David Rubin
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From: [email protected]
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Sent: 8/10/2011 4:30:46 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Fwd:
Dear All …….. below some interesting new science on Dogs.
x
Adam.
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Karl Cohen" <[email protected]_
(mailto:[email protected]) >
Subject: of possible interest I didn't write this
Date: 11 August 2011 3:53:24 AM AEST
To: "geraldine101010" <[email protected]_
(mailto:[email protected]) >, "Jane Hoffman"
<[email protected]_
(mailto:[email protected]) >
Reply-To: [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected])
Human beings and dogs
Man‚s best friend
Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership
Aug 6th 2011 | from The Economist print edition
Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behaviour Can Make You a Better
Friend to Your Pet, by John Bradshaw.
The relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated
animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for
humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our
beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began,
but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000
years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ard?che region of France, which contains
the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints
made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to
be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot
deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about
26,000 years old.
The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for
several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated
they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with
other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and
less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded
the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea
about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better
understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his
agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and
the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over
the past century or so.
One idea has governed dog training for far too long, Mr Bradshaw says.
Wolf packs are supposedly despotic hierarchies dominated by alpha wolves. Dogs
are believed to behave in the same way in their dealings with humans. Thus
training a dog effectively becomes a contest for dominance in which there
can be only one winner. To achieve this the trainer must use a variety of
punishment techniques to gain the dog‚s submission to his mastery. Just
letting a dog pass through a door before you or stand on the stairs above you
is to risk encouraging it to believe that it is getting the upper hand over
you and the rest of the household. Mr Bradshaw argues that the theory
behind this approach is based on bad and outdated science.
Dogs share 99.6% of the same DNA as wolves. That makes dogs closer to
wolves than we are to chimps (with which we have about 96% of our DNA in
common), but it does not mean that their brains work like those of wolves.
Indeed, the outgoing affability of most dogs towards humans and other dogs is
in
sharp contrast to the mix of fear and aggression with which wolves react to
animals from other packs. „Domestication has been a long and complex
process,‰ Mr Bradshaw writes. „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.‰ If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult
canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain
dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.
But what makes the dog-wolf paradigm especially misleading, Mr Bradshaw
argues, is that until recently, the studies of wolves were of the wrong
wolves in extremely artificial conditions. In the wild, wolf packs tend to be
made up of close family members representing up to three generations. The
father and mother of the first lot of cubs are the natural leaders of the
pack, but the behavioural norm is one of co-operation rather than domination
and submission. However, the wolves on which biologists founded their
conclusions about dominance hierarchies were animals living in unnaturally
constituted groups in captivity. Mr Bradshaw says that feral or „village‰
dogs,
which are much closer to the ancestors of pet dogs than they are to wolves,
are highly tolerant of one another and organise themselves entirely
differently from either wild or captive wolves.
Dogs are not like nicely brought-up wolves, says the author, nor are they
much like people despite their extraordinary ability to enter our lives and
our hearts. This is not to deny that some dogs are very clever or that
they are capable of feeling emotion deeply. But their intelligence is
different from ours. The idea that some dogs can understand as many words as a
two-year-old child is simply wrong and an inappropriate way of trying to
measure canine intellect. Rather, their emotional range is more limited than
ours, partly because, with little sense of time, they are trapped almost
entirely in the present. Dogs can experience joy, anxiety and anger. But
emotions
that demand a capacity for self-reflection, such as guilt or jealousy, are
almost certainly beyond them, contrary to the convictions of many dog
owners.
Mr Bradshaw believes that it is difficult for people to empathise with the
way in which dogs experience and respond to the world through their
extraordinary sense of smell: their sensitivity to odours is between 10,000
and
100,000 times greater than ours. A newly painted room might be torture for a
dog; on the other hand, their olfactory ability and their trainability
allow dogs to perform almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early
stages of a cancer long before a normal medical diagnosis would detect it.
The latest scientific research can help dogs and their owners have
happier, healthier relationships by encouraging people to understand dogs
better.
But Mr Bradshaw is also fearful. In particular, he deplores the incestuous
narrowing of the gene pool that modern pedigree breeders have brought
about. Dogs today are rarely bred for their working abilities (herding,
hunting,
guarding), but for a very particular type of appearance, which inevitably
risks the spread of physical and temperamental abnormalities. Instead, he
suggests that dogs be bred for the ideal behavioural traits associated with
the role they will actually play. He also worries that the increasing
urbanisation of society and the pressures on couples to work long hours are
putting dogs under huge strain. He estimates that about 20% of Britain‚s 8m
dogs and America‚s 70m suffer from „separation distress‰ when their owners
leave the house, but argues that sensible training can teach them how to
cope.
„Dog Sense‰ is neither a manual nor a sentimental account of the joys of
dog-ownership. At times its rigorously research-led approach can be
slightly heavy going. A few more jolly anecdotes might have leavened the mix.
But
this is a wonderfully informative, quietly passionate book that will
benefit every dog whose owner reads it.
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