ONE
The Cave
The elusive first dog—is it an image in Plato’s Cave,
a human desire posing as reality? Or is it the wolf
next door—the dog who always was?
There is something disconcertingly familiar about the tracks that appear abruptly deep in Chauvet Cave, an ancient many-chambered rock art gallery cut high into the limestone of a gorge overlooking the prehistoric bed of the Ardèche River that rushes out of the rugged, volcanic Massif Central in south-central France. The footprints belong to a boy about eight years old and just over four feet tall, walking through a bestiary where images of giant animals line the walls or emerge abruptly from crevasses, wavering in the dancing light of the torch that he holds in one hand for balance and light. Beside him glides a ghostly presence, a four-legged shadow that can project itself into another realm and then rematerialize in the blink of an eye, looking as if it had gone nowhere, as if its absent self were a figment of our imagination. We assume that the boy and the creature have names, though neither is known to us. They could have walked through the cave yesterday or last year, but they passed through twenty-six thousand years ago. Whether they came here to explore a place that they had just discovered or to revisit a sacred ground is also unknown. The footprints simply appear and then vanish.1
It is unlikely that the boy added any art to the cave galleries, perhaps already twelve thousand years old when he viewed them, and doubtful that he knew anything more than that they were the work of ancients—if he knew that much. After all, they portrayed the animals his own people hunted—horses, aurochs, megaceros deer, reindeer, and moose—as well as those with whom they sometimes contended for food and shelter—bears, jaguars, dirk-toothed cats and scimitar-toothed cats, lions, other wild dogs, and several species of hyenas. They also portrayed an owl, known widely for the ease with which it navigated the night and for its sagacity, or wisdom, to which many people aspired. Inexplicably, nearly two-thirds of the paintings in Chauvet Cave portray these predators, as well as two large animals that people tended not to hunt—mammoths, rhinoceroses—although they opportunistically took the young of each.
At the time the boy and dogwolf visited Chauvet Cave, bone-aching cold and deepening ice were advancing across Europe, disrupting the biannual migrations of animals and people. The plants—grasses, fruits, berries, and nuts—that both relied on were dead or dying, replaced by other plants that they could not, or would not, eat or by glaciers. Seeking food and shelter, people and animals moved south toward the Mediterranean, or they found refuge in the north in pockets of warmth that persisted through the most bitter cold. They congregated along the Ardèche and other rivers flowing out of the Massif Central or followed them to the Rhône River and ultimately to the Mediterranean Sea. Animals and people were hungry and on the move. The boy might have been one of the migrants, or he might have called this land and cave his home and counted himself among the chosen ones to live in a place where the herds still grazed and nuts and berries were abundant. The challenge lay in getting them before the animals, who seemed always to strike and strip vines and trees bare the moment the fruit reached its peak.
The Chauvet Cave rock paintings are the oldest yet found, the first in a tradition that flourished in southwestern France and Spain until around seventeen thousand years ago when artists—they may have been shaman or graffitists, but since they produced art, I will call them artists—painted the crowning glory of Paleolithic art, the Grotte de Lascaux. By that time, the cold had broken and the ice sheets had begun their long retreat. Warmth-loving plants and animals were recolonizing abandoned lands and new territory so rapidly that it appeared as if they were racing one another to a land’s end that no one could see. Resuming the migratory hunting life of their ancestors—following reindeer, bison, horses, and aurochs—some groups moved northward from the south of France, while others turned northeastward. Wherever people went, it seemed that they met strangers coming from other directions, many of them with dogs.
Doubtless the cave artists had stories, along with their images, to explain why they followed the herds of big grazers, while many neighboring groups hunted them only when they passed by their caves on their long migrations. These storytelling artists must also have had tales about how the ancients first encountered the dogwolves that later hunted with them and guarded their camps against predatory people and animals.
The Chauvet Cave artists stenciled their handprints on the wall, like signatures, but they did not draw humans, wolves, or dogs, although alone or together they were the most ubiquitous predators around human dwellings at that time. Artists at other caves did not depict humans or canids, either—not even those at Lascaux. The artists might have believed that self-revelation would bring them harm, the way many American Indians believed that a portrait captured living people’s spirit and caused a bad fate to befall them.
Or perhaps the Lascaux artists believed themselves born of the union of woman and dog, or woman and wolf. The first mother appears in terra-cotta as a wide, fecund body, often referred to in our age as a fertility goddess or “Venus,” but the dogwolf remains absent, perhaps because of taboos, like those in Judaism and Islam, against creating images of the deity.
