Part 1: Myths About the Dog's Origin and Nature
From: The 100 Most Silly Things That Have Ever Been Said About Dogs
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
From: The 100 Most Silly Things That Have Ever Been Said About Dogs
Copyright 2007 by Alexandra Semyonova -- All Rights Reserved
Myth 1: The dog is a descendant of the wolf, and because of this
we should regard him as a sort of tame wolf in our living room.
The idea of the dog as a tame wolf has a huge romantic attraction for us. We imagine the great Gray Wolf of
the northern regions of the Earth, a powerful wild animal weighing 160 – 220 pounds, who spends his days
hunting deer, moose or elk. We dream of our own ancestors finding (or stealing) a wolf puppy and raising
him with lots of TLC. We imagine this pup growing up to be man’s friend and companion, and bearing tame
pups for us. After thousands generations of this, we supposedly produced the dog as we now know him. We
see a direct line of descent going from our own dog straight to the mighty gray wolf we see on Discovery
Channel. Wow, a wolf in our living room, what a powerful feeling!
We now know that this isn’t how it really happened. Our ancestors didn’t tame the dog at all. He tamed
himself. Besides, the dog’s ancestor isn’t the mighty gray wolf of Discovery Channel. That wolf didn’t exist
yet when the dog began to split off into a new species – the gray wolf had yet to evolve, just as the domestic
dog did. What you need to imagine is a much smaller animal, who had already split off from the wolf family
line, some 200,000 - 500,000 years ago. This ancestor wasn’t a specialized hunter like the wolf is, but rather
what biologists call a “generalist” – an animal that is not limited to one special food source or environment,
but who can adapt to various situations. This smaller ancestor probably looked somewhat like the dingo and
other primitive dogs who still live in the wild today. It may not have been a pack animal. In fact, pack living is
rare among canids. So, like most of the generalist canids we see today, it probably lived in pairs and
temporary family groups, able to deal both with being together and with being alone.
So now you are picturing a smaller, more dog-like kind of animal. What did this pre-dog animal do that led, in
the end, to the present day dog? And did we have anything to do with it? The answer to both questions lies
in our own development as a species. Like most species, we struggled along for millions of years, our
numbers limited by the availability of food. Then, about 130,000 years ago, we invented the bow and arrow.
This was a great leap, but – contrary to the myth – it didn’t mean that the dog’s ancestor immediately joined
us to help with the hunt. The dog was still just a wild animal, and like all wild canids – right up to the present,
and even if they are raised in a human home – he remained totally useless to us during the hunt.
So our bow and arrow didn’t mean that some wolf was suddenly able to work as a tracking and hunting dog,
as the myth tells us. It did mean that our ancestors suddenly had a much easier time getting enough to eat.
They started to leave small dumps behind at their encampments, dumps where there were edible leftovers
for others to find. A new food source opened up for other species in the area. And when a new food source
opens up in a particular environment, some animal always moves in to exploit it. In this case, a few of the
sometimes hunting, sometimes scavenging, small ancestors of the present day dog were the ones who made
the move. These were individuals who were attracted to a much easier (and safer) way to make a living. All
they needed to do was trail along behind groups of humans and eat at the dumps we left behind. Perhaps
they still ran into roaming groups occasionally when their paths happened to cross, and perhaps they
sometimes still mated with these animals – but most of the pups would come of mating at dumps, between
loner animals who were now getting a living by scavenging our waste. This was the beginning reproductive
separation, and thus of the formation of a separate species.
So, probably about 130,000 years ago, we have a number of these dog-like ancestors who split off and
entered a new ecological niche. Partially reproductively isolated in this new niche, they began to develop
specifically doggy characteristics. In order to meet at the dump and thus be able to mate, these animals had
to have special qualities. They had to be prepared to eat ready-made food instead of participating in the
hunt (the food you give your dog is, up to this day, still made of our waste, even the most fancy and
expensive brands). If they lived in groups, they had to be willing to give this up in favor of wandering around
alone or in pairs (even at the dump, there wouldn’t have been enough food for a large group). They had to
be able to share space (the dump) with strangers of their own species who had also discovered this new
source of food. And – most important of all – they had to have a less than average fear of humans. These
animals were in the process of making a choice. They were farther from their cousin the wolf than ever, but
they weren’t domestic dogs yet, either. The choice that some of them made led them down the road to
becoming, at this juncture, a sort of pre-domestic dog. This animal’s anatomy was still adjusted to a life of
traveling as they trailed along behind groups of nomadic humans. This is probably why archeologists don’t
find typically doggy remains from this period. The dog’s body hadn’t changed yet, even though his behavior
and probably his brain were already changing. But before he could become a real domestic dog, our own
species had to make its next step.
This next step came about 12,000 years ago, when we developed agriculture. Humans stopped roaming as
hunters and gatherers, and started living in permanent settlements. Now the pre-dog could also settle down
and live permanently at the dump. Now he wouldn’t run into relatives who were still hunting and still shy of
humans, not even by accident. There would be no more mating with hunters, not even occasionally. His
body could now adapt to a non-traveling life, besides the changes that had already taken place in his brain
and behavior. Within a very short time, the dog as we know him today was a fact. This is the period when
truly doggy skeletal remains showed up. The other branches of the family continued on their hunter’s way,
and became the wild dogs you now see on Discovery Channel. The gray wolf has nothing to do with it.
The dog and the wolf are related to each other in the same way you are related to your sixth cousin, and in
the same way we are all related to some other types of primates (monkeys and apes). We share an
ancestor, that’s all. But the dog most definitely didn’t descend from the gray wolf, anymore than you
descended from your cousin.
Read more:
Beljaev, DK, Trut, LN, Some genetic and endocrine effects of selections for domestication in silver foxes, in
The Wild Canids, Fox, MW, ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1975.
Beljaev, DK, Plyusnina, IZ, and Trut, LN, Domestication in the silver fox (Vulpes fulvus desm): changes in
physiological boundaries of the sensitive period of primary socialization, Applied Animal Behavior Science 13:
359-70, 1984/85.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Koler-Matznick, J, The origin of the dog revisited, Anthrozoos 15(20): 98 – 118, 2002.
http://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf
Lindsay, SR, Handbook of applied dog behavior and training, Blackwell Publishing, Ames Iowa, 2000.
Plyusnina, IZ, Trut, LN, An analysis of fear and aggression during early development of behavior in silver
foxes (Vulpes vulpes), Applied Animal Behavior Science 32:253-68, 1991.
Serpell, JA, ed., The domestic dog: its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (UK), 1995.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Myth 3: Everything we know about wolves applies to dogs, too.
We’ve already seen a number of reasons why this isn’t true. The dog’s ancestor eventually became a dog
because he left the ecological niche his ancestor may have shared with the wolf’s ancestors more than
500,000 years ago. The domestic dog evolved in a totally different environment than the wolf. Their genetic
similarity means about as much (or as little) as our similarity to various apes means.
But there is more you need to know. Even if we could apply what we know about wolves to dogs, the fact is
that we don’t know very much about wolves. This may surprise you. Indeed, much has been published
about wolves – books, articles, documentaries on television – and most of it in such an authoritative tone.
Surely we must know all about them? The trouble is that most of what people pretend to know about wolves
is based either on fantasy and speculation, or on insufficient data and poorly designed research.
Mankind has been waging a war of annihilation against the wolf for hundreds of years now, because modern
man always viewed the wolf as a competitor in the hunt and a danger for his cattle. There may have been a
time when the wolf wasn’t scared of humans, but that was long before we develop writing, let alone science.
