If dogs are pretending to love us, then they are damn good actors.
I have some issues with Masson’s work. I would have loved it if he’d included a description a dog preying on some animal in Dogs Never Lie About Love.
He covers every part of their natural behavior but that one. If you see a dog acting as a predator, it can be a moving experience. It can also be terrifying if you’ve deluded yourself into believing that they don’t have these instincts. For someone like Masson, I think he would find it rather disconcerting.
He’s also one of those animal rights people who talks about these issues in a way that reminds me of how the Christian right talks about abortion.
The fact that he’s on the left makes no difference. It puts me off.
I think a better discussion of the issues can be found here.
That said, I do believe most birds and mammals do have emotions and can experience pain and suffering. And all of them will experience a certain level of suffering at they live their lives.
Most wild animals die horrific deaths. A hunter’s bullet causes far less suffering than the other “natural” ways these animals die.
We have to accept that this world is partially maintained through death. Despite our intellect, man has not created a world that transcends the simple realities that all things die and in most deaths, there will be some pain and suffering.
We can either deny these realities, or we can work to mitigate them.
And that’s where our focus should be.
***
Why is it that dogs are able to form bonds with species other than humans?
It has more to do with agriculture than the fact that dogs just like making friends.
When we domesticated other species, we culled those dogs that tried to eat our sheep and goats.
Those dogs that formed bonds with our sheep and goats and protected them from predators were given special treatment.
Charles Darwin noticed that most Western dogs learned very quickly to leave domesticated stock alone, while dogs from South Pacific and Australia could never be trusted around sheep. Darwin, like Masson, believed that it was the love of man that caused Western domestic dogs to leave stock alone.
I think it’s more likely the result of this early selective breeding.
Of course, Western dogs are not universally safe with stock, but I have known some fierce hunting dogs that learned to leave pet ducks alone.
When I was growing up, a predatory Norwegian elkhound and even more predatory farm collie learned to never touch my pet Muscovy ducks. The elkhound did kill one duck because it was eating out of dog’s food bowl. The elkhound wanted to discipline the duck for breaking pack rules, and the duck didn’t survive the punishment.
I also know of Walker coonhounds that can kill a raccoon in less than a minute but think the world of their owner’s cats.
Somewhere in domesticating the dog, the animal has evolved an ability to recognize which animals are prey and which animals it should befriend. For a predatory animal, that is quite an accomplishment.
I think some study is needed on this aspect of dog behavior. Maybe this will fit in nicely with the theory that dogs are very good at following rules. Rule following in dogs is being extensively studied in Hungary at Eotvos Lorand University’s Department of Ethology.
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the discovery of a canine skull in the Goyet Cave in Belgium. This skull had the distinctive features of a dog skull, but when it was dated, it was found to be 31,700 years old. The next oldest accepted dog remains date to 14,000 years ago and were found in Russia.
The current research on the DNA of domestic dogs suggests that they are 16,000 years old anddescend from a southern Chinese population of wolves. (Another study suggests that this finding may be incorrect.)
So how do we reconcile these two contradictory pieces of evidence?
Well, the real problem is that we currently have a clearly defined idea of what a wolf is and what a dog is. However, it is very likely that this definition is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of our species. I had an interesting discussion on this post, which was about rather unusual relationship among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, wolves, and domestic dogs. In this hunting society, the defining line between dog and wolf was rather nebulous. (I think they could tell the difference between the two, because the dogs didn’t hunt bison. These wolves were well-known for hunting bison, which is why they are called “Buffalo wolves.” And yes, they still exist.)
When you read the study on the Goyet wolves and dogs and those from Russia and the Ukraine, you notice how genetically diverse the wolf population originally was. It is very likely that there were some wolves that had developed some doggish traits, probably through a semi-domesticated relationship, like the account of the wolves and the Beothuk.
One problem with accepting the Goyet canine as a dog is that there is a huge gap between that dog skull and the next oldest dog remains. A gap has been created, and it doesn’t fit well with the other studies. It violates the scientific principle of parsimony, and thus, it is not yet universally accepted as a dog.
The reason why dogs appear to disappear from the archeological record is that dogs were domesticated several times throughout history. Because humans were not established as we are now, the conditions that allowed them to keep or have a relationship with “dogs” may have disappeared, and the dogs were forced to return to their ancestral form.
Now, I don’t doubt that this aspect may have led to the disappearance of “dogs” from the archeological record.
However, I think something else might have been at work here. Until Stanley Olsen began examining the remains of dogs at archeological sites, dog remains were simply thrown away. They weren’t worth studying, and it was nearly impossible for Olsen to get a grant to study dogs in archeological sites.
Because archeology wasn’t interested in these dogs, we don’t have much of a record of them. Who knows what interesting dog or wolf remains have been lost?
