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The mesmerising stare of the wolf which many of us, including myself, find so bewitching may have an entirely different purpose for the wolf. Before a pack chooses which animal in a herd to pursue, wolves look closely at each animal in turn, and more often than not the animal returns the gaze. Native Americans call this the ‘Conversation of Death’, and its purpose is for the wolf to assess the condition of the prey. The healthy animals in a herd often completely ignore a pack of wolves as they know they will pass this inspection. The sick and ill betray their nervousness to the wolves by their actions, sometimes even going so far as to stand up and walk away from the rest of the herd as if giving themselves up. The accuracy of this assessment is of paramount importance to the wolves, as the correct choice of victim may mean the difference between a full stomach and starvation. Bear that in mind the next time you exchange fond glances with your pet.
I was told as a child that dogs could smell your fear, so never show it. Of course, that made things even worse and the Hell Hound down the road must have realised I would make an easy kill, which no one will persuade me was not his intention every time I passed his gate on the way to school. Dogs are not wolves, but although many of their behaviours have been sublimated over the millennia as we have grown closer, the original template remains firmly lupine.
Whether or not we like to think so, everything about a dog – its appearance, its senses and its behaviour – are just versions of the wolf’s, albeit attenuated or enhanced by millennia of selection. Selection has done amazing things to create today’s dog, but the scaffolding on which it is built remains that of the wolf, and the limits to what selection can achieve are set by this basic framework. Selection cannot produce dogs that naturally walk on two legs. Although this is a trick that can be taught, no dog will ever walk on two legs better than it does on four, at least not in the foreseeable future. They are constrained by the architecture of the hip as surely as our own ancestors were in the distant past. Likewise, a dog will never learn to talk, though again they are able with training to appear to mutter a few words. The essential neurological pathways required for language are simply not there. Nonetheless, within these limits our two species have discovered similarities that have brought us together despite the vast evolutionary distances between us and the enormous differences in our genomes.
We can form much closer emotional bonds with dogs than we can with our nearest evolutionary cousin, the chimpanzee. Experts in animal behaviour have been aware of this for years and tested it thoroughly. For example, even though chimpanzees are much better than dogs at performing a wide range of tasks, dogs do better than chimps in others. One popular test is to place an item of food under one of two upturned beakers then see how often the dog or the chimp picks the correct one at a given signal from the experimenter. Given a dog’s extraordinary sense of smell, the experiment incorporates controls to avoid the animal using this advantage, for example by smearing both beakers with food or by hiding them behind a glass screen. With no other clues, both dogs and chimps select the correct beaker about half the time, as expected. The experimenter then does something to indicate which of the beakers covers the food, perhaps with a glance or by touching the beaker, and then counts the successful attempts. Chimps are not good at this test, although they will eventually learn. Dogs, on the other hand, pass with flying colours almost immediately.
The conclusion of this and other tests is that, while the chimps can eventually work out what to do, the dogs are able to follow the actions and read the intentions of the experimenter straight away. The interpretation of this uncanny ability, which is also shared by the wolf, is that it stems from their acute sensitivity to the signals from other members of the pack. They are also able to read the signals given out by prey animals that help the wolves to select the right target, catch it and kill it. On the open tundra, knowing which of a hundred caribou to go after is vital to avoid a fruitless pursuit. This is the ultimate origin of the dog’s ability to pick up the subtle signals that their owner is about to take them for a walk well before the door is opened. The natural inclination to interpret this as a sign of intelligence in our beloved pet is countered by their stubborn inability to perform tasks that we see as very straightforward. For example, faced with food placed behind a length of fencing, a dog will repeatedly try to get through it, ignoring the encouragement of the owner to go round instead.
It’s a long time since our ancestors survived on hunting wild game, and since the invention of agriculture we have almost entirely lost the ability to read the minds of other animals. Nonetheless, many hunters report a feeling that they ‘know’ what their prey will do next, another of the many atavistic senses from our Palaeolithic past. We were hunters once, and in many ways, deep inside, we still are.