By the time we decided to study the wolf, this animal had become so shy of us that it was almost impossible to
get a glimpse of him in his natural habitat. This is, first of all, because by that time there were already
damned few wolves left to study. And second of all, the ones that did survive us had learned to melt away
into the forest the instant they heard or smelled us, still do. It has been almost impossible, for more than 100
years now, to even see a wild wolf, let alone study his behavior – except the behavior of fleeing from a threat
to his life.
So wolves do their utter best not to let themselves be observed by humans in the wild, while science
demands that conclusions be based on observations. Scientists puzzled for awhile, then came up with a
solution of their own. Once in awhile they manage to shoot a wolf with a tranquilizer dart, after which they put
a radio collar around his neck and release him to rejoin his pack. After that, the scientists can locate the
group of wolves by following the signal the collared wolf is transmitting. What they generally do is go out in
an airplane and fly around in the hope of picking up a signal. Some days they are lucky. They locate the
wolves and try to follow the group, watching the wolves’ behavior from the air. However, there is a problem
with this. As soon as the airplane was invented, people, as usual, abused this technology. They immediately
began to kill wolves from the air. At this point, the wolf has had almost a hundred years’ time to learn that the
sound of an airplane is a signal of death. Wolves who hear an airplane do not go hang out on open terrain
and display all kinds of natural behavior for you. They head for the cover of the forest as quick as they can.
Yet again, the only behavior the scientist sees is flight behavior. So Discovery Channel may make it look as
if you can just walk into the woods and film a bunch of wolves from close by, but this isn’t really how it works.
The shots you see on TV are often the product of long and careful searching and tracking, and then filmed
with telescopic lenses the size of your arm. They are pieces of luck and the result of enormous patience.
Lots of people who research wild wolves spend years just finding and analyzing scats (wolf poop) without
ever getting a glimpse of a real, live wolf.
Because of this, most of the published research on wolves has been done on captive wolves. Scientists
gather together whatever wolves are, for some reason, available, and they house the wolves in a pen
somewhere. Under the best of circumstances, the enclosure may be a couple of square miles. The wolves
are then fed daily. Scientists can settle back and observe what the animals do, since the animals can’t
escape them anymore. This is, of course, a highly artificial situation. First of all, the wolves behave while
being watched by their jailer. This means we watch them under heightened stress and have no idea what
they’d do if a human weren’t around. Secondly, it gives us no idea what the wolves would be doing if they
had to go get their own food instead of hanging out all day with nothing much to do. Finally, the scientist has
in fact taken a bunch of arbitrarily selected total strangers and shut them up in an unnaturally small amount
of space, and is forcing them to live with each other in this small space for the duration of their lives whether
they like it (and each other) or not.
This is contrary to all natural circumstances. There are a few things we do know for sure about wolves from
the few glimpses people have gotten of them living free in the forests. In the wild, a group of wolves travels a
territory far too large for any human to enclose. Traveling is the main thing they do, filling their days with
finding food. A natural pack is not a collection of strangers. A natural pack is a family, whose members know
each other from birth. These family members stay together voluntarily, and each and every one of them can
leave at will if he doesn’t like it anymore. They can also leave to seek out a mate and form their own family.
They do not have to stay together no matter what, anymore than you have to live with your own parents
forever.
You won’t learn much about the natural behavior of wolves by jailing a group of strangers on a tiny surface
area and watching them be bored there, except maybe that they are so tolerant and social that they still don’t
kill each other. Dr. L. David Mech, just about the greatest living authority on wolves, put it in a nutshell with
these words: “Such an approach is analogous to trying to draw inferences about human family dynamics by
studying humans in refugee camps.”
Even where we can get a glimpse of wolf life in the wild, we are now watching a species whose habitat has
been mostly destroyed. Food is now much more scarce for them than it was 100 years ago. So is living
space. So even then, we are watching wolves whose behavior has been influenced by our presence, which
has caused them a lot of problems.
The dog is not a wolf. If you want to know about dogs, you have to study dogs. But aside from this, and
whether or not you could apply knowledge about wolves to dogs, the fact is that we don’t have much
knowledge about wolves in the first place. The stories that are told about them are hunters’ stories and
jailers’ stories – basically all nonsense, based on myths, fantasy, imagination, speculation, projection, lies
and/or poorly designed research; or by watching them behave in a habitat that is decaying and disappearing
right under their feet. It is no longer possible to study how wolves behave without some kind of human
influence interfering in the picture.
Read more:
Mech, LD, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1970 (8th ed 1995).
Mech, LD, Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:
1196-1203. Jamestown, ND: Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center Home Page.
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/alstat/intro.htm (Version 16MAY2000).
Mowat, F. Never Cry Wolf; The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves, McClelland and Stewart,
Toronto, 1963.
Myth 4: The domestic dog is a hunting species.
We’ve seen that the evolution of the specifically domestic dog probably began when a few of his ancestors
discovered human dumps as a new source of safe and easy food. It’s possible that these first dump animals
were able to exploit the new food source because they were especially smart. It’s also possible that he was
just especially lazy. Which explanation you prefer will depend on your opinion about present day dogs.
In any case, the decision to switch from the old habits to living on human food waste was an extremely
important one. The dump animals had to dare come fairly close to humans, and to be able to eat in the
presence of our smell. This led to the relative isolation from the members of their kind who did continue to
roam and to shun humans. In the beginning, as humans roamed to hunt with their bows and arrows, the
domestic dog’s ancestor could probably trail along at some small distance, waiting until we moved on to
descend upon our waste pile. This new ecological niche he’d found meant he was subject to a different
kind of natural selection than the ancestor who continued to live far away from us. Our dump animal may still
have supplemented his diet by roaming occasionally, but even the occasional hunting of small prey was
much less important to him now. At this point, he still needed a body fit for traveling long distances since we
still did, but Nature was already selecting for a brain that dealt differently with both aggression and fear.
When our own ancestors discovered agriculture and then began to keep cattle, the dog’s development
shifted into high gear. The great efficiency of our food production, which enabled us to fan out across the
Earth, meant that we threw away much more still edible food. The dog’s ancestor could now abandon
roaming and hunting altogether and take up permanent abode near the dump. This meant he had to come
live very close to us. We weren’t leaving dumps behind and moving on anymore. The village dweller doesn’t
feel like walking very far with his trash, and it was probably still dangerous to do so, so the dumps were
established close to where we lived. This meant that the pre-domestic dog had to be able to eat while we
were just around the corner and could show up any minute with a new load of trash. The fact that he could
do this means that the fear parts of his brain had already changed. It also meant that he wouldn’t run into
relatives anymore who did still shun humans and their smell.
Reproductive isolation was now a fact. The pre-dog’s genes now became subject to a completely different
regime of natural selection than in the old roaming, sometimes hunting niche. This animal no longer needed
to be fit for the traveling or the hunting life. The pre-dogs’s skeleton, muscles and brain could now start
adjusting to the sedentary life. He no longer needed to kill even occasionally to eat. The ability to deliver a
crushing bite, necessary to grab and kill prey, began to disappear. His jaws and teeth became smaller, as
did his head and his brain.
But it wasn’t just the change in food that caused the killer bite to disappear. Humans do not, right up to the
present day, tolerate animals in their surroundings who are a danger to themselves and their cattle. Our
ancestors probably added their own selective pressure to Nature’s by killing off any of these pre-dogs who
attacked humans or the animals they kept. If he wanted to be able to stay near humans and eat easily and
safely at our dumps, the early dog had to get rid of aggression altogether. He not only had to refrain from
attacking humans, but also from attacking our chickens, sheep and cows. Killer aggression was not only
superfluous, it was now actively dysfunctional, working to reduce the early dog’s chances of survival. The
dog lost the inclination to kill anything at all.
