Natural History

I’ve never understood this one.

But lots of people call dogs their children

I don’t.

Dogs are dogs.

A dog is a special subspecies of wolf that can live safely with people. It has evolved an ability to learn from humans that the other wolf subspecies don’t have. It is also a far better associative learner than virtually any other species or subspeces in the order Carnivora.

That’s the part of dogs I find fascinating. The fact that they are another organism, and yet they bond with us and easily learn from us.

My view on dogs is best summarized in this oft-quoted paragraph from Henry Beston in The Outermost House:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

To patronize a dog with our projections of parenthood does them a great disservice. What they really want is someone to understand them as they are. They don’t want to be babies. They want to be dogs. That means that they need to have an outlet for their drives and instincts, which are often quite different from our own.

I’ll give you a good example. Consider the absolute joy that dogs get in rolling in rotting and stinking things. There are lots of folk ethology reasons for them doing so. It’s camouflage, says one theory. They are covering up their scent so they can better stalk prey animals. Now,  I would think that deer and other ungulates would soon learn to fear the stench of rotting carcasses!

My own theory on why dogs do this behavior is twofold. Dogs are mostly olfactory organisms. They relish smells probably in the same way we relish beautiful land and seascapes.  The best way to enjoy those smells is for the dog to anoint itself with the object that gives off that odor. And we humans take photographs of land and seascapes that we find enjoyable. Dogs don’t have cameras, so in order to take the stench home, they have to get some on their bodies to take home. There must be some evolutionary advantage in wild dog and wolf societies to have a novel smell. Perhaps having that novel smell on your body gives you more political clout than if you just smelled like a dirty old dog.

For us, rolling in rotting redolent refuse is an unsanitary and unconscionable act. Our nose are weak things, and our species has evolved a heightened sensitivity to anything we perceive as dirty or stinking. Such a tendency allowed our ancestors to live in high densities without contracting disease very easily. We simply had a genetic (or perhaps cultural) aversion to the smell of feces and rotting corpse. (It’s got to be genetic. I don’t know of a single culture that likes lying around in feces and rotting corpses.)

But these two species are able to share the same homes, even the same beds and food. That’s really a weird thing. One animal anoints itself with rotting objects that give off pungent odors. The other avoids these objects at all costs. And yet we call each other family.

I don’t think you can ever truly appreciate what a dog is until you try to understand them as the animal that they are.

The more you realize what dogs are, the more you realize how unusual they really are. No other species of large carnivore lives in such an intimate as dogs live with us. Indeed, it’s not safe for us to live with any other large carnivore in such a way. Bears are too emotionally reactive to be safe companions, and big cats have rather deeply ingrained predatory motor patterns which humans can easily trigger.

Imprinted wolves have this same sort of problem, although it’s almost always children that trigger the motor pattern. But they are also more emotionally reactive than most domestic dogs are, and most of them are totally unfit for domestic life, even if a small minority are actually quite dog-like (like “Wags.”)

I find all of these aspects of dogs really interesting.

I don’t find it very interesting that people like to turn them into children.

To me, that does the dog a very great injustice. It narrows the human mind. It prevents us from asking questions– from wondering why dogs are the way they are and why on earth they live with us so well. Those are fascinating questions, and ones that could help us come up with better ways to fulfill our dogs and provide them better lives.

Maybe it’s because I’m very much a rationalist, but I like my dogs because they are dogs, not because they are furry toddlers that eat horse poop.

Maybe dogs need their own slogan:

I am canine. Hear me woof.

(Note: I am no animal rights lunatic or “animal liberationist.” Please train your dogs. Dogs require training– that’s actually an intrinsic part of their nature. They must be trained in order to be fulfilled.)

(Note II: Every dog I’ve known that was treated as a baby was neutrotic or potentially psychotic in some fashion. You cannot tell me that dog as child projection is very healthy for dogs.)