worms. The dog that had no way of coping has developed a strategy that works for him. Sadly, it is one that rarely works for us and in the worst-case scenarios the dog can no longer be kept as a family pet.
With this in mind, our mission should surely be to focus on prevention, rather than struggling for a cure. Puppies come into this world with a whole set of genetic potentials, and some of those will be connected to just how well they cope under pressure. While we would like our dogs to live a wonderful, stress-free life, the reality is that this can’t always be the case. Every day, I have to get out of bed too early, get ready in no time, go in the office, deal with e-mails, phone calls, traffic and technology, fix the printer, tussle with the mail, work my way through a hundred little annoyances – and that’s all on a good day! Dogs also have to deal with life as it happens, warts and all – and how they learn to do this, how they learn to build effective coping strategies, is largely up to us.
Case history: Amber, the cotton-wool Cocker Spaniel puppy
One of the most potent arguments that the old-fashioned ‘pack’ theorists rely on is that in order to live together, dogs – and, by default, people – must fit into a structured hierarchy. This notion was based on the work of a Norwegian zoologist called Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe in 1921. He looked at social systems amongst hens and developed the idea of a ‘pecking order’ – a hierarchy based on physical dominance, in which one hen would peck another in order to establish rank. The phrase ‘pecking order’ has become commonplace in everyday parlance in this country and many others to describe social hierarchy. However, it takes more than a single step to extrapolate chicken behaviour to that of the wolf or dog (or even humans), and this is where myth and reality part company.
Watch wild dogs hunting as a pack, and what you see is not a rigid hierarchy at work but a fluid and flexible team operation. In any group of wild dogs there will inevitably be some individuals that are particularly fast, light on their feet or agile. These may be the dogs that chase the prey animal to tire it, effectively corralling it towards other members of the group that have different but no less impressive skills. For example, there might be one or two dogs that are recklessly fearless, and these are the ones who get the job of hanging onto the prey’s nose until other heavier or stronger team members do what they are good at and bring the prey down. In such an efficient hunting team, no individual has supremacy over any other; in fact, each individual has an equally important part to play in their survival.
Ah, but what about competition over resources, I hear you ask? What about those classic wildlife documentary scenes where you see two wolves – or even a group of adolescent youngsters – wrestling over a piece of hide or the last bone from the kill? Surely hierarchy has a part to play there? Well, in my view, only humans would watch a group of dogs tussle over a remnant and instantly come to the conclusion that they are competing. What about the possibility that they may be co-operating to rip apart pieces of carcass that are impossible to tackle alone? How about the idea that they might be gathering information about each other? Dogs that rely on a team to hunt need to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They need to know whether one individual is faster, stronger, slower or weaker on the right side or the left, and the time to find this out is not at the moment when an extremely angry warthog is bearing down on you, but well in advance during everyday interactions.
Of course, many dog owners find the idea that dogs are really wolves in disguise appealing. It’s fun – and rather powerful – to imagine that somehow humans took wolf cubs, raised them in their caves and ‘created’ domestic dogs. The myth says that we then managed to manipulate how they look and act, breeding them for long coats, short legs and droopy ears, and as long as we maintained ‘alpha’ status then we remained in control. The myth is wrong, though. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, domestic dogs are not the same as wolves. Despite sharing the vast majority of their genes with their cousins, they are simply not the same creature, as some wonderful 1960s studies demonstrated rather neatly.
In 1959 Dmitri Belyaev, a Russian geneticist, launched a long-term experiment to tame foxes with the initial aim of making them easier to handle for the fur trade. While this may seem horribly unethical to us now, in those days it was essential that captive animals bred for their fur were easy to care for and manage – primarily because injury resulted in the potential loss of the pelt’s commercial value. Starting with a population of caged wild foxes, which demonstrated typical fear and aggression towards humans, Belyaev selected cubs from each generation based on one criterion only – those that were tamest around people.
Changes began to appear very rapidly. It took only six generations of breeding for the foxes to start showing friendly behaviours, such as approaching when their keepers arrived rather than running away. Even more amazing was that after only thirty-five generations of breeding for friendly temperament, Belyaev’s foxes began to act like domestic dogs. The foxes wagged their tails when they saw their human carers approaching, whined for affection, used appeasement signals and made care-soliciting gestures. However, what was remarkable was not that Belyaev succeeded in breeding friendly foxes that seemed truly to like human contact; it was that with those behavioural changes came unexpected physiological ones too.
The friendly foxes lost their pricked ears and developed floppy ones instead. Their coats changed and acquired black and white patches, like a Collie, and became long and plush. Their tails turned up at the end, like a dog’s, rather than hanging down like a normal fox’s brush. In addition, the females came into season twice a year, like a bitch, rather than once a year, like a vixen. The foxes also started to bark in a way that was quite unlike anything the keepers had ever heard from a fox before.
Clearly, the genetic shift that caused ‘domestication’ in these foxes also had many other effects, which resulted in dog-like characteristics. Perhaps, as some eminent ethologists such as Ray Coppinger believe, a very similar set of circumstances occurred among wolves. Some of them might have shown less fear of humans way back in our collective past, and they were the ones that were inevitably ‘selected’ for breeding by the people who lived close to them, and probably used them as a food source too.
Such ‘domesticated’ attributes are certainly abundant in the juvenile and social dogs that we keep today. Artificial selection for appearance has done the rest, creating dogs as huge as the Great Dane and as diminutive as the Chihuahua – but this has only occurred relatively recently in dog terms. However, although domestication may have taken the adult wolf out of the dog, it’s important to understand that the dog itself is not fully ‘tame’ unless we help to make it so.
My mother, a primary school head teacher for thirty years, always stood by the adage, ‘Show me the boy before he is five, and I’ll show you the man’. While genetics have a huge part to play in canine behaviour traits, there is little doubt that the early weeks of a puppy’s life are also integral to the way the dog will behave as an adult. If you deny a puppy the chance to meet other dogs, people and the outside world, you can end up with a dog that is effectively institutionalised and fearful of all new experiences.
Puppies who are not exposed to all the sights, sounds and smells that life has to offer before the age of twelve to sixteen weeks may never gain confidence in later life, and may always have problems relating to other dogs or humans. This makes sense. Keep a child locked away in isolation until he or she is eight years old and we would not expect him or her to make a quick and easy social recovery. In fact, we would expect that he or she would be affected for life.
It’s obvious that puppies should have lots of positive experiences in those early days and weeks, but they also need to experience ‘real life’ in a gentle way too. Only by experiencing different emotional states can dogs learn to cope with them, and this means dealing with negative emotions as well as positive ones.