The domestic dog is not a hunter. He is a scavenger.
See also: Myth 5
Read more:
Beck, AM, The ecology of "feral" and free-roving dogs in Baltimore, Ch 26, in Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids,
Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, MY, 1975.
Beck, AM, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-ranging Urban Animals, York Press, Baltimore, 1973.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Nesbitt, WH, Ecology of a feral dog pack on a wildlife refuge, in Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids, Van Nostrand
Reinhold Co, MY, 1975.
Rubin, HD, Beck, AM, Ecological behavior of free-ranging urban dogs, Appl An Ethol 8:161-168, 1982.
Scott MD, Causey K, Ecology of feral dogs in Alabama, J Wildlife Management 37:252-265, 1973.
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine behavior
and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Foundation, The Hague, The
Netherlands, 2003.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Myth 5: But my own dog is obviously a hunter, because he kills
cats (or rabbits, or sheep).
A hunter is not just an animal that kills, it’s an animal that kills to eat. The behavioral sequence of a true
predator that kills other animals in order to eat them looks like this:
Scent > track > watch/orient > stalk > chase > grab > kill > dissect > eat
This isn’t just some arbitrary behavioral chain, it’s a functional chain – a series of steps aimed at reaching a
goal. The goal is to eat. You can only call an animal a predator when he displays the whole chain, and when
he does so in order to get a meal. You can’t call an animal a predator because he just so happens to look a
like some ancestor who lived by hunting, or because he sometimes shows parts of the old behavior just
simply because of how his body is still put together. Domestic dogs do not kill to eat. If you dump them in the
woods, they will starve unless there’s a popular camping site somewhere nearby where there’s enough
human garbage to keep them alive.
The dog evolved at the trash dump. He didn’t need to kill to eat. Aggression not only lost its function, but it
actually became a threat to the dog’s survival in our proximity. The killer bite disappeared from the dog’s
natural behavior pattern. Other parts of the pattern were less subject to human selection against them, parts
of the chain we didn’t care one way or the other about. Yet others were still useful for finding edible parts of
the trash pile. So partly human selection, partly human indifference, and partly the demands of scavenging
operated to move the dog further and further away from whatever predator ancestor he may have had.
This is, however, a very recent occurrence in terms of evolution. 130,000 or 12,000 years is but the wink of
an eye. Dogs are still shaped basically the same way they were half a million years ago. They still have four
legs and the ability to run fast. They still don’t have hands, only a mouth for grabbing things. Their sense of
smell is still acute, very good for finding the edibles among all the paper and plastic. Their hearing is still
acute, but it’s now tuned into lower tones than the ears of predators (whose ears are tuned in to higher
tones). Some original ancestral patterns may still be latently present in the form of reflexes. A dog may
watch/orient toward something that moves, for example. But this is a pattern that goes back to an ancestor
even before the reptilian-mammal split – just about all animals do it, it’s not specifically a hunter’s thing. A
dog may reflexively snap at something that shoots by close to him, which may be a hunter’s reflex – but this
still isn’t hunting, anymore than a monkey reflexively catching a baseball coming at him is tool-making.
Some of the old patterns just look like they’re still present because the dog’s body is shaped the way it is.
Young dogs chase each other in play, but so do young cows. They are feeling the joy of using their bodies,
which happen to have four legs, and they are practicing social skills. When domestic dogs bite each other in
play, they’re not practicing hunting. They’re practicing not biting too hard. When they grab something or
pick something up with their mouth, it’s not because they are hunters with an urge to bite – it’s just because
they don’t have any hands. When they look like they’re stalking a mouse, they’re probably just curious, since
dogs like to know what’s in their living space. The stalk and stare stance is just the way their body is put
together, although to be honest we don’t do it much differently ourselves when we want to creep up on
something. Dogs might want to chase the mouse away but probably aren’t thinking about killing it, and they
certainly aren’t planning to eat it.
So what about our these cat and sheep killing dogs? Let’s look first at the dog as he probably was in the
very beginning, at least 12,000 years ago. To do this, we have to go to villages in the Third World, where
these original mutts can still be found hanging out around the dump. They are direct descendants of the
original dog, but so are our own dogs. So what’s the difference? The difference between our own dogs and
these Third World dogs is that humans have never messed around with the village dogs’ genes to make
them into gun dogs or fashion dogs. These village dogs have been selected purely by the necessities of the
ecological niche they live in – natural, not human, selection created them. That is, aside from rather insistent
human help in wiping out aggression altogether by killing dogs that scared or attacked humans and their
cattle, children or chickens. We can assume that these Third World village dogs represent the original,
natural dog. These natural dogs don’t display the hunting sequence as explained above. If they show these
behaviors at all, then it’s only separate, isolated parts of the chain. They engage in these behaviors mostly
during play, and there is no real aggression involved, same as the great majority of our own dogs. Mostly,
these dogs wander around in villages or watch humans who come to the dumps, staying in the background,
getting close to people yet staying just out of reach, lazing around in the shade, neither chasing nor biting
anything at all. Flight is their first reaction to anything that is perceived as a threat (unless they are
cornered, of course).
If we now move over to look at the dumps near big cities in the industrial countries of South America, we get a
different story. Here, besides various small, modest dogs of the kind we call “mutts”, we also find larger dogs
that we can identify as belonging to real, modern breeds. These are city dogs who have either escaped their
owners or been abandoned by them. Unlike the mutts, these city dogs do display the killing bite. Now this is
no wonder, and here’s the reason why. These are countries where the machismo culture still rules. The
South American dumps are full of pitbulls and rotweilers. These are breeds in which humans have worked
hard to revive the killing bite, putting together concentrated and precise breeding programs to produce killer
dogs. These human-selected dump dogs will even threaten humans who come to look at the dump, and they
are, unlike the mutts who are also hanging around, truly dangerous. This contrast gives us the key to why
some people have a problem with their own dog killing other animals, which they then mistakenly attribute to
“hunting” behavior.
For about the past hundred years, since the very first official breed registers were established, we have been
messing around with the natural dog in a very intense way. Once we understood how inheritance worked, we
began reviving various parts of the dog’s latent behavior chain to suit our own preferences. We did this by
selecting for differences in body and brain as we bred dogs. Indeed, genes only specify potential, but by
messing around with them we have messed around with potential. I will explain how this works later, in Myths
38 and 39. For now, it’s enough to say we created the pointer, exaggerating the “orient > watch” and the
start of the “stalk” parts of the sequence, to get a dog who freezes up at the beginning of the stalk. This is
the pointing position. The border collie is bred for the watch and the stalk. She “gives eye” and approaches
the sheep in the stalk position, posed for the pounce. She may even nip at their heels, but without
attacking. The retriever is bred for the grab bite, and executes this bite without progressing to the killing
bite. The pitbull has the killing bite and the shearing dissection bite, but without the preceding parts of the
sequence (no stalking, freezing up, nor any warning at all).
