I recently stumbled upon a fascinating theory about why dogs often spin round and round before they poop. According to research by Czech scientists, dogs appear to have some sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetism and prefer to do their business while facing north. Nobody seems quite certain how or why they do this. Sadly, I came across this tantalising snippet only after I’d finished Dogopedia: a Compendium of Canine Curiosities, the book I’ve written with Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, but it serves to illustrate how much more there is to learn about our canine friends.
Despite their familiarity (indeed, probably because of it) dogs have rarely been the subject of serious inquiry until quite recently. People who study animals – zoologists, biologists, ethologists and the like – have tended to focus on more exotic, exciting animals than the domestic creatures at their feet or on their laps. In recent years, though, there’s been a surge of scientific interest in our domestic pets with companion animal study centres opening up at universities all over the place. There is now a wide body of research into such matters as how puppies compare to wolf cubs, whether yawning is contagious in dogs, how they indicate that they want something, what different tail wags mean, and why they like to leave scent marks everywhere.
This means there’s a lot of new information for dog owners to take on board. Some of it challenges conventional wisdom. Dogs don’t, for instance, see in black and white. Dogs have fewer cones in the retina than humans so their world is less visually vivid than ours, but they can see some colour. The conclusions of other behavioural investigations seem to mystify things that once seemed perfectly obvious. Mounting (other dogs, cushions, the leg of an important visitor and so on) is surely just sexual frustration, isn’t it? Well, not necessarily. Neutered male dogs sometimes do it, as do puppies and female dogs. There are theories, of course – it could be dominance behaviour, a compulsive disorder or just wild excitement – but the truth is, we still don’t fully understand why dogs do this.
Some expert conclusions just fly in the face of what most dog owners feel in their very bones to be absolutely true. Take guilt, for example. Who hasn’t seen that guilty face next to a puddle on the floor or an upturned bin? Indeed, “mutt-shaming” has become a social media phenomena. This is where cute-looking dogs with ever such guilty expressions are photographed next to signs with confessions such as “I raided the cat litter”, and (my favourite one) “I eat crayons and poop rainbows”. The reality is that dogs can’t quite grasp the complex concept that particular behaviours are either morally wrong or socially unacceptable. The famously guilty expression – gaze averted, head down, sloping body language – is much more likely to be a response to being stared at by an annoyed owner than down to any remorse over an earlier action.
We’re learning more all the time about canine behaviour but there are some really big questions about dogs yet to be answered. Exactly when and how the domestic dog first came about is still the subject of much debate. Domestic dogs share 99.96 per cent of their DNA with the grey wolf and the two species obviously have many other characteristics in common. However, one key difference between our pet dogs and their distant cousins is tameness. Try as you might, you can’t actually domesticate a wolf. If they’re hand-reared from cubs, they will accept human company – then, so will lions in a zoo, but that doesn’t make them pussycats. So how come some of the grey wolf’s ancestors ended up living more or less happily alongside humans?
There are several competing theories about how this friendship got started but it’s no easy thing to settle the matter definitively. Archaeological remains, for instance, can be difficult to interpret. Canine bone fragments could have belonged to a wild wolf or a domestic dog. Even if we’re sure it was a dog, how do we know whether it was a barely tolerated scavenger, a pampered pet or perhaps even a source of food? New archaeological discoveries and developments in DNA analysis are giving us more information all the time and no doubt further research will continue to uncover more clues. As it stands, it looks like the domestication of the wolf was not a single event but a process which occurred over time and in more than one place.
How, why and when may remain a mystery, but the human-canine friendship has been mutually beneficial. It hasn’t always been a picnic for dogs, it has to be said. They have been exploited and abused or just casually disregarded throughout much of their history, but they are still much more successful as a species than their wild relatives. As for humans, no other animal has been so helpful in so many different ways as the dog. A combination of selective breeding and careful training has resulted in dogs capable of fulfilling all sorts of functions – from traditional sheep herders to modern-day sniffer dogs. There have been dogs to guard reindeer, llamas and yaks and other dogs to hunt wolves, raccoons and puffins. Dogs have pulled carts, boats and fishing nets and been trained to find truffles and track escaped convicts.
Today, dogs are more valued than ever before and are often regarded as cherished members of the family in many parts of the world. Sadly, however, some dogs are still cruelly abused. This is why we still need places of refuge like Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in London, which takes in around 6,000 dogs a year. More common than outright abuse, however, is dogs running into trouble because their owners haven’t fully understood their needs and motivations. Learning more about what our world looks like from a dog’s perspective can only deepen the human-canine friendship and make life better for both of us.
Dogopedia, a Compendium of Canine Curiosities from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, is available to buy in all good bookshops. For further information on Battersea Dogs & Cats Home please visit www.battersea.org.uk.