I think the Goyet Cave “dog” is a very important find. More research has to be done.
I also think we need to be very careful of the findings that suggest a definite Chinese origin of the domestic dog. It is possible that there were European and East Asian populations of domestic dogs, and the East Asian population wound up replacing the European one, at least through its matriline. (The Savolainien studies are MtDNA studies and are studies of maternal inheritance.) It is also possible that we still don’t have the foggiest clue about where dogs originated because the assumptions do not take into account the diversity of original wolf populations and the fact that the oldest populations of wolves are also from Asia.
But I’m no longer going to parrot the line that we know where dogs come from. It’s all up in the air now. My educated guess is that they are towards the older end of the spectrum, and dogs and wolves have exchanged genes too much for us to pinpoint the exact place for that domestication.
***
I’m going to do a post on the dog featured at the top of the post. He has a very interesting story.
Most wolves that exist today fear people above all things, and if a dog, coyote, or strange wolf pops up in a pack’s territory, it is dead.
Even the wolves of Ellesmere kill interlopers in their territories, and these wolves are believed to have experienced no (or at least very little) persecution from man. These wolves do, however, live in land that is very marginal habitat, and any territory that a breeding pair can procure will be defended aggressively.
The wolves of the Great Plains in those accounts were living in a productive ecosystem with plenty of prey. These wolves were very similar to how I would imagine the ancient wolves that were able form a relationship people. They could hunt large prey on their own, but they were curious about humans. These wolves were approaching people who lived off of American bison as a prey species. I can imagine those ancient wolves approaching mammoth and mastodon kills in search of some scraps and maybe a little companionship.
(And yes, I’m fully aware that the bison hunting culture of the Great Plains was a very short-lived culture, but it is just as likely that man and wolf had a similar relationship when they were living on other species. Both Eurasia and North America possessed ecosystems that were very productive and diverse the end of the Pleistocene. Then, agriculture gave rise to large numbers of humans, who then went after most of the megafauna that survived the effects of that climate change–like the aurochs.)
That’s why I continue to say that domesticating the wolf had to have been so easy that a caveman could do it. If the wolves of yore were like these animals, domestication would have been a cinch.
The Beothuks were the indigenous people of Newfoundland who were living there in the early colonial period.
Contrary to what you may read, the Beothuk probably did not own dogs. There are no archeological records of dog remains near Beothuk settlement, and most of the earliest accounts of the Beothuk make no mention of canines.
But they did have a relationship with the Newfoundland wolf that might be called semi-domestication. (I disagree very strongly that these accounts are of a feral or a semi-domesticated Native American pariah dog. There apparently were none of these animals on Newfoundland when Europeans arrived! There probably were dogs associated with European and Míkmaq settlements on the island, but none with the Beothuk.)
This account, published in 1620, comes from Richard Whitebourne, an early colonist and cod fisherman who had originally served on his own ship against the Spanish Armada. Whitbourne set up a cod fishing colony at Renews, Newfoundland, sometime after the Armada was defeated. This is his account of the relationship between the Beothuk and the wolf of Newfoundland:
For it is well known that they are a very ongenious and subtile kind of people (as it hath often appeared in divers things), so likewise are they tractable, as hath been well approved, when they have been gently and politically dealt withall; also they are a people who will seek to revenge any wrongs done unto them, or their wolves, as hath often appeared. For they mark their wolves in the ears, with several marks, as is used here in England on sheep, and other beasts, which hath been likewise well approved; for the wolves in these parts are not so violent and devouring as those in other countries, for no man that I ever heard of, could say that any wolf. . . did set upon any man or boy.
Richard Whitbourne Discovery and Discourse of the Newfoundland (1622 printing)
(The Beothuck were called “Red Indians” because they painted themselves with ochre.)
The relationship here is rather weird. There is no evidence that the Beothuk were feeding their semi-domesticated wolves, nor were they using them for anything, such as hauling loads or guarding. They were hunting and fishing people, who relied upon the sea’s bounty, as well as the herds of caribou to feed them. They were known for setting up elaborate deer fences, which they used to drive the caribou into a central arena where they could be easily dispatch with the use of bows and arrows.
Whitbourne’s mastiff dog eventually goes wandering in the wilderness. Today, if such a thing happened in wolf country, the dog would be at risk.
Whitbourne’s mastiff was greeted by the wolves, who then decided to play with the dog. In fact, the mastiff would disappear for days to play with its lupine brethren.
The Beothuk had no reason to hate the wolf. They were a hunting people, who may have seen the wolf as a comrade that kept the herds healthy. Very little was ever written about Beothuk mythology; most contemporary accounts claim that they had no religion, which is a very common (and probably inaccurate) statement by many early European colonizers. Because of this lack of a good account of their religious beliefs, we are left with no understanding of how the wolf fit into their cultural and religious worldview.
