This is a haunting photograph of an indigenous Siberian and a laika hunting dog. If we were somehow transported back perhaps 15,000 year ago, we might be witness to a scene very much like this one.
Dog domestication may have happened as early as 30,000 years ago, and certainly by that time, there were humans and dogs living together, hunting together, working together.
We now live in a world so removed from those times. Our age is that of the smart phone and the online petition. It’s of a time of even greater delusion about our relationship to the natural world than the previous generation.
And it was more deluded than the generation before it.
But 15,000 years ago, there was no such delusion. Meat meant life. The mast from the trees fed the wild animals, and so humans and dogs were connected to the acorn and the beechnut by way of venison.
A trip to the grocery store gives us the meat now. The dog food is mostly the byproducts of our meat industry.
But at one time, the dogs helped us hunt the big game, and for their efforts, they got a bit of the scraps and the offal.
It was in ancient world that our union was formed.
Later on, we used them to manage and protect our herds, haul our nets and sleds, and turn the wheels of our machines.
But now, we don’t need them for those things. Most Western dogs don’t do anything but live as companions, a life that on the surface appears to be absolute perfection. It’s certainly true that there are millions of dogs in the United States right now who have better standards of living than millions of children throughout the world.
However, their brains and bodies are still yearn for a different time.
Virtually no retrievers have the rigor lives of their forebears working for market hunters in on the east coast of England or on Chesapeake Bay nearly a century ago. And one would be hard-pressed to find dogs that live as aboriginal hunting dogs, even though they still hold on in the redoubts of the Siberian taiga.
The urban and suburban dog lives in a world so foreign from its ancestors. It is a testament to the adaptability and intelligence of the species that so many dogs have made the transition without incident.
But let that town dog loose in a forest, and it will run. It will sniff where the wild turkeys have been. It will tree the squirrels.
The dog may be a cute pet that snuggles with the children, but in the forest, the beast is reawakened.
It is as marvelous as it is disconcerting.
But it shouldn’t be.
For in my own experience, my mind suddenly awakens to that ancient time when I step foot in the forest with dog.
We become canid smelling, ape seeing once again.
Very well said. I enjoy bird hunting, but truth be told I wouldn’t except for my dogs. They are in their bliss when in the field. That is how I love them to be.
Beautiful post!
My book, Humans, Dogs, and Civilization affirms you blogpost. I tell how my city-bred Old English Sheepdog acted when we moved to 35 acres of woodlands. Although he had never been in the woods, the first day we were there, he smelled the cows in a dairy farm next to our property. He hied through the woods, and diligently rounded up al the cows in a row by a stonewall. The story is recounted in the chapter entitled “Ishmael.” The book should be out in two weeks and constantly discusses what dogs are really like, their cognition, their love of having real jobs to do.
Elaine O. Chaika.
ps. My blog is <elainechaika.com/dogs >
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Humans and dogs just belong together. We evolved together, dependent on one another. Dogs made people as much as people made dogs. But now there’s too many “fanciers” who have no knowledge of true dog behavior or physiology.
Look at the dog in that image. Very primitive, maybe one step removed from its wild canine cousins. Very lupine form. A real dog. Truly beautiful, graceful and noble.
Meanwhile deformities like brachycephaly are celebrated, inbreading to ensure their continuation is rampant, dogs that are born healthy are killed because they don’t display deformities that are desired, and for what?
To conform to a breed standard system that has its roots in the pseudoscience of eugenics. “Let’s control reproduction to breed in only the exact same perfect form.” Except it’s not perfect. Genetic diversity, not monotypical conformity, is healthy. Forced genetic conformity sounds like something out of Brave New World, not sound breeding practice.
And the breeders constantly try to outdo other breeders, making the distinguishing characteristics in the standards more pronounced. The result is these characteristics become outright deformities and taint the entire breed’s genetic pool. Witness the decline of hip health in show German shepherds.
Then there’s the pedigree system, which reeks of true classism and elitism, the idea that an individual is born superior because of their ancestors. Is it any surprise 19th century British aristocrats came up with it? It is more unscientific mumbo jumbo that projects on dogs their own pompous snobbery and disdain for the common person.
Both should be rejected. Dogs can be bread for desired characteristics, but the conformity standards are unhealthy, and interpreted to the extreme. And pedigrees are meaningless. It is time for these relics of the same pseudoscientific genetic elitist mentality once used to justify slavery and mass murder among humans to stop being used to justify long lasting harm to dog populations. We owe them too much.
I cannot agree that pedigrees are meaningless. Even in cross-breeding, an accurate record of ancestry and kin is important in keeping track of what characteristics are produced, what desirable or undesirable qualities are transmitted, by which individual, and so on.
A pedigree is far more than a mere collection of names. It can be a scientific record and very useful.