The search for the first dog seems always to lead to more questions, to dissolve into a ghostly visage leaping just out of grasp. The dog remains a hint, a whispered rumor in the genetic code, an inexplicable fossil, before it seems to arrive full blown upon the scene, a gift from the gods or a god itself—or more. The Aboriginal people of Australia said: “The dingo is what we would be if we were not what we are.” That is why the impressions left in Chauvet Cave’s soft mud are so tantalizing in their intimation that twenty-six thousand or so years ago a boy and a dog walked there, just like they would today. That is why not everyone will agree, even when standing in front of the impressions, that what they see is a dog as opposed to the illusion of a dog.2
But suppose the tall, lean animal shadowing the boy is not a dog but rather a wolf—a socialized wolf nearly as old as the boy. What distinguishes it from a socialized dog? What brought the boy and the wolf to this cave and where did they go from here—physically and metaphorically? Most discussions of domestication focus on physiological, behavioral, and genetic changes that mark the advent of a domesticated animal, whether it’s the dog, the horse, the goat, or some other animal. These changes are the manifest clues that let archaeologists and paleontologists distinguish between the remains of wolves and dogs—as well as other wild animals and their domestic kin—but their appearance does not necessarily mark the moment of domestication, as it were, nor the reason for it.
How then, do we learn about the origins of the dog, the animal who shares our lives more intimately sometimes than members of our own families? That is the signal question underlying this book. The answer is simultaneously straightforward and convoluted due, in large measure, to the animals involved—human and wolf—highly social, tactically minded, pack-hunting global wanderers.
That the Dog is a Wolf modified by nature, wolves, and humans is as nearly beyond dispute as an evolutionary line of descent can be. Geneticists, paleontologists, archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, and animal behaviorists, who normally agree on little else, have confirmed that finding repeatedly. The primary lingering questions are: Which wolf subspecies or population gave rise to the dog? And did the dog evolve more than once in different locales, following different paths from among different wolves?
Georges-Louis Leclerc, better known to history as Comte de Buffon, the great eighteenth-century French natural scientist who anticipated Charles Darwin by nearly a century, believed the wolf bore the dog, but was frustrated in his attempts to breed a shewolf to a greyhound in the hope of producing fertile offspring that would prove his theory. Buffon had raised the two together specifically to encourage their mating once mature, but the wolf repeatedly rejected the greyhound’s advances and attacked him. Finally, frustrated, the greyhound killed the wolf. More often than not, when such experiments have been tried subsequently, results have gone the other way, with the female wolf killing the male dog, often after copulation. That’s why the more common cross is male wolf to female dog.
Buffon never caught on with the English-speaking public partly because he was French and partly because his perfectly lucid predictions were negative. Darwin preferred to ignore his work, and subsequent Darwin scholars tended to follow his lead, until recently. Buffon by now has received credit for suggesting common ancestry for humans and apes, as well as dogs and wolves, donkeys and horses, and other animals. Buffon also believed that characteristics developed by an individual in response to the environment were passed on to the organism’s offspring. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, developed that idea into a theory of evolution based on the inheritability of acquired physical and behavioral traits. Although once discredited, Lamarckism is enjoying a revival among some environmental and evolutionary biologists studying the ways in which environmentally triggered mutations in the genomes of individuals can be passed on to their descendants but because they wish not to be identified with Lamarck, they call their field “epigenetics.”
Buffon also believed that species tended to degenerate from the parent form, not to improve. For Buffon, the sheepdog was the “ur-dog,” the closest to the original wolf stock in terms of brains and talent. Breeds or types of dogs that followed were lacking in one or more essential characteristics of the wolf. Buffon engaged in a heated debate with Thomas Jefferson over his assertion that humans and animals in the New World were degenerate versions of those found in the Old World. Jefferson convinced him otherwise.
Charles Darwin’s progressive metaphors suited the nineteenth-century zeitgeist in America and England much better, and his language did not require translation. Unfortunately, although Darwin got much right about many topics, including dogs, whom he loved, his observations and theories about their origins were wrong. He observed that northern wolflike dogs were so different from southern pariah dogs that they had to have separate parent species—wolf and jackal respectively. Then and now, the jackal was considered a garbage-grubbing scavenger, fit largely to be killed on sight, while the wolf was all that was wild and free—and, of course, the enemy of livestock.
Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian founder of modern ethology—the study of animal behavior—embraced Darwin’s erroneous notion for most of his long career, which is to say for much of the twentieth century. He changed his mind and accepted the wolf as the sole progenitor of both northern and southern dogs after listening closely to the respective vocalizations of jackals and wolves. Unfortunately, Lorenz’s initial error had appeared in his 1949 bestselling book, Man Meets Dog, which has long outlived his later correction. In 1967, John Paul Scott, coauthor with John L. Fuller of the classic study of dog development, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, declared that behaviorally the dog could be descended only from the wolf. Dogs are capable of all wolfish behaviors except when humans have altered their physical and behavioral responses through breeding.3
Put another way: Human breeders have by design and accident made some dogs more wolflike than others. For example, dogs and wolves are gregarious, sociable animals who communicate through physical posturing, scent marking, and a variety of vocalizations—howls, including harmonized howls; growls; chirps; chortles; yodels; shrieks; snorts; whines; whimpers; sighs; and barks. Wolves are said to bark little, and then only in defense of their dens, but that is an exaggeration. They will bark at a bear or lion they are encouraging to abandon its recent kill for what appear to be the same reasons some dogs will bark at livestock they are herding—to disrupt its thought process, get and hold its attention, and help control its movement. I say “help” because additional actions, like snapping teeth and bluff charges, usually accompany the wolf’s barking. Dogs, on the other hand, have developed barking into a high art, a fairly sophisticated, and frequently maddening, form of communication that humans with a little effort can understand.
But humans, primarily through selective breeding, have altered the appearance and physical capabilities of some dogs in ways that sharply curtail their ability to communicate. Floppy ears lack the mobile expressiveness of prick ears. Excessively long hair prevents other dogs and humans from looking into an animal’s eyes in order to read its intentions, while docked or naturally shortened tails deprive dogs of a whole range of significant communicative gestures. The individual animal’s size, shape, and other physical characteristics clearly affect its speed, stamina, strength, and relationship with the world.
More important, in terms of the origins of the dog, both wolves and dogs can become well socialized to people and other animals during a crucial developmental period that begins at three weeks of age. That period lasts until around eight weeks for wolves and fourteen weeks for dogs, after which both enter a “fear period” that works against forming close bonds to people, although both are capable of forming adult friendships. That extended socialization period and delayed fear response in puppies appears to lie at the heart of the difference between dog and wolf, although how and when the dog came to possess it are still unclear.
For some years, biologists have tended to say that the transformation occurred at a time when humans were giving up their hunting and foraging ways and settling into more or less fixed villages. Wolves joined the army of other scavengers working the midden heaps on the edge of the villages. Over time, the dump-diving wolves tamed themselves—that is, made themselves less fearful of humans. The observant humans chose the best of them to tame further and turn into dogs. A major problem with this theory is that the accepted archaeological evidence says that the human groups with the first dogs were hunters and gatherers, not proto-farmers. A second problem is conceptual: Why would early humans want to bring into their lives and homes a sniveling offal eater? Even if the humans themselves were as rank and dirty as they are frequently portrayed in docudramas, that they threw garbage—waste—in specific places suggests that they perceived it as categorically different from what they kept. There is scant evidence that they did not view scavengers hanging around their middens the same way. From all indications, early humans did not take in and tame hyenas, who were the primary scavengers among the animals found at many early human sites. Dogs rank among the best scrounges in the world, but it does not follow that their progenitor wolf had to become a garbage-dump beggar before humans could accept it and then bring forth its true talents, rescuing it from the trash heap and turning it into a hardworking, lovable companion.
Many students of dog evolution have largely failed to match proposed dates derived from genetic analyses with what was happening among wolves and early humans, including human ancestors, at that time in the place or places dogs were said to have first appeared. In the pages that follow I aim to pick a path through an often bewildering, sometimes contradictory, mass of information to examine how, why, when, and where these two species—human and wolf—got together and produced the dog. I will begin with a review of what has already been proposed and then offer my own explanations, based on what we know and can reasonably conjecture.
Genetic analyses conducted since the late 1990s have placed the origins of the dog as early as 135,000 years ago. That remains a tantalizing date, but most researchers into dog evolution have chosen to ignore it as too early. Scientists have divided into two camps, one placing dog origins around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago; the other, around 12,000 to 16,000 years ago. An additional proposed date of 27,000 years ago, based on nuclear DNA, came out of the completed sequencing of the dog genome.
