Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz Read Free Book Online

wide-ranging effect: for instance, his foxes open their eyes earlier and show their first fear responses later, more like dogs than wild foxes. This gives them a longer early window for bonding with a caretaker—such as a human experimenter in Siberia. They play with each other even when they reach adulthood, perhaps allowing for longer and more complex socialization. It is worth noting that foxes diverged from wolves some ten to twelve million years ago; yet in forty years' of selection they look domesticated. The same perhaps could happen with other carnivores we take under our wing and inside our houses. The genetic changes nudge them into being doggy.

HOW WOLVES BECAME DOGS

    Though we tend not to think much about it, the history of dogs, well before you got your dog, bears more on what your dog is like than the particulars of his parentage. Their history begins with wolves.
    Wolves are dogs before the accoutrements. The coat of domestication makes dogs quite different creatures, however.* While a pet dog gone missing may not survive even a handful of days on his own, the anatomy, instinctual drive, and sociality of the wolf combine to make it very adaptable. These canids can be found in diverse environments: in deserts, forests, and on ice. For the most part, wolves live in packs, with one mating pair and from four up to forty younger, usually related wolves. The pack works cooperatively, sharing tasks. Older wolves may help raise the youngest pups, and the whole group works together when hunting large prey. They are very territorial and spend a good amount of time demarcating and defending their borders.
    Inside some of these borders, tens of thousands of years ago, human beings began to appear. Homo sapiens, having outgrown his habilis and erectus forms, was becoming less nomadic and beginning to create settlements. Even before agriculture began, interactions between humans and wolves began. Just how those interactions played out is the source of speculation. One idea is that the humans' relatively fixed communities produced a large amount of waste, including food waste. Wolves, who will scavenge as well as hunt, would have quickly discovered this food source. The most brazen among them may have overcome any fear of these new, naked human animals and begun feasting on the scraps pile. In this way, an accidental natural selection of wolves who are less fearful of humans would have begun.
    Over time, humans would tolerate the wolves, maybe taking a few pups in as pets, or, in leaner times, as meat. Generation by generation, the calmer wolves would have more success living on the edge of human society. Eventually, people would begin intentionally breeding those animals they particularly liked. This is the first step of domestication, a remaking of animals to our liking. With all species, this process typically occurs through a gradual association with humans, whereby successive generations become more and more tame and finally become distinct in behavior and body from their wild ancestors. Domestication is thus preceded by a kind of inadvertent selection of animals who are nearby, useful, or pleasing, allowing them to loiter on the edges of human society. The next step in the process involves more intention. Those animals who are less useful or liked are abandoned, destroyed, or deterred from hanging about with us. In this way, we select those animals who more easily submit to our breeding of them. Finally, and most familiar, domestication involves breeding animals for specific characteristics.
    Archeological evidence dates the first domesticated wolf-cum-dog at ten thousand to fourteen thousand years ago. Dog remains have been found in trash heaps (suggesting their use as food or property) and in grave sites, their skeletons curled up aside human skeletons. Most researchers think dogs began to associate with us even earlier, maybe many tens of thousands of years ago. There is genetic evidence, in the form of