Canis lupus hominis

As you may know, I do disagree very strongly wtih Raymond Coppinger’s theory of domestic dog origins. His theory argues that domestic dogs were self-domesticated. Their ancestors were ancient wolves that lived about 12,000 years ago who discovered that living off people was a far better lifestyle than hunting. He does not believe dogs are parasites, as does Budiansky (if what Budiansky says is true, we need to shoot them all!). Instead, what hapened is that the wolves that had the flight distance to easily scavenge off of people began to fill that niche, and through Darwininian selection, these wolves became like the Belayev foxes.

I don’t buy it. At least I don’t buy it 100 percent. I think some of what he says is true. Indeed, there are parts of his book that are really interesting, and I have quoted them on this blog.

Coppinger got his start studying birds at feeder.  He looked at how feeding birds impacted their evolution and their behavior.

And then he took the results of that research and began applying it to dogs. Those that had allowed people to approach them more closely were better adapted to eat out of bird feeders. It was also changing migration patterns.

And then he took the results of that research and began applying it to dog domestication.

Coppinger is one of those people who refuses to change the Linnaean name for the domestic dog to Canis lupus familiaris.  He contends that dogs and wolves have since evolved different niches, and that it does not matter that they have such similar molecular and nuclear DNA. His whole focus is on the behavior of the organism. I don’t make that leap, but if we look closely the reasons for it, maybe it can tell us something about dominance theory.

Coppinger believes the “natural” behavior of domestic dogs can be found in developing countries. In villages, there are free roaming dogs that don’t form packs. They compete against each other for resources. Their lives a brutish, nasty, and short. But they don’t have to hunt for food. They can afford to have smaller brains than wolves — as all domestic dogs do. They have less powerful jaws and smaller teeth.

Now, I’ve critique that notion that brain size reduction has  made dogs into stupid wolves.  Mark Derr offered a far better critique than I did, so I won’t go into here. However, what Coppinger was trying to explain was how dogs became different from wolves. That’s what his focus was about.

I also think that if you read his text very carefully Coppinger very strongly wants us out of the dominance paradigm. If his theory that the natural dog is the village dog, then the natural training method has nothing to do with being an alpha wolf.

Coppinger writes:

Today the popular dog press seems to feel that if dogs are descended from wolves, they would have wolf qualities. But the natural selection model points out that the  wolf qualities are severely modified. Dogs do not think like wolves, nor do they behave like them. Books about training dogs [like Cesar’s] would have us believe that  dogs get their behavior directly from wolves. We are advise to act like the pack leader, the alpha male, and treat our dogs like subordinants. Since dogs came from wolves, they say, dogs should behave like wolves, think like wolves, and respond to wolf-like signals [like alpha rolls].

But dogs cannot think like wolves because they do not have wolf brains…

Asserting my dominance over one of my favorite working dogs by pressing it to the ground and snarling at it is preposterous. I don’t want my sled dogs rolling on their backs and urinating in the air like some subordinant wolf every time I show up. I don’t think a dog knows what people are talking about when they exhibit this “alpha” wolf behavior (67).

In an interview, Coppinger and his wife explan what dog training should be:

The alpha wolf model of dog training certainly does appear frequently in print, but we wonder if it was ever really incorporated into serious dog training. We suspect it was never very useful in training dogs, and that almost everybody intuitively knew that. It was “say one thing, do another.”

Certainly all the new techniques, such as click and treat, are not based on dominance. We’ve watched top trainers like Terry Ryan and Ken McCort, and never saw any hint of “I’m the dominant wolf.” People who try modifying aggressive dogs don’t try to “dominate” them into submission. Everybody agrees that would be a disaster. Imagine training a wolf by dominating it. Quick way to get killed.

It is a mistake to think that because dogs are descended from wolves, they behave like wolves. Wolves do not show the “alpha roll,” or any other hierarchical behavior, except in specific circumstances, particularly during reproductive and feeding behaviors. Wolf packs on a hunt are working cooperatively, and hierarchy goes by the board.

Training dogs is fun for me and for the dog, as it should be. Our sled dogs ran because running is fun and feels good. Endorphins are released, social interactions are increased. Try running while you’re being submissive. Dogs aren’t pulling sleds because they are forced to or are submitting to some person’s will. Everybody who ever drove dogs knows that you absolutely cannot force them to do it.

***

It won’t be hard to get the wolf pack mentality to go by the board simply because we don’t think many of the experts ever really believed it. It is through social play behavior that animals learn from one another. Further, it is fun to play with our dogs even if none of us learn anything. It will certainly make more sense to the dog than to be tumbled onto its back and growled at by a human.

Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff have recently drawn attention to a category of behaviors they call intentional icons. Dogs have signals they use when they want to play — the play bow. The play bow is a signal that all the following behaviors like growls and snarls are all in fun. Consider what might happen if you gave the “dominant male” intentional icon, indicating everything that happens from now on is about the driver being the dominant dog. The sled dogs, if they were reacting as submissive wolves, would then lie on their backs and pee in the air instead of running as a team.

Instead of threatening our dogs every time we want to train them, we need to perfect the human play bow which tells the dog the games are about to begin. Remember that games have rules, and what the dog and the humans learn during play is what the rules of the game are. That makes sense in teaching or training, whether it is dogs or students. The intent of dominance display is to exclude the subordinate from some activity, like breeding. The alpha wolf isn’t trying to teach the subordinate anything.

If only Coppinger had looked at the wolf literature, I think he would have been less likely to focus so closely on the differences. Yes, there are differences between wolves and dogs, just as there are differences between Arctic and Arabian wolves. Wolf packs are family groups that rarely do dominance displays or show aggression towards members of the family– except in captivity or in mega pack situations (like the ones in Yellowstone that have multiple breeding females).

Although I disagree with Coppinger’s theory on the origins of the domestic dog and where we should classify it, I think part of what motivated his research was that too many people were wasting their relationships with domestic dogs by trying to rule over them as absolute monarchs– because that’s what wolves do. No, that’s not what wolves do, and dogs are domestic animals that are wolves but are very different from wolves. It’s all one big misconception.

***

BTW, if we really want to take this appeal to nature nonsense to its fullest extent, we shouldn’t be talking to Cesar.

We shold be talking to this guy, who thinks he’s part of a captive wolf pack:

Source

Remember, captive wolves that can’t disperse to set up these rigid hierarchies that are maintained through lots of aggression.

Domestic dogs are unlike captive socialized wolves in that they don’t have much aggression at all. If dogs were like captive wolves, we would never be able to have a dog park. It would be total murder and chaos.

Wild wolves packs that are based upon a pair and their offspring are not like this at all.