If your dog is killing cats or rabbits, it’s probably a breed in which breeders have been too enthusiastic about
reviving the grab bite by breeding for a changed brain. We often see this in various hunting dog breeds, as
well as in breeds that are commonly chosen for police work (e.g., the German shepherd, the Belgian
shepherd Malinois), and in breeds that we have specifically molded for real killer aggression (the
pitbull/American Stafford, the boerbull, the fila Brasileiro, etc.). It is the interference of the modern consumer
in the dog’s genes, which has created dogs with one or two selected exaggerated reflexes. In their romance
with the wolf, these people tell themselves the dog is displaying parts of some predator’s hunting chain.
They forget that many of these behaviors had acquired a different meaning and function as the dog
scavenged the local dump. Scenting and tracking is just as necessary to find edible bits of garbage.
Running is just as good for escaping as for chasing something. All animals have to bite and chew to eat,
even the vegetarian ones. So even if these behaviors are leftovers of some hunting ancestor, these dogs
only show various parts of the sequence, these parts have gained a new meaning and function, and showing
fragmented parts of a hunting sequence does not make a dog a predator. A predator will display the whole
sequence, and she will display it only when it’s functional and useful to do so. Our own breeding behavior
hasn’t revived the ancient natural chain. Rather, we’ve taken advantage of this scavenger’s shape and her
play behavior, applying artificial selection to create dogs who show separate and exaggerated behaviors,
which we then kid ourselves has something to do with some wild predator. All we’ve really done is create
abnormalities. Often distortion of the dog’s body has gone along with this. All of these dogs would still be
hopeless at the real hunt and would probably die of starvation if they had to make a living of it.
Aside from our consumer interest in her genes, there are also other reasons why your dog might be killing
other animals. If your dog is not a pitbull or one of the others we’ve bred for exaggerated size and/or
aggression, and if you allow her to develop normally by playing with other dogs while she’s young, she will
learn to control her bite with great precision no matter how excited she is. This is a thing all natural dogs
learn, as a matter of course, since there are no humans around to keep them from interacting with other
dogs during their puppy days. If you overprotect your puppy, not allowing her to play often and long with
other dogs, you prevent her from learning to control her bite. She can bite too hard without even knowing
she is doing it, and without meaning to do any harm. She just has no idea what she can do with her teeth.
This is not because she is a hunter, but rather an educational deficiency.
Punishment can also be a reason for a dog to kill cats or other animals, even if she isn’t of a breed that we’ve
made into killers. If a dog is often punished in the presence of other animals, she will eventually start to
become aggressive towards those animals. It is a proven fact that dogs don’t associate punishment with their
own behavior. Rather, they associate a punishment with something that just so happens to be nearby when
the punishment takes place. In other words, your dog won’t understand that you are punishing her for
growling at the cat, or chasing the cat away from her treat, or for being too interested in the sheep. What the
dog perceives is that you often punish her when the cat’s around, or whenever the two of you get near
sheep. Now, it is also a proven fact that punishment very often arouses aggression. When you put these
two facts together, we get a logical result. The punished dog will try harder and harder to chase the damn
cat away before you notice the cat and start acting all mad again. All you see is that the dog is still chasing
the cat, and that it’s getting worse, so you punish her even harder. The cat becomes more and more
aversive to the dog, and the aggression, which punishment quite normally evokes, becomes more and more
uncontrolled. If the dog now gets a chance to chase a cat (or a sheep), she may very well kill the other
animal. This does not mean the dog is a predator, because even rats and mice, prey species who have
never hunted, display the same aggression when punished in the laboratory. A dog who kills other animals is
often the result of the owner inadvertently training the dog to feel aggressive towards other animals.
So now we have several situations in which a dog escapes and then comes back later, after having killed a
cat, or a rabbit, or a sheep. She may leave the dead animal behind, or she may come back to you carrying
the whole dead cat or rabbit in her mouth. You think you are dealing with an instinctive hunter.
But let’s look yet a little closer. If you go back and look at the hunting sequence, you may notice that
something is missing in your dog’s behavior, namely the last two parts of the real hunting sequence. Your
dog does not rip apart the cat she caught, nor does she eat it. The pitbull (and the other aggressive breeds)
will often execute ripping, dissecting movements during an attack. But they also will often continue to attack
long after the other animal is dead, and then they suddenly calm down and walk away. You will not see a
real predator do either of these things. The dog who suffered a educational deprivation in her youth just
doesn’t know she’s biting too hard. She isn’t intending any harm at all, let alone having hunting intentions.
The punished dog is not naturally aggressive. Her reaction is punishment-induced aggression, which has
nothing to do with hunting. She just wants to get rid of the cat, if possible for once and for always, so the
punishment will stop.
It does sometimes happen that a purebred, non-pitbull-type dog, who has been allowed to play with other
dogs while growing up, and who has never been punished around other animals, will escape and play ravage
with a herd of sheep. Even so, these dogs are not really hunting. They are playing. The dog will chase a
sheep, grab it, possibly wound it badly or kill it. Then the dog will switch to chasing another sheep who is
trying to run away, executing the sequence all over again. To this dog, the game is only interesting as long
as the other animal is still moving. Eating is not the point. The dog that kills the sheep still hopes to see
dinner waiting in his food bowl when he gets home. This makes the game and its motivation essentially
different from what a real hunter does. The real predator isn’t playing when she chases another animal. The
real predator is involved in a serious activity, namely, food acquisition. The real hunter has to put a lot of
energy into merely surviving, and she is therefore careful about her energy expenditure. Hunting is done as
efficiently as possible. The wolf takes a single prey and eats that prey with hair and hide. It is this very fact
that enables ranchers to know whether it was a wolf, or indeed a dog, who attacked the herd in the night.
Your pedigreed dog is not a product of Nature, but rather a product of consumer society. Our interference in
her genes has moved her back several steps in time, removing a number of typically doggy characteristics,
and actually making her less of a real, natural dog. We have been able to do this because the dog
descended from an animal that sometimes hunted. She has the same basic body shape and has some of the
old structures in her brain in a diminished or changed form. But this is not at all the same thing as saying the
present day domestic dog is a predator. A present day domestic dog who kills has nothing to do with
predation. Her behavior is either a distorted and non-functional revival of separate behaviors that struck our
fancy, or it is due to lack of education. It has nothing at all to do with the serious business of getting food or
with the natural behavior of the domestic dog as a species.
The domestic dog is not a predator. The domestic dog is a scavenger, including your killer dog.
Abrantes, R, The Evolution of Canine Social Behaviour, Wakan Tanka Publishers, Naperville IL, 1997.
Beck, AM, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-ranging Urban Animals, York Press, Baltimore, 1973.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Biological bases of behavior of domestic dog breeds, in Voith, VL, Borchelt, PL,
eds, Readings in Companion Animal Behavior, Veterinary Learning systems, Co., Inc., Trenton, NJ, 1996.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids: Their Systematics, Behavioral Ecology and Evolution, Van Nostrand Reinhold
Co, NY, 1975.
Fox, MW, Behavior of wolves, Dogs and Related Canids, Harper & Row, NY, 1971.
Koler-Matznick, J, The origin of the dog revisited, Anthrozoos 15(20): 98 – 118, 2002.
http://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf
Lockwood, R, The ethology and epidemiology of canine aggression, in Serpell J (ed), The Domestic Dog: Its
Evolution, Behavior & Interactions with People, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Mech, LD, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1970 (8th ed 1995).
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine behavior
and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Publishing, The Hague, The
Netherlands, 2003.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Wright, JC, Severe attacks by dogs: Characteristics of the dogs, the victims, and the attack settings, Publ
Health Rep 100:55-61, 1985.
Still to come in Part 1: Myths 6 - 18
we should regard him as a sort of tame wolf in our living room.