Proponents of the older dates favor the view that dogs arose in multiple locations and for some time thereafter were frequently crossed with wild wolves—a practice that continues, although the number of dogs is so large that the wolves now leave barely a trace in the overall dog gene pool. Even in their own corner of the world, such hybrids soon pass back into dog except, perhaps, for a few variations on genes that might or might not help the local dogs improve their strength or intelligence or endurance or looks. Reflecting the human cultural bias that sees dogs as debased wolves, wildlife biologists tend to view dog genes that find their way into depleted populations of wild wolves or booming populations of coyotes and their hybrids as detrimental.4
Groups supporting a more recent origin following the Last Glacial Maximum diverge regarding time and place. Many favor the Middle East and other locations in Europe and Asia. In 2009, a team of Chinese and European geneticists stated with certainty that the dog originated from a population of several hundred wolves south of the Yangtze River, no earlier than 16,300 years ago. Virtually all of the world’s dogs belong to one of six clades, defined by similarities in their mitochondrial DNA, that originated in this region around the same time.5
In domesticating wolves, a group of people in that region sought to create a more palatable and manageable entrée, the research team said. The dogs were raised in cages, undoubtedly with their canines and carnassials broken off to prevent them from chewing their way to freedom. The people south of the Yangtze also began raising guard dogs. In quick order, the descendants of these dogs spread to all corners of the globe, developing new talents and traits as they went. In effect, these early dogs transformed themselves from dinner to consumer of game that they helped hunt, kill, and carry to the pot, which they still sometimes occupied. Odder conversions have happened in history, to be sure, but this one is a little hard to digest because it assumes not only that a top predator can be made a prey species—that is, livestock—but also that the results can be reversed and extended in the opposite behavioral direction. The docile prey species can be remade into a predator for the benefit of another species.6
Dates derived from DNA analyses rely on a number of assumptions regarding such “facts” as when one species split from another—say the coyote from the gray wolf—and a regular rate of mutation in specific regions of the genome. Maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA is traditionally used for such studies because it has its own genome, which is considerably smaller and more easily sequenced than the full genome. The Y or male chromosome often provides dates that diverge markedly from the mitochondrial DNA, and until recently has not been commonly looked at by researchers attempting to sleuth out the dog’s origin. The same goes for the complete dog genome, which researchers finished sequencing in 2005. Using sophisticated computer software and specially manufactured chips that allow them to survey all of this genetic material from large numbers of animals, geneticists have begun producing new studies of wolf and dog evolution with sometimes surprising, and apparently contradictory, results. Statistically those results might be unassailable, but no group has produced the physical evidence needed to clinch its case. Whether such evidence exists is an interesting question—it might not.
Proponents of a southeastern China origin for the dog, in attempting to explain the absence of fossil evidence supporting their thesis, argue that archaeological sites have either not been excavated or were excavated without regard to whatever canine bones might have been found. (That claim is made around the world and has the ring of truth: Dogs are ubiquitous in texts but are not indexed, because they are animals; so, too, canids abound in many archaeological collections but have largely gone unsorted and uncataloged.) But they fail to show why they have chosen the area south of the Yangtze River above other places in China and Asia more likely to have served as a place of origin for the dog. In most parts of the world, the first dogs appeared in the camps of hunters and gatherers following the migrating herds of reindeer, horses, and other big game. Evidence suggests that dogs were camp guards, hunters, companions, and, perhaps, draft animals.
China covers a vast territory with the Huang He (Yellow) River, well north of the Yangtze, taken as the traditional ecological, agricultural, and cultural divide between the wheat-producing north and the rice-growing south. During the last glacial advance, northern China and neighboring Mongolia formed a region of open steppes and tundra that harbored large ungulates and the animals who hunted them, including humans and wolves. From all available evidence, this area is more likely to have figured in the creation of the dog than southeastern China, where wolves were in short supply and no dog remains more than ten thousand years old have been found. The country itself was more rugged and forested than the steppes, with a great diversity of animal life for hunters to exploit. Even accepting for the moment that dog meat is as fine a delicacy as its proponents claim, there is a difference between sacrificing the occasional puppy from a larger pool and raising large numbers of those puppies as food. It is hard to see, for example, why people would choose to domesticate for food an animal that could potentially harm them and would have produced scant caloric return for the amount of effort spent in capturing, holding, and breeding it in fairly large numbers. Gastronomic logic suggests that given the rapid spread of dogs, if serving as dinner was their primary purpose, more people around the world would be chowing down on them now. More likely, the wolf who became dog helped find, hunt, haul, and guard the large meat on the hoof that its human companions preferred.