However, this is one of the best accounts of the relationship between a hunter-gatherer people and a population of wolves that had not suffered wide-spread persecution. There are accounts of the Beothuk trapping wolves for their fur, but whether this habit was part of their original culture or something they adapted to fit into the European market economy is a good question. In fact, because the Beothuk began to see the wolf pelt as something valuable to trade with the Europeans, it may have ultimately led to the break down of the relationship between hunter-gatherer man and wolf.
It is accounts of relationships like this one that possibly tell us what early man’s relationship with the wolf was like. Wolves were curious about people, and people were fascinated by wolves. The fact that they hunted the same prey forged an unusual relationship that lasted until man began to raise livestock. When that happened, all bets were off, and the wolves that could live with man and his stock became dogs. Those that could not became wolves, and man then decided to make the wolf become extinct. This push to near extinction put a selective pressure on all wolf populations that made them nearly impossible to domesticate and far more reactive than they once were. That is why virtually all wolves today are very difficult to keep in captivity, and why most experts very urge people not to keep wolves as if they were dogs.
***
On a somewhat unrelated note, here is a photo of Adolph Murie with his family and the pet wolf named Wags.
It’s going to be one of those posts. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I was perusing this site on Native American dogs, when I came across something very, very wrong:
All of these primitive dogs are probably, to one extent or another, related or have very similar ancestors. The only difference is that Native Americans also developed their dogs from crossing in coyotes thousands of years ago. Where as the dogs from Africa, India and Asia used jackals and small Asian wolves that are more Jackal-like than wolf-like. With modern DNA and logical research, it’s now known that the wolf was not the ancestor of the modern dog, but coyote and jackals were the modern dog’s ancestors. Outdated research said all people and dogs migrated into the American continents across the Baring [sic] Straits [also not true-- for both people and dogs!]. New, more recent research shows they also came up from the south [not a single study suggests this].
Very little of this paragraph is true. Dogs are derived from some form of Eurasian wolf, including the native dogs of North and South America. In fact, the big contention right now is where in Eurasia. Right now, the big debate is whether Savolainen’s finding that dogs come from southern China or whether the dog comes from some other part of Eurasia.
Coyotes and golden jackals played a negligible role in developing the domestic dog. The fact that many Native American dogs in North America looked a lot like coyotes is mostly circumstantial. These dogs have had their MtDNA and nuclear DNA analyzed, and they are also derived from Eurasian wolves. The only dogs that have been known to have jackal in them are the Sulimov dogs. Dogs are wolves. That case has been settled long ago.
I found a few other things that were wrong with this site. One of them is the suggestion that the largest Native American dogs (other than those of the Arctic hauling spitz variety) were the size of a Carolina dog or dingo.
I’ve read too many accounts of large wolf-like dogs in North America during the colonial period and the era of exploration to accept this theory.
The truth is that Native Americans were expert dog breeders. They produced all sorts of different forms of domestic dog. Wool-producing dogs in the Northwest, little bear dogs that resembled chihuahuas, and the hairless dogs of Latin America are but a few varieties that the original inhabitants of the Americas were able to create.
I don’t know why people keep repeating that dogs are derived from jackals or coyotes. It’s the one theory about the origins of domestic dogs we know for sure is false.
Research into dog and coyote hybrids suggests that there is decreased fertility and embryo survival when hybrids are bred to each other over several generation. While we have found fertile coyotes with dog MtDNA and the Eastern North American wolf and red wolf have coyote MtDNA, the fact that hybrid coydogs cannot carry remain fertile or produce many offspring through successive generations of back-crossing suggests that coyotes played a very small role in development of the domestic dog. It is also one reason why the coydog population remains relatively low.
When Sulimov created his golden jackal hybrid sniffer dog. He had to have husky bitches nurse jackal pups because male jackals won’t mate with a domestic dog. This is the opposite of the behavior one sees naturally occurring dog and wolf crosses. In those crosses, the male wolf readily mates with the dog bitch. The fact that Sulimov had to go to these lengths to get the animals to crossbreed suggests that they aren’t that closely related, even if they can produce hybrids that are very often fertile.
I don’t know why people hold onto these tired old theories. Konrad Lorenz was wrong. Get over it.
It’s not as bad as believing chihuahuas are derived from fennec foxes, but this theory has been thoroughly disproved.
***
If you want to read the truth about Pre-Columbian Native American dogs, check out Marion Schwartz’s A History of Dogs in the Early Americas.
Also worth reading is Mary Elizabeth Thurston’s The Lost History of the Canine Race, which has a wonderful chapter on the various types of Native American dogs.