The idea of the dog as a tame wolf has a huge romantic attraction for us. We imagine the great Gray Wolf of
the northern regions of the Earth, a powerful wild animal weighing 160 – 220 pounds, who spends his days
hunting deer, moose or elk. We dream of our own ancestors finding (or stealing) a wolf puppy and raising
him with lots of TLC. We imagine this pup growing up to be man’s friend and companion, and bearing tame
pups for us. After thousands generations of this, we supposedly produced the dog as we now know him. We
see a direct line of descent going from our own dog straight to the mighty gray wolf we see on Discovery
Channel. Wow, a wolf in our living room, what a powerful feeling!
We now know that this isn’t how it really happened. Our ancestors didn’t tame the dog at all. He tamed
himself. Besides, the dog’s ancestor isn’t the mighty gray wolf of Discovery Channel. That wolf didn’t exist
yet when the dog began to split off into a new species – the gray wolf had yet to evolve, just as the domestic
dog did. What you need to imagine is a much smaller animal, who had already split off from the wolf family
line, some 200,000 - 500,000 years ago. This ancestor wasn’t a specialized hunter like the wolf is, but rather
what biologists call a “generalist” – an animal that is not limited to one special food source or environment,
but who can adapt to various situations. This smaller ancestor probably looked somewhat like the dingo and
other primitive dogs who still live in the wild today. It may not have been a pack animal. In fact, pack living is
rare among canids. So, like most of the generalist canids we see today, it probably lived in pairs and
temporary family groups, able to deal both with being together and with being alone.
So now you are picturing a smaller, more dog-like kind of animal. What did this pre-dog animal do that led, in
the end, to the present day dog? And did we have anything to do with it? The answer to both questions lies
in our own development as a species. Like most species, we struggled along for millions of years, our
numbers limited by the availability of food. Then, about 130,000 years ago, we invented the bow and arrow.
This was a great leap, but – contrary to the myth – it didn’t mean that the dog’s ancestor immediately joined
us to help with the hunt. The dog was still just a wild animal, and like all wild canids – right up to the present,
and even if they are raised in a human home – he remained totally useless to us during the hunt.
So our bow and arrow didn’t mean that some wolf was suddenly able to work as a tracking and hunting dog,
as the myth tells us. It did mean that our ancestors suddenly had a much easier time getting enough to eat.
They started to leave small dumps behind at their encampments, dumps where there were edible leftovers
for others to find. A new food source opened up for other species in the area. And when a new food source
opens up in a particular environment, some animal always moves in to exploit it. In this case, a few of the
sometimes hunting, sometimes scavenging, small ancestors of the present day dog were the ones who made
the move. These were individuals who were attracted to a much easier (and safer) way to make a living. All
they needed to do was trail along behind groups of humans and eat at the dumps we left behind. Perhaps
they still ran into roaming groups occasionally when their paths happened to cross, and perhaps they
sometimes still mated with these animals – but most of the pups would come of mating at dumps, between
loner animals who were now getting a living by scavenging our waste. This was the beginning reproductive
separation, and thus of the formation of a separate species.
So, probably about 130,000 years ago, we have a number of these dog-like ancestors who split off and
entered a new ecological niche. Partially reproductively isolated in this new niche, they began to develop
specifically doggy characteristics. In order to meet at the dump and thus be able to mate, these animals had
to have special qualities. They had to be prepared to eat ready-made food instead of participating in the
hunt (the food you give your dog is, up to this day, still made of our waste, even the most fancy and
expensive brands). If they lived in groups, they had to be willing to give this up in favor of wandering around
alone or in pairs (even at the dump, there wouldn’t have been enough food for a large group). They had to
be able to share space (the dump) with strangers of their own species who had also discovered this new
source of food. And – most important of all – they had to have a less than average fear of humans. These
animals were in the process of making a choice. They were farther from their cousin the wolf than ever, but
they weren’t domestic dogs yet, either. The choice that some of them made led them down the road to
becoming, at this juncture, a sort of pre-domestic dog. This animal’s anatomy was still adjusted to a life of
traveling as they trailed along behind groups of nomadic humans. This is probably why archeologists don’t
find typically doggy remains from this period. The dog’s body hadn’t changed yet, even though his behavior
and probably his brain were already changing. But before he could become a real domestic dog, our own
species had to make its next step.
This next step came about 12,000 years ago, when we developed agriculture. Humans stopped roaming as
hunters and gatherers, and started living in permanent settlements. Now the pre-dog could also settle down
and live permanently at the dump. Now he wouldn’t run into relatives who were still hunting and still shy of
humans, not even by accident. There would be no more mating with hunters, not even occasionally. His
body could now adapt to a non-traveling life, besides the changes that had already taken place in his brain
and behavior. Within a very short time, the dog as we know him today was a fact. This is the period when
truly doggy skeletal remains showed up. The other branches of the family continued on their hunter’s way,
and became the wild dogs you now see on Discovery Channel. The gray wolf has nothing to do with it.
The dog and the wolf are related to each other in the same way you are related to your sixth cousin, and in
the same way we are all related to some other types of primates (monkeys and apes). We share an
ancestor, that’s all. But the dog most definitely didn’t descend from the gray wolf, anymore than you
descended from your cousin.
Read more:
Beljaev, DK, Trut, LN, Some genetic and endocrine effects of selections for domestication in silver foxes, in
The Wild Canids, Fox, MW, ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1975.
Beljaev, DK, Plyusnina, IZ, and Trut, LN, Domestication in the silver fox (Vulpes fulvus desm): changes in
physiological boundaries of the sensitive period of primary socialization, Applied Animal Behavior Science 13:
359-70, 1984/85.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Koler-Matznick, J, The origin of the dog revisited, Anthrozoos 15(20): 98 – 118, 2002.
http://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf
Lindsay, SR, Handbook of applied dog behavior and training, Blackwell Publishing, Ames Iowa, 2000.
Plyusnina, IZ, Trut, LN, An analysis of fear and aggression during early development of behavior in silver
foxes (Vulpes vulpes), Applied Animal Behavior Science 32:253-68, 1991.
Serpell, JA, ed., The domestic dog: its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (UK), 1995.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Myth 3: Everything we know about wolves applies to dogs, too.
We’ve already seen a number of reasons why this isn’t true. The dog’s ancestor eventually became a dog
because he left the ecological niche his ancestor may have shared with the wolf’s ancestors more than
500,000 years ago. The domestic dog evolved in a totally different environment than the wolf. Their genetic
similarity means about as much (or as little) as our similarity to various apes means.
But there is more you need to know. Even if we could apply what we know about wolves to dogs, the fact is
that we don’t know very much about wolves. This may surprise you. Indeed, much has been published
about wolves – books, articles, documentaries on television – and most of it in such an authoritative tone.
Surely we must know all about them? The trouble is that most of what people pretend to know about wolves
is based either on fantasy and speculation, or on insufficient data and poorly designed research.
Mankind has been waging a war of annihilation against the wolf for hundreds of years now, because modern
man always viewed the wolf as a competitor in the hunt and a danger for his cattle. There may have been a
time when the wolf wasn’t scared of humans, but that was long before we develop writing, let alone science.
By the time we decided to study the wolf, this animal had become so shy of us that it was almost impossible to
get a glimpse of him in his natural habitat. This is, first of all, because by that time there were already
damned few wolves left to study. And second of all, the ones that did survive us had learned to melt away
into the forest the instant they heard or smelled us, still do. It has been almost impossible, for more than 100
years now, to even see a wild wolf, let alone study his behavior – except the behavior of fleeing from a threat
to his life.