There is one other vital feature that we share with the wolf that has not yet been completely extinguished by millennia of civilisation. Like the wolf pack, we depend on each other. Surprising as it may seem, and however imperfectly we manage to do so individually, our success as a species stems from our ability to work together, just like the wolf pack, to achieve what we cannot do alone. The basic unit of cooperation in humans has always been the family and there are good reasons for this. When we slowly evolved from tree-living ancestors in the African forests and became truly bipedal as we colonised the savannah, our skeletons had to change to allow us to walk upright. One of these changes was in the pelvis, where the pubic bone fused at the front, greatly narrowing the birth canal. Simultaneously and in order to grow a larger and more complex brain, babies’ skulls grew and, ever since then, labour and birth have been difficult and dangerous for women. The growth of the brain and the time taken to make all the right neuronal connections within it extended the time that babies and infants need our care and attention. This meant that to survive during the long time it took for our children to become independent, mothers needed the support of the family group. Also we learned the advantage of hunting in groups rather than alone. That cooperation enabled our ancestors to hunt much larger prey, and this was particularly important in Palaeolithic Europe where, as we have seen, there was an abundant supply of large herbivores.
Even though our distant African ancestors probably encountered Cape hunting dogs and allied species that also hunt in well-organised packs, when they first arrived in Europe some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago they would have seen at first hand the hunting strategy of the grey wolf and perhaps even begun to emulate it. Although humans and wolves had little else in common, the ability to cooperate within a close-knit family group was very strong in both species.
The basic social unit is the wolf pack. It is almost an organism in its own right, separate from the individual members and whose survival as a unit is paramount. A wolf that finds itself excluded, excommunicated from the pack, must find another one and be accepted into it or face starvation and an early death. A typical pack is an extended family of around half a dozen related individuals. Occasionally packs of thirty wolves are reliably reported, but hundreds-strong ‘super packs’ gleefully reported in the press make for good copy but are highly unlikely. In a typical example, ‘According to reports … a state of emergency was declared when the eastern Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on the banks of the Yana river was surrounded by four hundred ravenous wolves who killed thirty of the village’s horses, leaving the terrified villagers wondering whether they would be next on the menu.’1 This story plays to our deep-seated fear of wolves, which, together with our fear of the dark, deep forests and dangerous predators, is another aspect of the Palaeolithic archetype which is part of our make-up even today.
Life in the wolf pack is much more prosaic. As we have seen, there is usually just one breeding pair in each pack, the alpha pair, and breeding takes place only once a year, in February or March, with cubs being born after sixty-three days. Litters are usually between four and six, but the number varies depending on the availability of food. In good years there might be up to a dozen pups in a litter, while in lean years the alpha pair may not breed at all. Pups are born deaf and blind. They can hear after a few days, open their eyes about ten days later and are weaned at five weeks. By this time they have ventured outside the den, but they stay close to the entrance while they play. The play begins to establish the all-important social order within the litter that, though it changes many times, underlies the ultimate organisation of the pack. Dog owners and breeders will recognise many of the same milestones.
While we see ample demonstrations of love and devotion in a mother’s treatment of her cubs, it is underscored by the ruthless discipline of the wild. Any cub showing signs of physical disability will be killed, and even eaten. Each of these measures, the hormonal regulation of litter size according to the abundance of prey and the elimination of the weak and disabled, is there to protect the survival of the pack. So too is the interest the other adults show in the alpha female’s cubs and the affection the youngsters give in return. Unlike in many other species, adults make no attempt to take food given to growing pups, and within the pack there is a strong sense of respect for the social order.
This is reminiscent of the way many social insects like bees and ants behave where the lives of the workers, all sterile, are completely devoted to the survival of the alpha female’s, the queen’s, offspring. The evolutionary explanation for this altruism is that even though the workers have no offspring of their own, their efforts to support their sister, the queen, help to ensure that their DNA flows through to the next generation. As with the beehive, the wolf pack is at heart an extended family. Konrad Lorenz, a keen observer of dog behaviour, interpreted the altruism of the wolf pack as marking the beginning of a primitive sense of morality. The strong sense of family shown by the wolf, and shared albeit clumsily by ourselves, lies at the heart of the unexpectedly close relationship our ancestors managed to develop with this wild creature and which some of us continue to enjoy with our pets.
