlikely to go away. The rehoming charities will inevitably take the brunt of coping with the unwanted dogs that result. But fortunately they increasingly have available to them the information necessary to adopt more science-based methods for rehabilitating such dogs, and for raising understanding among adopting owners of what makes dogs behave the way they do.
Looking into the future, I predict that dogs will need all the help they can get, from scientists and enthusiasts alike. Dogs were first domesticated to live in small villages and rural communities, and there is no doubt that tensions arise, both between dog and owner and between owner and non-owner, when dogs live in modern cities. As the globe becomes progressively more urbanized, such unease may spread.
Dogs in the West will never be able to return to the freedoms they enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, when many were allowed to roam city streets during the day, meeting (or avoiding) other dogs as and when they chose, before returning to their owners in the evening. Society requires much more of dogs, and dog owners, than it did then. The public’s attitudes toward hygiene in particular have hardened in the past twenty years, with poop-scoop laws becoming almost universally adopted and more people openly expressing a dislike of touching or being licked by a dog. More people also seem to be allergic to dogs than ever before (although, paradoxically, many scientists now think that contact with dog allergens in infancy is actually protective against the development of this allergy). Dogs are now expected to behave well at all times, especially when in public, and the number of places where owners can exercise dogs off-leash has been considerably reduced. If this trend continues, pet dogs could potentially turn into a barely tolerated minority interest, especially in cities.
There was a time in the early years of this century when it looked as though dog populations in the United Kingdom and the United States were beginning to shrink, as though every dog had indeed had its day; the best estimates now suggest that the dog population may be leveling off. Cats are now at least as numerous as dogs in both countries, mainly because they suit modern lifestyles whereby all members of a household work and the time and space for exercising a dog are restricted. How popular will dogs be at the end of the twenty-first century? Addressing the twin pressures of misguided breeding and poor understanding of canine psychology is crucial to ensuring that dogs remain as significant a part of human life as they have been for the past ten millennia. My hope is that this book will make some contribution toward that goal.
Notes
Introduction
1 Including, I have to confess, by myself: An article I wrote for a Waltham Symposium in 1990 takes this approach. At that time, there was no research contradicting it. The situation is very different today.
Chapter 1
1 Carles Vilà, Peter Savolainen, Jesús Maldonado, Isabel Amorim, John Rice, Rodney Honeycutt, Keith Crandall, Joakim Lundeberg, and Robert Wayne, “Multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dog,” Science 276 (June 13, 1997): 1687–1689.
2 Biologists often name whole groups of animals after their best-known member. Hence the Roman name for the domestic dog—canis—is used to refer to all the domestic dog’s relatives: Canis for the closest ones, canid for the extended family. The confusion that this causes isn’t deliberate, honest.
3 Michael Fox, one of the pioneers of dog behavior in the 1960s, thought that for each species there was a distinct limit on how large and complex a pack could become, with the wolf at the pinnacle. His theories linger on even today in books about dogs, but in the time since he formulated his ideas a great deal more has been discovered about the behavior of many of these species.
4 This term appears in Hungarian expert Dr. Ádám Miklósi’s Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5 Randall Lockwood, “Dominance in wolves: Useful construct or bad habit?” in Behaviour and Ecology of Wolves, ed. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Garland STPM Press, 1979), pp. 225–243.
6 See Dr. David Mech’s illuminating article on the new conception of wolf biology at http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/alstat/alpst.htm (accessed on August 25, 2010).
7 There is some controversy about just how many kinds of wolf occur in the wild in North America today, but only the grey wolf is sufficiently widespread for its social behavior to have been studied. The number of types of grey wolf on the American continent is constantly being reappraised; there may be five (Northwestern, Plains, Eastern, Mexican, and Arctic), but I’ve referred to the first two generically as the “timber” wolf. A sixth, the red wolf, is often considered a separate species. Although it is sometimes called the “Texas” red wolf, in the early part of the last century its range centered on North Carolina. Some people maintain that it is a unique and endangered animal, and a great deal of effort is being put into captive breeding and conservation. Bear in mind, however, that the red wolf looks suspiciously like a mixture between a grey wolf and a coyote—and its DNA appears to back the idea that it is a hybrid. Wolves and coyotes can mate and produce offspring, certainly in zoos and probably also in the wild; the Eastern or Algonquin wolf that occurs in Ontario and Quebec is probably such a hybrid, although it has also been posited as a third true species of wolf. To further confuse the picture, the DNA of red wolves suggests that they may have hybridized with coyotes for a second time in the nineteenth century, as changing agriculture and ranching practices began to favor coyotes over wolves in the southeastern United States. And given that many apparently purebred coyotes also contain wolf (as well as domestic dog) DNA, interbreeding between wolves and coyotes appears to have been going on for thousands of years—leading to the coining of the tongue-in-cheek term “Canis soupus” to describe coyote, eastern wolf, and red wolf alike.