So wolves do their utter best not to let themselves be observed by humans in the wild, while science
demands that conclusions be based on observations. Scientists puzzled for awhile, then came up with a
solution of their own. Once in awhile they manage to shoot a wolf with a tranquilizer dart, after which they put
a radio collar around his neck and release him to rejoin his pack. After that, the scientists can locate the
group of wolves by following the signal the collared wolf is transmitting. What they generally do is go out in
an airplane and fly around in the hope of picking up a signal. Some days they are lucky. They locate the
wolves and try to follow the group, watching the wolves’ behavior from the air. However, there is a problem
with this. As soon as the airplane was invented, people, as usual, abused this technology. They immediately
began to kill wolves from the air. At this point, the wolf has had almost a hundred years’ time to learn that the
sound of an airplane is a signal of death. Wolves who hear an airplane do not go hang out on open terrain
and display all kinds of natural behavior for you. They head for the cover of the forest as quick as they can.
Yet again, the only behavior the scientist sees is flight behavior. So Discovery Channel may make it look as
if you can just walk into the woods and film a bunch of wolves from close by, but this isn’t really how it works.
The shots you see on TV are often the product of long and careful searching and tracking, and then filmed
with telescopic lenses the size of your arm. They are pieces of luck and the result of enormous patience.
Lots of people who research wild wolves spend years just finding and analyzing scats (wolf poop) without
ever getting a glimpse of a real, live wolf.
Because of this, most of the published research on wolves has been done on captive wolves. Scientists
gather together whatever wolves are, for some reason, available, and they house the wolves in a pen
somewhere. Under the best of circumstances, the enclosure may be a couple of square miles. The wolves
are then fed daily. Scientists can settle back and observe what the animals do, since the animals can’t
escape them anymore. This is, of course, a highly artificial situation. First of all, the wolves behave while
being watched by their jailer. This means we watch them under heightened stress and have no idea what
they’d do if a human weren’t around. Secondly, it gives us no idea what the wolves would be doing if they
had to go get their own food instead of hanging out all day with nothing much to do. Finally, the scientist has
in fact taken a bunch of arbitrarily selected total strangers and shut them up in an unnaturally small amount
of space, and is forcing them to live with each other in this small space for the duration of their lives whether
they like it (and each other) or not.
This is contrary to all natural circumstances. There are a few things we do know for sure about wolves from
the few glimpses people have gotten of them living free in the forests. In the wild, a group of wolves travels a
territory far too large for any human to enclose. Traveling is the main thing they do, filling their days with
finding food. A natural pack is not a collection of strangers. A natural pack is a family, whose members know
each other from birth. These family members stay together voluntarily, and each and every one of them can
leave at will if he doesn’t like it anymore. They can also leave to seek out a mate and form their own family.
They do not have to stay together no matter what, anymore than you have to live with your own parents
forever.
You won’t learn much about the natural behavior of wolves by jailing a group of strangers on a tiny surface
area and watching them be bored there, except maybe that they are so tolerant and social that they still don’t
kill each other. Dr. L. David Mech, just about the greatest living authority on wolves, put it in a nutshell with
these words: “Such an approach is analogous to trying to draw inferences about human family dynamics by
studying humans in refugee camps.”
Even where we can get a glimpse of wolf life in the wild, we are now watching a species whose habitat has
been mostly destroyed. Food is now much more scarce for them than it was 100 years ago. So is living
space. So even then, we are watching wolves whose behavior has been influenced by our presence, which
has caused them a lot of problems.
The dog is not a wolf. If you want to know about dogs, you have to study dogs. But aside from this, and
whether or not you could apply knowledge about wolves to dogs, the fact is that we don’t have much
knowledge about wolves in the first place. The stories that are told about them are hunters’ stories and
jailers’ stories – basically all nonsense, based on myths, fantasy, imagination, speculation, projection, lies
and/or poorly designed research; or by watching them behave in a habitat that is decaying and disappearing
right under their feet. It is no longer possible to study how wolves behave without some kind of human
influence interfering in the picture.
Read more:
Mech, LD, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1970 (8th ed 1995).
Mech, LD, Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:
1196-1203. Jamestown, ND: Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center Home Page.
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/mammals/alstat/intro.htm (Version 16MAY2000).
Mowat, F. Never Cry Wolf; The Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves, McClelland and Stewart,
Toronto, 1963.
Myth 4: The domestic dog is a hunting species.
We’ve seen that the evolution of the specifically domestic dog probably began when a few of his ancestors
discovered human dumps as a new source of safe and easy food. It’s possible that these first dump animals
were able to exploit the new food source because they were especially smart. It’s also possible that he was
just especially lazy. Which explanation you prefer will depend on your opinion about present day dogs.
In any case, the decision to switch from the old habits to living on human food waste was an extremely
important one. The dump animals had to dare come fairly close to humans, and to be able to eat in the
presence of our smell. This led to the relative isolation from the members of their kind who did continue to
roam and to shun humans. In the beginning, as humans roamed to hunt with their bows and arrows, the
domestic dog’s ancestor could probably trail along at some small distance, waiting until we moved on to
descend upon our waste pile. This new ecological niche he’d found meant he was subject to a different
kind of natural selection than the ancestor who continued to live far away from us. Our dump animal may still
have supplemented his diet by roaming occasionally, but even the occasional hunting of small prey was
much less important to him now. At this point, he still needed a body fit for traveling long distances since we
still did, but Nature was already selecting for a brain that dealt differently with both aggression and fear.
When our own ancestors discovered agriculture and then began to keep cattle, the dog’s development
shifted into high gear. The great efficiency of our food production, which enabled us to fan out across the
Earth, meant that we threw away much more still edible food. The dog’s ancestor could now abandon
roaming and hunting altogether and take up permanent abode near the dump. This meant he had to come
live very close to us. We weren’t leaving dumps behind and moving on anymore. The village dweller doesn’t
feel like walking very far with his trash, and it was probably still dangerous to do so, so the dumps were
established close to where we lived. This meant that the pre-domestic dog had to be able to eat while we
were just around the corner and could show up any minute with a new load of trash. The fact that he could
do this means that the fear parts of his brain had already changed. It also meant that he wouldn’t run into
relatives anymore who did still shun humans and their smell.
Reproductive isolation was now a fact. The pre-dog’s genes now became subject to a completely different
regime of natural selection than in the old roaming, sometimes hunting niche. This animal no longer needed
to be fit for the traveling or the hunting life. The pre-dogs’s skeleton, muscles and brain could now start
adjusting to the sedentary life. He no longer needed to kill even occasionally to eat. The ability to deliver a
crushing bite, necessary to grab and kill prey, began to disappear. His jaws and teeth became smaller, as
did his head and his brain.
But it wasn’t just the change in food that caused the killer bite to disappear. Humans do not, right up to the
present day, tolerate animals in their surroundings who are a danger to themselves and their cattle. Our
ancestors probably added their own selective pressure to Nature’s by killing off any of these pre-dogs who
attacked humans or the animals they kept. If he wanted to be able to stay near humans and eat easily and
safely at our dumps, the early dog had to get rid of aggression altogether. He not only had to refrain from
attacking humans, but also from attacking our chickens, sheep and cows. Killer aggression was not only
superfluous, it was now actively dysfunctional, working to reduce the early dog’s chances of survival. The
dog lost the inclination to kill anything at all.
The domestic dog is not a hunter. He is a scavenger.
