Being without a dog for the past 10 years has been one of the most difficult aspects of growing old. Since childhood, I’ve always had one particular dog that was my friend and protector, and I miss that relationship even more than my youth.
My earliest memories were of the black Great Dane we called Satan. Actually, he was Mother’s dog more than mine, but I know he liked and protected me. He commanded respect because of his size, but he never bit anyone. So it was a shock to realize that smaller dogs could be a threat. I was bitten by every dog in the neighborhood because, next to Satan, they all looked small and not scary.
Once, as a toddler, I bolted away from my nanny, ran up to a Doberman that was sitting on his own porch, bopped him on the head and said, “Nice doggie.” In one move, he glommed my whole face. I never blamed him; after all, he was guarding his own house.
Years later, friends gave me a two-year-old female Doberman because they were moving and couldn’t keep her. She was sweet, never bit anyone, but was respected because her breed had a significant reputation for aggression. My older sister said she couldn’t believe I got a Doberman and didn’t I remember the one who attacked me? Well, I did, but of course that was really my own fault.
My daughter Betty has trained all sorts of animals for the movies, most notably the mixed-shepherd dog on the TV show “Mad About You.” Maui (renamed Maurie for the series set in New York) was the director’s second choice. His first choice growled at the star, Paul Reiser, fatally altering the trajectory of its career.
Recently, I came across two articles about the domestication of dogs in Scientific American and Scientific American Mind that re-examined what had previously been accepted as fact concerning canid evolution from modern gray wolves. Turns out, that was wrong. Although dogs share 99.9 percent of their DNA with gray wolves, recent sequencing confirms another ancestor from Siberia, a different wolf that has gone extinct.
Also, domestication of canids was thought to have coincided with the agricultural revolution, but now connects conclusively with earlier humans as hunter-gatherers. It makes sense that using dogs/wolves to aid in hunting large prey would benefit both.
Virginia Morell’s piece “From Wolf to Dog” cites studies analyzing whole genomes showing the two species are “sister taxa.”
Most interesting to me, and not mentioned in either article, is the interbreeding between the Australian Shepherd dog and the Dingo (a wild dog of Australia). Ranchers were looking for a dog with herding instincts, but harder footpads and mouths and a tougher disposition for working cattle instead of sheep. The result was exactly as they hoped and was named the Queensland Healer.
Other incidents of interbreeding to exaggerate certain characteristics have served to muddle genomic studies. Skeletal remains of dogs buried in the Czech Republic roughly 27,000 years ago have different shaped skulls than the herders bred in Peru 1,000 years ago.
The other article, “The Science of a Friendship” by Adam Miklosi, focuses more on how dogs became our friends and whether they feel some of the same emotions that we do.
“Dogs have figured out how to join the community of an entirely alien species; evidence of sophisticated social competence,” Miklosi wrote.
The crucial component of social competence apparently is the ability to form an attachment, which closely resembles the bond between human mothers and babies.
Staring into each other’s eyes releases oxytocin, the love hormone, in both humans and dogs.
Miklosi, a biologist and ethology department head at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, studies human-dog interactions with a special interest in cognitive abilities of dogs. Some of the tests he describes seem odd to me, but anecdotal evidence of human-dog attachments abound.
My husband Mack had acquired a six-week-old Queensland Healer puppy that he trained to work cattle. It became closely attached to him and didn’t care much for me. After we married — and I regularly fed the dog — he still mostly ignored me. When our son was born, the dog also ignored him until Mack left the house. Then he wouldn’t let the child out of his sight, sleeping under his crib or in front of his door. As soon as Mack returned, the dog went back to ignoring the child and they never became close. So is a dog capable of knowing that he is responsible for his owner’s child? How would he know that?
Scientific testing can’t match daily observation. And I really do miss having a dog.