8 As is most likely the story for the domestic cat; see Science 296 (April 5, 2002): 15 for a summary of my research group’s study into this.
Chapter 2
1 The members of this international team, led by Carles Vilà at the University of California in Los Angeles, published their findings in volume 276 of the journal Science (June 13, 1997, pp. 1687–1689).
2 With the notable exception of the Egyptians, who mummified a wide range of animals, including vast numbers of domestic cats.
3 Indeed, such long-distance commutes were rare until comparatively recently, when European dogs were introduced as part of colonialization. However, it turns out that in most areas, pet dogs who escape, as well as hybrids between pets and local dogs, tend not to prosper; evidently they are less effective than local street dogs at exploiting local conditions. The DNA of many local populations is thus largely preserved in its original form.
4 See Peter Savolainen, Ya-ping Zhang, Jing Luo, Joakim Lundeberg, and Thomas Leitner, “Genetic evidence for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs,” Science 298 (November 22, 2002): 1610–1613; and Adam Boyko et al., “Complex population structure in African village dogs and its implications for inferring dog domestication history,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (August 19, 2009): 13903–13908.
5 See, for example, Nicholas Wade, “New Finding Puts Origins of Dogs in Middle East,” New York Times, March 18, 2010.
6 More gruesome still is the Zoroastrian practice of allowing dogs, regarded as sacred animals, to dispose of human corpses.
7 This scenario, conveniently, would also explain why the mitochondrial DNA sequences of dogs and wolves appear to have diverged at an unfeasibly early date. The divergence would have to predate the genetic changes that split the “normal” wolves from the “socializable” wolves, because today there are no survivors of the latter, apart from the few that changed into dogs. Matings between “socializable” females and “normal” males might well have continued for many millennia after the split, but would be undetectable in the (maternally inherited) mtDNA of modern dogs.
8 Ludmilla Trut, “Early canid domestication:
The farm-fox experiment,” American Scientist 87 (1999): 160–169.
9 A few anthropologists have toyed with the rather romantic notion of man-wolf coevolution, suggesting that wolves taught us how to hunt in groups, even how to form complex societies. However, it seems highly unlikely that any two-legged human could ever have “adopted” the wolf’s lifestyle. The wolves would have outrun him before he had time to blink. When he finally caught up with them after they had made their kill, why would they have let him share it with them? The primitive spears and knives that he had at his disposal would hardly have been adequate to drive off a pack of hungry wolves. Moreover, depictions of men hunting with dogs do not feature in cave paintings until five thousand to six thousand years ago, almost halfway through the history of domestic dogs as revealed by the archaeological record. It is certainly true that wolves feature prominently in the symbolism of recent hunter-gatherer societies, but myths do not recapitulate origins; indeed, they merely invent a framework for explaining the uncontrollable.
Chapter 3
1 Here I am indebted to biologist Dr. Sunil Kumar Pal and his colleagues, who have been studying the urban feral dogs of West Bengal for over ten years.
2 The sanctuary is run by the rehoming charity Dogs Trust, to whom I am very grateful for providing this opportunity.
3 See http://www.inch.com/~dogs/taming.html (accessed September 28, 2010).
4 See http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance (accessed December 16, 2009).
5 These RHP-related ideas were first developed with my colleague Dr. Stephen Wickens; see my chapter in James Serpell’s The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
6 See, for example, John Bradshaw and Amanda Lea, “Dyadic interactions between domestic dogs,” Anthrozoös 5 (1992): 245–253. The results of this study were confirmed by additional analysis of the data presented in Carri Westgarth, Robert Christley, Gina Pinchbeck, Rosalind Gaskell, Susan Dawson, and John Bradshaw, “Dog behaviour on walks and the effect of use of the leash,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 125 (2010): 38–46.
7 Specifically by Ádám Miklósi, in his book Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
8 For an example of this approach and how it was initially adopted even by specialist veterinarians, see Amy and Laura Marder’s article “Human-companion animal relationships and animal behavior problems,” published in Veterinary Clinics of North America—Small Animal Practice 15 (1985): 411–421.
9 Summarized from the entry headed “Understanding Your Dog” in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s online encyclopedia h2g2 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4889712 (accessed August 20, 2010).
10 Taken from http://www.acorndogtraining.co.uk/dominance.htm (accessed on March 18, 2010). The author of this site, Fran Griffin, is not herself a supporter of these “commandments.”
11 Both these studies were conducted by a colleague of mine at Bristol University, Dr. Nicola Rooney.
Chapter 4
1 Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier, Be the Pack Leader (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007), p. 11.
2 Colin Tennant, Breaking Bad Habits in Dogs (Dorking, UK: Interpet Publishing, 2002), p. 18. The “Expert Dog Trainer and Canine Behaviourist” tag is from the cover of the same book.