See also: Myth 5
Read more:
Beck, AM, The ecology of "feral" and free-roving dogs in Baltimore, Ch 26, in Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids,
Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, MY, 1975.
Beck, AM, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-ranging Urban Animals, York Press, Baltimore, 1973.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Nesbitt, WH, Ecology of a feral dog pack on a wildlife refuge, in Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids, Van Nostrand
Reinhold Co, MY, 1975.
Rubin, HD, Beck, AM, Ecological behavior of free-ranging urban dogs, Appl An Ethol 8:161-168, 1982.
Scott MD, Causey K, Ecology of feral dogs in Alabama, J Wildlife Management 37:252-265, 1973.
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine behavior
and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Foundation, The Hague, The
Netherlands, 2003.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Myth 5: But my own dog is obviously a hunter, because he kills
cats (or rabbits, or sheep).
A hunter is not just an animal that kills, it’s an animal that kills to eat. The behavioral sequence of a true
predator that kills other animals in order to eat them looks like this:
Scent > track > watch/orient > stalk > chase > grab > kill > dissect > eat
This isn’t just some arbitrary behavioral chain, it’s a functional chain – a series of steps aimed at reaching a
goal. The goal is to eat. You can only call an animal a predator when he displays the whole chain, and when
he does so in order to get a meal. You can’t call an animal a predator because he just so happens to look a
like some ancestor who lived by hunting, or because he sometimes shows parts of the old behavior just
simply because of how his body is still put together. Domestic dogs do not kill to eat. If you dump them in the
woods, they will starve unless there’s a popular camping site somewhere nearby where there’s enough
human garbage to keep them alive.
The dog evolved at the trash dump. He didn’t need to kill to eat. Aggression not only lost its function, but it
actually became a threat to the dog’s survival in our proximity. The killer bite disappeared from the dog’s
natural behavior pattern. Other parts of the pattern were less subject to human selection against them, parts
of the chain we didn’t care one way or the other about. Yet others were still useful for finding edible parts of
the trash pile. So partly human selection, partly human indifference, and partly the demands of scavenging
operated to move the dog further and further away from whatever predator ancestor he may have had.
This is, however, a very recent occurrence in terms of evolution. 130,000 or 12,000 years is but the wink of
an eye. Dogs are still shaped basically the same way they were half a million years ago. They still have four
legs and the ability to run fast. They still don’t have hands, only a mouth for grabbing things. Their sense of
smell is still acute, very good for finding the edibles among all the paper and plastic. Their hearing is still
acute, but it’s now tuned into lower tones than the ears of predators (whose ears are tuned in to higher
tones). Some original ancestral patterns may still be latently present in the form of reflexes. A dog may
watch/orient toward something that moves, for example. But this is a pattern that goes back to an ancestor
even before the reptilian-mammal split – just about all animals do it, it’s not specifically a hunter’s thing. A
dog may reflexively snap at something that shoots by close to him, which may be a hunter’s reflex – but this
still isn’t hunting, anymore than a monkey reflexively catching a baseball coming at him is tool-making.
Some of the old patterns just look like they’re still present because the dog’s body is shaped the way it is.
Young dogs chase each other in play, but so do young cows. They are feeling the joy of using their bodies,
which happen to have four legs, and they are practicing social skills. When domestic dogs bite each other in
play, they’re not practicing hunting. They’re practicing not biting too hard. When they grab something or
pick something up with their mouth, it’s not because they are hunters with an urge to bite – it’s just because
they don’t have any hands. When they look like they’re stalking a mouse, they’re probably just curious, since
dogs like to know what’s in their living space. The stalk and stare stance is just the way their body is put
together, although to be honest we don’t do it much differently ourselves when we want to creep up on
something. Dogs might want to chase the mouse away but probably aren’t thinking about killing it, and they
certainly aren’t planning to eat it.
So what about our these cat and sheep killing dogs? Let’s look first at the dog as he probably was in the
very beginning, at least 12,000 years ago. To do this, we have to go to villages in the Third World, where
these original mutts can still be found hanging out around the dump. They are direct descendants of the
original dog, but so are our own dogs. So what’s the difference? The difference between our own dogs and
these Third World dogs is that humans have never messed around with the village dogs’ genes to make
them into gun dogs or fashion dogs. These village dogs have been selected purely by the necessities of the
ecological niche they live in – natural, not human, selection created them. That is, aside from rather insistent
human help in wiping out aggression altogether by killing dogs that scared or attacked humans and their
cattle, children or chickens. We can assume that these Third World village dogs represent the original,
natural dog. These natural dogs don’t display the hunting sequence as explained above. If they show these
behaviors at all, then it’s only separate, isolated parts of the chain. They engage in these behaviors mostly
during play, and there is no real aggression involved, same as the great majority of our own dogs. Mostly,
these dogs wander around in villages or watch humans who come to the dumps, staying in the background,
getting close to people yet staying just out of reach, lazing around in the shade, neither chasing nor biting
anything at all. Flight is their first reaction to anything that is perceived as a threat (unless they are
cornered, of course).
If we now move over to look at the dumps near big cities in the industrial countries of South America, we get a
different story. Here, besides various small, modest dogs of the kind we call “mutts”, we also find larger dogs
that we can identify as belonging to real, modern breeds. These are city dogs who have either escaped their
owners or been abandoned by them. Unlike the mutts, these city dogs do display the killing bite. Now this is
no wonder, and here’s the reason why. These are countries where the machismo culture still rules. The
South American dumps are full of pitbulls and rotweilers. These are breeds in which humans have worked
hard to revive the killing bite, putting together concentrated and precise breeding programs to produce killer
dogs. These human-selected dump dogs will even threaten humans who come to look at the dump, and they
are, unlike the mutts who are also hanging around, truly dangerous. This contrast gives us the key to why
some people have a problem with their own dog killing other animals, which they then mistakenly attribute to
“hunting” behavior.
For about the past hundred years, since the very first official breed registers were established, we have been
messing around with the natural dog in a very intense way. Once we understood how inheritance worked, we
began reviving various parts of the dog’s latent behavior chain to suit our own preferences. We did this by
selecting for differences in body and brain as we bred dogs. Indeed, genes only specify potential, but by
messing around with them we have messed around with potential. I will explain how this works later, in Myths
38 and 39. For now, it’s enough to say we created the pointer, exaggerating the “orient > watch” and the
start of the “stalk” parts of the sequence, to get a dog who freezes up at the beginning of the stalk. This is
the pointing position. The border collie is bred for the watch and the stalk. She “gives eye” and approaches
the sheep in the stalk position, posed for the pounce. She may even nip at their heels, but without
attacking. The retriever is bred for the grab bite, and executes this bite without progressing to the killing
bite. The pitbull has the killing bite and the shearing dissection bite, but without the preceding parts of the
sequence (no stalking, freezing up, nor any warning at all).
If your dog is killing cats or rabbits, it’s probably a breed in which breeders have been too enthusiastic about
reviving the grab bite by breeding for a changed brain. We often see this in various hunting dog breeds, as
well as in breeds that are commonly chosen for police work (e.g., the German shepherd, the Belgian
shepherd Malinois), and in breeds that we have specifically molded for real killer aggression (the
pitbull/American Stafford, the boerbull, the fila Brasileiro, etc.). It is the interference of the modern consumer
in the dog’s genes, which has created dogs with one or two selected exaggerated reflexes. In their romance
with the wolf, these people tell themselves the dog is displaying parts of some predator’s hunting chain.
They forget that many of these behaviors had acquired a different meaning and function as the dog
scavenged the local dump. Scenting and tracking is just as necessary to find edible bits of garbage.