An argument in favor of a one-time domestication event flies in the face of a growing body of scientific literature showing that domestication of a species invariably occurred at several different, and often widely separated, locations and involved several different populations or subspecies. The Middle East, Europe, and Southwest Asia have all produced dog fossils dating to about 14,000 years, but finding earlier physical evidence for the dog has proved difficult. Specimens are rare and often of a sort that can make distinguishing dog from wolf difficult. Dated to 31,700 years ago, a canine skull found in Goyet Cave, Belgium, in the 1860s, and then tossed aside as uninteresting, was recently declared a dog on the basis of its shortened muzzle, believed a sign of domestication, and its mitochondrial DNA, which does not match that of any known wolf. It does not match other dogs’, either, but that does not bother the animal’s human supporters.
Skeptics say that wolves from that period were as variable as early dogs and so the Goyet Cave dog might actually be a wolf—such are the difficulties involved in finding evidence for an evolutionary split that might initially have been imperceptible.
Similarly the mud-preserved paw print in Chauvet Cave was declared that of a dog because the animal seemed to have accompanied the boy on his journey and the print more nearly resembled that of a dog than a wolf. But expert animal trackers admit that distinguishing dog from wolf prints, assuming the animals are of similar size, is at best difficult even when the print is fresh and clear. When the prints are twenty-six thousand years old and belong to animals that may no longer exist, the task is that much harder, even if they are immaculately preserved.
Still, the evidence suggests that the flesh-and-blood creatures at the Goyet and Chauvet caves were large socialized wolves who served as camp guards, hunters, haulers, and fellow wanderers. Their appearance is arguably the strongest physical evidence for the early dog and for the hypothesis that what is commonly called “domestication” of the wolf occurred in several different places, and involved different subspecies or populations. The paucity of older fossil evidence does not arise from a lack of looking on the part of contemporary archaeologists and paleontologists, nor does it absolutely mean that the early animals called dogs are indeed phantoms, that there were no dogs at that time horizon. But it does suggest that although there may have been socialized wolves, they were not dogs. The lack of physical evidence can be due to many reasons, not the least of which is that the dog existed genetically before it did phenotypically, and I can say that because the dog is fundamentally a wolf still capable of looking like a wolf. But archaeologists want a canid that looks like a dog—large or small—before they will admit its existence.
In this regard the archaeologists claim an inherent advantage because they deal only with physical evidence, but for that reason they have failed collectively to deal with the genetic evidence, which has its own standards. I have chosen to reject neither the genetic nor the archaeological evidence and to focus on two periods—the first covers the initial encounter of humans and wolves, currently set around one-hundred and fortly thousand years ago, and the second runs from around forty to fifty thousand years ago to the dawn of the Neolithic Age ten thousand years ago.
This period encompasses the rise of art and culture, weaving, invention of new and more lethal weapons, long-distance trade, the extinction of Neanderthal, and the dramatic retreat into refuges to escape the most recent glacial lockdown of the planet. The Last Glacial Maximum reached its peak around twenty-four thousand years ago but lasted from twenty-seven thousand to nineteen thousand years ago, or possibly shorter. The period ends with retreating ice, and human and dog population explosions out of those refuges to retake a world growing warmer and wetter.
Any number of explanations for how the wolf became dog concentrate on this period, particularly the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, because that is when the first dogs appear in human burials. They are smaller than the wolves of the region in which they are found, we are told, and further distinguished from wolves by an overall slighter build, shortened and broadened nose that initially is too small for their teeth, which show clear evidence of crowding, and other physiological changes that, taken together and in the context of a burial with a human or humans, spell “dog.” Those size differences are explained as the results of malnutrition at the time of domestication, an argument based on the assumption that a free wolf ate far better than a scavenging camp follower. Or the smaller size could be due to a biological process called paedomorphosis and broadly defined as early sexual maturation and delayed physical and mental maturation relative to the parent species. The paedomorphic dog, in short, looks like the juvenile wolf.
Whatever their cause, those changes have long been interpreted as the inevitable result of domestication and thus proof of it. According to the two most popular lines of thought today, domestication happened because humans adopted puppies from the ranks of garbage-eating, self-taming wolves hanging around their villages; or because humans adopted and raised wolf puppies on a regular basis, and over time enough of them were hanging around the camp and tame enough that something happened and they became dogs.
Neither explanation seems satisfactory—that is why there is no consensus—and so in an effort to provide a new way of looking at the problem, I decided to change names a little. I call the wolf who takes up residence with a human a “socialized wolf,” rather than a “tame wolf.” I use this term because tame is a word tied up with domestication and meekness or subservience, and the wolf who befriended an early human was not that. Rather it was an animal capable of forming an active friendship with a creature from another species.
