Excerpt
This Dog Will Change Your Life
Chapter 1What Is a Dog?I feel kind of awkward that the last part of the introduction included a quote from Lévi-Strauss. Well, not totally awkward, maybe, but I want to be careful. I’m not an academic or anything close to it, and I don’t want this book to be academic either. It’s a celebration of the joy that dogs bring into our lives, and more specifically of the way that they can help us have a better approach to our identity, our relationships, and our purpose. It’s meant to attain and then maintain a kind of emotional altitude, so I don’t want it to feel too weighty. In that spirit, I want to issue a Dogist Pledge. Every time I quote a high-end academic thinker or author, I’ll try within a few paragraphs to quote a comedian of some sort. In this case, it’ll be Groucho Marx, who popularized the quote “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” When I first heard that quote, I was younger, and I thought it was funny. I still think it’s funny, but I also think that it’s profoundly inaccurate. Books
are great, sure. No argument there. You’re in one now, and hopefully you’re enjoying it. But as it turns out, you
can read inside of a dog. I’ve been doing it for years, trying to look into dogs through their expressions and movements, to locate their essence and understand how it changes our essence. What I have learned is that it’s not dark at all. It’s almost all about light, the special radiance they possess that brightens the world.
What is a dog? It seems important to handle that question before we start talking about how and why dogs improve the lives of the humans around them. Ask a zoologist—or, if you can find one, a cynologist (someone who specializes in the care and training of dogs)—and you’ll get an answer that starts off like this: “Oh, good question.” (Cynologists are very polite.) “It’s a common domesticated animal,
Canis familiaris, sometimes referred to as
Canis lupus familiaris.” Then they’ll probably clear their throat, politely, to signal that if you want to know much more, you should probably read their peer-reviewed paper “What Is a Dog?”
Even that brief answer, though, contains much of the story. Why sometimes
Canis familiaris and sometimes
Canis lupus familiaris? To answer that question, we need to travel to the past. Ready? Okay—it’s not now anymore. It’s long ago, maybe twenty thousand years ago, prior to or perhaps just at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum, an ice age in which sheets of ice covered most of North America, northern Europe, and Asia. These sheets of ice accounted for much of the planet’s available moisture, locking it in place and reducing it elsewhere, and this in turn lowered sea level, expanded deserts, and created harsh and isolated environments. That’s the world that early humans had to live in, and they shared that harsh world with other animals, one of which was the wolf. Wolves back then were not exactly like modern wolves, but they were close cousins of the gray wolf, which we ended up calling
Canis lupus. Back then, I’m not sure what anyone called them. There was no Latin yet, obviously. There was probably a specific grunt that these humans used to alert others to the presence of this four-legged, furry, sharp-toothed, hundred-pounds-and-change creature.
Remember, it wasn’t an easy time to be alive. Various species were competing for the same resources. At some point, these wolves began to interact with early humans. It wasn’t all the wolves. It was certain wolves, the ones that felt comfortable enough to come nearer and nearer to the early humans, to approach their camps. They weren’t just comfortable. They were motivated. Humans had food, and wolves, like all animals, like food. And they weren’t just motivated. They were amenable. Many wolves tried to approach encampments and score scraps of food, but the ones that approached while still behaving in wolflike ways were most likely driven off or killed. They scared people. They were considered a threat. The wolves that got near or even into an encampment and got food were the ones that acted friendlier, even affectionate. Making friends with humans not only meant food but also a less harsh and hazardous environment. It was a relationship that benefited the humans as well— a symbiosis. Humans got protection, and a relatively sophisticated version of it. These animals were four-legged ADT alarm systems that could smell a threat more than a mile away, hear more acutely, and detect movement better under poor visual conditions. (Dogs, and the wolves that preceded them, have a tapetum lucidum, a reflector system in the eye that gives them better night vision. That’s why most dogs don’t have red-eye in photos; rather, their eyes look lit-up because the tapetum bounces light back to the retina, similar to a deer in headlights.)
Fast-forward in time. Those protodogs that found their way into the company of humans didn’t stay the same. They began to separate from the other wolves not just behaviorally but anatomically. When humans encountered animals with a particular trait variation that we found appealing, we took them in, fed them more, and provided the safety and stability for them to breed. Their teeth got shorter, their ears floppier, their faces rounder—all outward markers of their friendliness, or at the very least signs of difference from the wild animals that humans came to see as markers of friendliness. The main thing that separated them from what came before was not just their docility but a unique awareness of and responsiveness to the moods of humans. These new animals were (drumroll) dogs.
Or rather, they were a kind of dog. Today, we have more than many. So why don’t all specimens of
Canis familiaris resemble those early wolves-into-dogs? For the same reason that there is variation in any species: individual mutations and interbreeding. Those early dogs ramified over time into more and more types of dogs. Scholarship in this area is somewhat muddy, so no one knows for certain if there were seven ancient breeds of dog, or nine, or ten, or twelve, or sixteen. But everyone agrees that in the period following the conversion of wolves to dogs, different types of dogs began to appear on the earth.
How this happened was complex and confusing, and pushed forward by a mix of natural dog interbreeding and human intervention in the process. Again, I am not a dog academic. I do not have an advanced degree in dog. I am careful to stipulate this in part because there are people in my family who have advanced degrees—biologists, doctors, veterinarians—and in part because I want to claim my own space as a dog enthusiast, dog evangelist, and dog documentarian (dogumentarian?). What this means is that I read whatever I can about dogs eclectically and seize upon the parts of my reading that stick. One idea that has stuck is the idea that there are sixteen basal breeds at the trunk of the canine genetic tree. These are the ancient rivers of dogness, and every dog now includes distant flows from them.
So what are they? Well, according to one study, the sixteen basal breeds are the Afghan Hound, the Akita, the Alaskan Malamute, the American Eskimo Dog, the Basenji, the Canaan Dog, the Chow Chow, the Dingo, the Eurasier, the Finnish Spitz, the New Guinea singing dog, the Saluki, the Samoyed, the Shar-Pei, the Shiba Inu, and the Siberian Husky. What’s amazing is that they are still around, and I have run into them on my Dogist rounds. (I actually haven’t met a New Guinea singing dog yet, but they sound incredible, no pun intended.) I remember a Finnish Spitz named Fritz whose owner told me “he’s a big pain in the ass is what he is.” Fritz was only two at the time, so he may well have mellowed.
In thinking about these original breeds, the main thing to keep in mind is that dogs, from the moment they appeared, were partly a human invention. They coevolved with us because of us, and it’s not an overstatement to say that they are a part of us. We can say for certain that there would have been no dogs without humans. But there might also have been no humanity without dogs. How we moved from those first post-wolves to a diverse, fascinating, and wonderful universe of workers, helpers, and companions is central to our development as well.