A grey wolf pack at rest in a wolf reserve in Canada. The social bonds of the pack are key to the wolves’ happiness and survival. (Jose Schell/Nature Picture Library)
Most research on wolf behaviour, especially in the early days, was carried out on captive animals confined to an area only a fraction the size of their natural territory. These animals were fed every day, so did not need to hunt, neither were they necessarily related to each other, as is the case in the wild. John Bradshaw from the University of Bristol specialises in the behaviour of dogs. He has come to think that the commonly held view of a rigidly enforced dominance hierarchy within wolf packs is seriously distorted simply because the animals observed in captivity are unrelated.2 Captive animals tend to be more aggressive towards each other than is generally seen in the wild, and this is no surprise in Bradshaw’s view. Basing theories about pack behaviour on captive wolves would be like inferring all the subtleties of normal human interactions from the behaviour of long-term prison inmates.
According to Bradshaw, this misinterpretation of pack behaviour, in particular the role of the ‘alpha male’, is responsible for some of the more distasteful methods of dog training, often involving physical punishment. Adolph Murie, the first biologist properly to study wolves in their natural Arctic habitat, was left with the impression that first and foremost wolves within a pack were friendly to one another.3 Unlike captive wolves, they absolutely have to get along to survive. Although there is a harsh side to discipline, it does not detract from the amicable and mutually supportive relations that are the fundamental adhesives of the pack.
Although the structure within a pack is fluid and can change with time and circumstance, there are two separate hierarchies. The alpha female and the alpha male take precedence over the others of their sex, and although it was once thought that they formed the only breeding pair, it now emerges that although the alpha female is the only animal to have young, it is not always the alpha male that is the father. Again, rather loosely, precedence is signalled by a variety of postures and gestures, and generally, but not always, the alpha animals are the first to feed at a kill.
The myth of the alpha male who must never be challenged has become an easily recognised caricature of our human society but is based, at least in part, on our distorted impression of the social order of the wolf pack. It is the alpha female that has the greatest say. She selects the victim and directs the hunt. The beta animals are the ones that enforce the will of the alpha female, for example by challenging the prey to help her gauge its fitness. Shortly before the cubs are born, the pack converges near the denning site chosen by the pregnant female, to help out. They bring her food and, after the pups are weaned, they take over responsibility for teaching them the ways of the pack.
The parallels with our own family lives are striking, and therein lies the root of the bond between the two species. The wolf has by necessity honed its social arrangements to fit its method of cooperative hunting, and this spills over into their family life in ways we find very familiar. When our Palaeolithic ancestors first encountered the grey wolf in Europe, they saw a wild animal that behaved on the hunt much as they did themselves. Their predecessors, the Neanderthals, must also have witnessed wolves in action, but as far as we know never contemplated working together with them for mutual advantage. Textbooks speak of the domestication of the wolf as if it were an inevitable process directed solely by and for the benefit of humans. I prefer to think that it was not inevitable at all but required a definite inventive step by one or a very few individuals, and we will examine the genetic evidence for this statement a little further on in the book.
Even these days very few original inventions are made by more than one person. After the all-important inventive step there may be many modifications and refinements, but truly original thoughts are very few and far between. Versions of the invention, if it is any good, spread quickly – these days almost instantly – but the original thought happens only once. I can think of several cases in science where this has happened. The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming, the revelation of the basis for genetic fingerprinting by Alec Jeffreys, the polymerase chain reaction which transformed molecular genetics by Kari Mullis, and the discovery of the helical structure of DNA itself by James Watson and Francis Crick – all of these sprung from one or two brilliant minds. The same is true in all branches of science, technology and the creative arts.
The alliance our ancestors forged with the wolf was an event of seminal importance in human evolution and ranks with the other innovations such as the bow and arrow, the spear-thrower and the flowering of art and music. All these things secured our ancestors’ survival through the harshest conditions of the Ice Age.