3 Quoted from an article by Louise Rafkin in the San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2006, titled “The Anti-Cesar Millan: Ian Dunbar’s been succeeding for 25 years with lure-reward dog training; how come he’s been usurped by the flashy, aggressive TV host?” See http://articles.sfgate.com/keyword/puppy (accessed November 15, 2010).
4 In fact, Konrad Most also promoted the idea of shaping dogs’ “instinctive” behavior using rewards and discussed the benefits of allowing dogs to make their own decisions; indeed, he went on to become a pioneering guide-dog trainer. But it’s his philosophy of the dog-human relationship that is perhaps his biggest and most unfortunate legacy.
5 The Monks of New Skete, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: A Training Manual for Dog Owners (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1978), p. 13.
6 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
7 Ibid., pp. 46–47.
8 The Monks of New Skete, The Art of Raising a Puppy (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1991), pp. 202–203.
9 Veterinary behavior specialist Sophia Yin explains this in detail on her website; see http://drsophiayin.com/philosophy/dominance (accessed December 16, 2009).
10 David Appleby, one of the founders of the UK’s Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors, writes on the APBC’s website: “There seems to be little doubt that programmes introduced to cure a dominance problem can result in depression and withdrawn behaviour.” See http://www.apbc.org.uk/articles/caninedominance (accessed March 18, 2010).
11 Fran Griffin, one of the founders of the UK Association of Pet Dog Trainers, writes: “Over the years I have heard far too many stories from owners who have followed the ‘dominance reduction schedule’ after taking advice from trainers/behaviourists, only to become very disappointed. Once it has become established that the dog has failed to respond to the regime, the owners became more and more aggressive in their attitude, in the belief that they were ‘asserting their alpha position over the dog.’ Eventually the dog bit them ‘unprovoked.’ For many this resulted in the dog’s demise, whilst others were thrown into the local rescue kennels.” See http://www.acorndogtraining.co.uk/dominance.htm (accessed March 18, 2010).
12 Another reason for horses’ trainability in this context has to do with the sensitivity of their mouths. Dogs have plenty of teeth and are happy to carry things clenched between them; horses have a gap between their grazing and chewing teeth, which allows the bit to sit right on their sensitive gums.
13 According to a former graduate student of mine, Sarah Hall, this is the most likely explanation for why cats get bored with toys so quickly—so it’s reasonable that the same principle might apply to dogs.
14 “Puppy parties” are structured socialization sessions for puppies in their juvenile period.
15 Karen Prior has written various books on this topic, including Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training (revised edition), published in 1999 by Bantam in the United States and in 2002 by Ringpress Books in the United Kingdom.
16 This study was performed by Dr. Deborah Wells at The Queens University–Belfast; see “The effectiveness of a citronella spray collar in reducing certain forms of barking in dogs,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 73 (2001): 299–309.
17 Matthijs Schilder and Joanne van der Borg, “Training dogs with help of the shock collar: Short and long term behavioural effects,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 85 (2004): 319–334.
18 Richard Polsky, “Can aggression in dogs be elicited through the use of electronic pet containment systems?” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 3 (2000): 345–357.
19 Elly Hiby, Nicola Rooney, and John Bradshaw, “Dog training methods: Their use, effectiveness and interaction with behaviour and welfare,” Animal Welfare 13 (2004): 63–69.
20 Christine Arhant, Hermann Bubna-Littitz, Angela Bartels, Andreas Futschik, and Josef Troxler, “Behaviour of smaller and larger dogs: Effects of training methods, inconsistency of owner behaviour and level of engagement in activities with the dog,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 123 (2010): 131–142.
21 The training disc should not be confused with the “distractor,” usually a tin can filled with pebbles thrown on the ground in front of the dog, which some dog trainers recommend. This method is one way of getting the dog to stop doing something undesirable; it gives the owner an opportunity to reward the dog for doing something else. However, in practice it is of limited usefulness, because most dogs quickly habituate to such noises. Among those who don’t, the very lack of habituation is evidence that the “distractor” is actually a punishment, inducing fear in those particular dogs.
22 In this connection, see the blog entry writt
en by David Ryan, chairman of the UK’s Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors, at http://www.apbc.org.uk/blog/positive_reinforcement (accessed August 16, 2010).
23 Published by Meghan Herron, Frances Shofer, and Ilana Reisner, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Hospital, in an article titled “Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviours,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 117 (2009): 47–54.
24 In the words of David Ryan, chair of the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors: “It makes good television to go head to head and dominate a dog. Unfortunately, television is not real life and tends to show short interactions where the dog is forced to submit. It is not impossible for ‘handy’ owners to repeatedly force their dog into submission either, but these unpleasant and unnecessary measures are not how most pet owners want to live with their dogs. Lamentably the high profile of these programmes means the on-screen warning ‘do not try this at home’ is often not heeded.” See http://www.apbc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Why_Wont_Dominance_Die.pdf (accessed April 9, 2010).
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