Individuals in a band of hunters and gatherers could have socialized wolves in small numbers for years and generations, and no doubt did. But in other cases, a band’s socialized wolves would breed with each other and in so doing become what I call “dogwolves,” to denote animals that are doglike wolves rather than wolflike dogs or “wolfdogs.”
We don’t currently know beyond a doubt what natural and cultural events led groups of “socialized wolves” in several locations to integrate so fully into human society that they stopped being wolves, but I think we have to assume, absent proof to the contrary, that the association between socialized wolves and humans was consensual and mutual, and in response to the needs and desires of both species, as well as to exigencies of rapidly shifting environmental conditions. They helped each other out, and they adapted together to a changing world.
Arguably, both wolves and humans made a conceptual leap to “dog,” a wolf who cast its evolutionary lot with humans and thus ceased being a wolf in physical and cultural terms. In prehistory and early history, captive wolves could have been restrained tightly with wood and sinew or woven fabric or leather, but could not have been kept that way easily and securely for long periods unless their teeth were knocked out. Until the advent of metallurgy thousands of years later, which allowed humans to produce stronger collars, chains, and cages, an unwilling wolf could not be routinely tied up or restrained in a less-than-sturdy stockade or a deep, covered pit. But by that time, animals clearly recognized as dogs were widespread, so factors other than force must have been involved in the wolf’s ancient and ubiquitous presence in and around human encampments.
The dog could have arisen only from animals predisposed to human society by lack of fear, attentiveness, curiosity, necessity, and recognition of advantages gained through collaboration—notice I say “gained,” not “to be gained,” because while not everyone will agree that wolves or dogs can project ahead in such a fashion, few would argue that dogs do not recognize when an action brings immediate benefits; dogs also know how to split when it does not. Many discussions of domestication generally proceed as if humans and animals were clueless ciphers under the control of genes or of natural or supernatural forces. But those animals were not biological Audio-Animatronics born with a preprogrammed response to people, lions, scimitar cats, dirk cats, hyenas, bears, or any number of other familiar and unfamiliar situations and creatures that had somehow to be overcome in order for them to join the anthropocentric world as domesticates. The humans were neither actors in a cosmic farce nor the chosen lords of the world, nor visionaries—except perhaps in their own minds.
It is fair, I think, to say that the humans and wolves involved in the conversion were sentient, observant beings constantly making decisions about how they lived and what they did, based on their perceived ability to obtain at a given time and place what they needed to survive and thrive. They were social animals willing, even eager, to join forces with another animal to merge their sense of group with the others’ sense and create an expanded super-group that was beneficial to both in multiple ways. They were individual animals and people involved, from our perspective, in a biological and cultural process that involved linking not only their lives but the evolutionary fate of their heirs in ways, we must assume, they could never have imagined. Does that thesis project too much self-awareness into the past? I doubt it. Powerful emotions were in play that many observers today refer to as love—boundless, unquestioning love.
But love seems too limited in its meanings and applications to describe such a relationship. The American painter George Catlin visited forty-eight Indian tribes between 1832 and 1839, when many of them still had strong links to their cultural traditions and their only domesticated animals were the dog and the horse. Some tribes called horses “big dogs,” because prior to their arrival with Spanish conquistadors, they had never seen one and thus had no name for it. Indian dogs were known not only to resemble wolves but also to interbreed with them. There was nothing refined about them, and for that reason Western observers often wrongly devalued them—unless they needed them for something or, like Catlin, they opened their eyes to see how these dogs lived and interacted with their people. “The dog, amongst all Indian tribes is more esteemed and more valued than amongst any part of the civilized world,” Catlin wrote in his account of his journey. “The Indian who has more time devoted to his company, and whose untutored mind more nearly assimilates to that of his faithful servant, keeps him closer company, and draws him near to his heart; they hunt together, and are equal sharers in the chase—their bed is one, and on the rocks and on their coats of arms they carve his image of fidelity.”7
I will argue, too, that domestication is a continuing process aimed at bringing an animal or plant to the point where the human controls all important aspects of its life, including its reproduction and freedom of movement from birth to death. Seen in that light, the formation of modern breeds and the war against free-roaming dogs during the past two hundred years more nearly resemble a domestication event than does anything that happened before in terms of limiting genetic diversity and gaining greater control of the dog.