Running is just as good for escaping as for chasing something. All animals have to bite and chew to eat,
even the vegetarian ones. So even if these behaviors are leftovers of some hunting ancestor, these dogs
only show various parts of the sequence, these parts have gained a new meaning and function, and showing
fragmented parts of a hunting sequence does not make a dog a predator. A predator will display the whole
sequence, and she will display it only when it’s functional and useful to do so. Our own breeding behavior
hasn’t revived the ancient natural chain. Rather, we’ve taken advantage of this scavenger’s shape and her
play behavior, applying artificial selection to create dogs who show separate and exaggerated behaviors,
which we then kid ourselves has something to do with some wild predator. All we’ve really done is create
abnormalities. Often distortion of the dog’s body has gone along with this. All of these dogs would still be
hopeless at the real hunt and would probably die of starvation if they had to make a living of it.
Aside from our consumer interest in her genes, there are also other reasons why your dog might be killing
other animals. If your dog is not a pitbull or one of the others we’ve bred for exaggerated size and/or
aggression, and if you allow her to develop normally by playing with other dogs while she’s young, she will
learn to control her bite with great precision no matter how excited she is. This is a thing all natural dogs
learn, as a matter of course, since there are no humans around to keep them from interacting with other
dogs during their puppy days. If you overprotect your puppy, not allowing her to play often and long with
other dogs, you prevent her from learning to control her bite. She can bite too hard without even knowing
she is doing it, and without meaning to do any harm. She just has no idea what she can do with her teeth.
This is not because she is a hunter, but rather an educational deficiency.
Punishment can also be a reason for a dog to kill cats or other animals, even if she isn’t of a breed that we’ve
made into killers. If a dog is often punished in the presence of other animals, she will eventually start to
become aggressive towards those animals. It is a proven fact that dogs don’t associate punishment with their
own behavior. Rather, they associate a punishment with something that just so happens to be nearby when
the punishment takes place. In other words, your dog won’t understand that you are punishing her for
growling at the cat, or chasing the cat away from her treat, or for being too interested in the sheep. What the
dog perceives is that you often punish her when the cat’s around, or whenever the two of you get near
sheep. Now, it is also a proven fact that punishment very often arouses aggression. When you put these
two facts together, we get a logical result. The punished dog will try harder and harder to chase the damn
cat away before you notice the cat and start acting all mad again. All you see is that the dog is still chasing
the cat, and that it’s getting worse, so you punish her even harder. The cat becomes more and more
aversive to the dog, and the aggression, which punishment quite normally evokes, becomes more and more
uncontrolled. If the dog now gets a chance to chase a cat (or a sheep), she may very well kill the other
animal. This does not mean the dog is a predator, because even rats and mice, prey species who have
never hunted, display the same aggression when punished in the laboratory. A dog who kills other animals is
often the result of the owner inadvertently training the dog to feel aggressive towards other animals.
So now we have several situations in which a dog escapes and then comes back later, after having killed a
cat, or a rabbit, or a sheep. She may leave the dead animal behind, or she may come back to you carrying
the whole dead cat or rabbit in her mouth. You think you are dealing with an instinctive hunter.
But let’s look yet a little closer. If you go back and look at the hunting sequence, you may notice that
something is missing in your dog’s behavior, namely the last two parts of the real hunting sequence. Your
dog does not rip apart the cat she caught, nor does she eat it. The pitbull (and the other aggressive breeds)
will often execute ripping, dissecting movements during an attack. But they also will often continue to attack
long after the other animal is dead, and then they suddenly calm down and walk away. You will not see a
real predator do either of these things. The dog who suffered a educational deprivation in her youth just
doesn’t know she’s biting too hard. She isn’t intending any harm at all, let alone having hunting intentions.
The punished dog is not naturally aggressive. Her reaction is punishment-induced aggression, which has
nothing to do with hunting. She just wants to get rid of the cat, if possible for once and for always, so the
punishment will stop.
It does sometimes happen that a purebred, non-pitbull-type dog, who has been allowed to play with other
dogs while growing up, and who has never been punished around other animals, will escape and play ravage
with a herd of sheep. Even so, these dogs are not really hunting. They are playing. The dog will chase a
sheep, grab it, possibly wound it badly or kill it. Then the dog will switch to chasing another sheep who is
trying to run away, executing the sequence all over again. To this dog, the game is only interesting as long
as the other animal is still moving. Eating is not the point. The dog that kills the sheep still hopes to see
dinner waiting in his food bowl when he gets home. This makes the game and its motivation essentially
different from what a real hunter does. The real predator isn’t playing when she chases another animal. The
real predator is involved in a serious activity, namely, food acquisition. The real hunter has to put a lot of
energy into merely surviving, and she is therefore careful about her energy expenditure. Hunting is done as
efficiently as possible. The wolf takes a single prey and eats that prey with hair and hide. It is this very fact
that enables ranchers to know whether it was a wolf, or indeed a dog, who attacked the herd in the night.
Your pedigreed dog is not a product of Nature, but rather a product of consumer society. Our interference in
her genes has moved her back several steps in time, removing a number of typically doggy characteristics,
and actually making her less of a real, natural dog. We have been able to do this because the dog
descended from an animal that sometimes hunted. She has the same basic body shape and has some of the
old structures in her brain in a diminished or changed form. But this is not at all the same thing as saying the
present day domestic dog is a predator. A present day domestic dog who kills has nothing to do with
predation. Her behavior is either a distorted and non-functional revival of separate behaviors that struck our
fancy, or it is due to lack of education. It has nothing at all to do with the serious business of getting food or
with the natural behavior of the domestic dog as a species.
The domestic dog is not a predator. The domestic dog is a scavenger, including your killer dog.
Abrantes, R, The Evolution of Canine Social Behaviour, Wakan Tanka Publishers, Naperville IL, 1997.
Beck, AM, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-ranging Urban Animals, York Press, Baltimore, 1973.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Biological bases of behavior of domestic dog breeds, in Voith, VL, Borchelt, PL,
eds, Readings in Companion Animal Behavior, Veterinary Learning systems, Co., Inc., Trenton, NJ, 1996.
Coppinger, R, Coppinger, L, Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution,
Scribner, New York, 2001.
Fox MW (ed), The Wild Canids: Their Systematics, Behavioral Ecology and Evolution, Van Nostrand Reinhold
Co, NY, 1975.
Fox, MW, Behavior of wolves, Dogs and Related Canids, Harper & Row, NY, 1971.
Koler-Matznick, J, The origin of the dog revisited, Anthrozoos 15(20): 98 – 118, 2002.
http://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf
Lockwood, R, The ethology and epidemiology of canine aggression, in Serpell J (ed), The Domestic Dog: Its
Evolution, Behavior & Interactions with People, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Mech, LD, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1970 (8th ed 1995).
Semyonova, A, The social organization of the domestic dog; a longitudinal study of domestic canine behavior
and the ontogeny of domestic canine social systems, Carriage House Publishing, The Hague, The
Netherlands, 2003.
Sibly, RM, Smith, RH, Behavioral Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive Behavior, Blackwell
Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1985.
Wright, JC, Severe attacks by dogs: Characteristics of the dogs, the victims, and the attack settings, Publ
Health Rep 100:55-61, 1985.
Still to come in Part 1: Myths 6 - 18
Nonlinear Dogs
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Copyright 2007 by
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
Copyright 2007 by
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
Copyright 2007 by
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
Alexandra Semyonova
All rights reserved
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