TWELVE

Why a Dog
Is Not a Wolf

So close together, yet so far apart. The human element
cannot be overlooked. People define dog—and wolf.

A signal problem in re-creating the evolution of the dog predates the advent of modern genetics: What physical changes clearly say this animal is a dog? Implicit in that question is the conviction that without physical changes there is no dog, only a socialized wolf. The debate over these matters might seem arcane to some, but it is ultimately about the processes of evolution and domestication, and about the history and essence of a unique interspecies friendship, that remain largely shrouded in mystery, myth, and received wisdom.

Over the years, archaeologists have worked out a suite of characteristics, many of which are said to be common by-products of domestication: these include an overall reduction in size and robustness so that the dog is always slighter than the equivalent-size wolf, from toes to brain; an overall broadening of the snout and shortening of the jaw, causing crowding of the teeth until they, too, shrink. In many breeds, the dog’s head is more domed and the eyes more forward looking—more binocular and human-looking. The tympanic bulla, the bone behind the middle ear that is reduced in size and flattened in dogs, is reportedly the most foolproof distinguishing feature.

Dogs’ bites are less powerful than those of wolves except when selective breeding has made them more powerful—the pit bull, for example, generates biting force greater on average than a wolf. This reduction in bite force is often said to be due to malnutrition at the time of domestication. When the half-starved dogwolf finally obtained food, it was composed of more vegetative matter and meat scraps, which in a culture that used every part of the animal must not have amounted to much. That period of too little of the wrong kind of food caused a weakening of the masticatory muscles largely responsible for determining the shape of the jaw and skull. Malnourishment is said to have stunted the growth not only of the starved animal but of her descendants as well. It is not clear whether this projected dietary decline coincided with the hard times that hit humans and animals in the Levant and other refuges at around eighteen thousand years ago, or at some other event, or even whether malnutrition has such long-lasting effects. A more parsimonious explanation might lie in a change to more human-derived food that did not require the powerful jaw muscles needed to tear flesh from still living animals or crush bones and brought a relaxation of the selective pressure to maintain them. The same diet change affects zoo wolves in similar fashion so that their jaws often resemble those of early dogs. Once the heavy musculature is reduced from lack of use, the shape of the jaw changes and the teeth undergo a reduction in size.¹

The wolf’s supracaudal gland above its tail, used for scent marking and identification, is absent from the dog. Dogs are believed to show more white in mixed pelage, more solid red and tawny yellow coats than wolves. A curved tail and lop ears distinguish many dogs from wolves. The dog’s footsteps look like the animal making them lists from side to side; the wolf goes where its toes point. Coats that obscure the eyes, and tails that are too short or too curled obstruct the dog’s ability to communicate.

Dogs mature earlier sexually than wolves and, free of the seasonal constraints that govern the timing of reproduction in wild canids, come into estrus twice yearly rather than once. How much of that is genetic rather than social and environmental is difficult to determine, especially since the current trend in science is to blame genes for everything. Yet among wolves, social controls within the pack and environmental conditions, especially the availability of food and absence of stressors, like prolonged abnormal weather, disease, or human persecution, regulate breeding of subordinate—young—females. If the breeding alpha female dies, a young female can come into heat, and subordinate females sometimes breed in packs that have access to abundant prey. The combination of early sexual maturation and delayed growth or development of other organs and limbs is called paedomorphosis and is believed by many archaeologists and biologists to be the reason dogs are slighter than their opposites among wolves. Early sexual maturity and accelerated growth, hypermorphosis, produce dogs larger than wolves, although it must be said that some very large dogs appear to be slow to mature physically, even if they mature early sexually.

Slowing the rate of development enough is said to lead to the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood, a phenomenon called neoteny. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould resurrected this nineteenth-century notion of neoteny in a popular book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny and with an article in the May 1979 issue of Natural History magazine, titled “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz.” He drew the bulk of his examples from the world of popular culture—the juvenilization of many rough and rustic folk figures like St. Nicholas, or of popular cartoon characters like Walt Disney’s proletarian rat, Steamboat Willie, who became the denatured Mickey Mouse. Gould did not recognize that this softening and juvenilization were part of a cultural trend begun in the mid-nineteenth century to “civilize” and fully domesticate man and beast. Just as cultural figures were changed, so were dogs, as breeders strove to make them more cuddly and human, with rounded skulls, eyes forward, their demeanor forever puppylike. The Pomeranian is an early example of this trend. A medium-sized German working dog of the spitz type, as manifest in its tightly curled tail, was reduced to Lilliputian proportions in the late nineteenth century because Queen Victoria had some small Pomeranians of which she reportedly was inordinately fond.²

Applying the cultural concept of neoteny to dogs, evolutionary biologist Raymond Coppinger developed an elaborate chart showing the degree to which various types of dogs were physically and behaviorally juvenilized, playing their lives away. His prime example of a neotenic dog was the Saint Bernard, whose head, he said, resulted from the dog’s development being stuck at a very young stage, rather than from the work of breeders. Coppinger is also a leading proponent of the idea that wolves first tamed themselves by feeding on midden heaps of Mesolithic villages at a time when people were becoming sedentary. Eventually, people noticed the dump divers and turned the tamest among them into dogs.³

Researchers who believe the dog is a neotenic wolf invariably cite Dimtry Belyaev’s Siberian farm fox experiment in which animals bred over multiple generations for tameness toward humans alone ultimately produced juvenilized, doglike foxes. But none of their arguments supporting the theory that domestication proceeds by neoteny brought on by selection for tameness pertain to the already socialized wolf. Those arguments might not hold anywhere since the phenotypic changes in the tame foxes also occurred in a population of the same silver foxes bred to no purpose at all, albeit at a lower frequency. Over the years, more than one observer has reported seeing in captive-bred wolves and other zoo animals the kinds of phenotypic changes usually associated with domestication.

There certainly is no evidence that wolves were selected by early humans for tameness the way the farm foxes were, since selection in that experiment was also made “against aggression.” In many cultures, from its origins, the dog has been valued as a loud and, when necessary, aggressive guardian of people, their homes, possessions, and livestock. The vast majority of the world’s dogs breed without direct human interference, and many of those landraces are known as intractable and unwelcoming, if not actively hostile toward strangers.

It is helpful to remember, in this regard, that most of the concern with tameness or trainability dates to the nineteenth century, when “civilized” dogs became the rage, “civilized” in this case meaning they knew their place and paid attention to the human. But it also meant looking more human, even doll-like. Unrefined dogs, pariahs, are undesirable precisely because they have not been subjected to proper breeding. Until they are, by definition, they can never be “civilized.” Nearly everything is wrong, but it persists for reasons have more to do with people than dogs.⁴

Even Raymond Coppinger’s poster dog for neoteny might not be what it seems. A 2007 study by Abby Drake and Christian Peter Klingenberg at Manchester University showed how breeders in America have dramatically and drastically altered the appearance of the Saint Bernard over the past 120 years in order to make their dog conform to an ever changing breed standard. Their emphasis has been on producing dogs with broader, higher skulls, with larger, more binocular eye sockets at acute angles from a shortened, broadened snout. They have succeeded in making a giant doll.⁵

To reiterate an important point, there is no evidence that the dog originated from self-taming, submissive, neotenic wolves. That theory is based in part on the mistaken belief that dogs originated during the Mesolithic Age, when people were settling into permanent settlements complete with garbage dumps. All the evidence, archaeological, genetic, and cultural, places the first dogs in the camps of hunters and gatherers. In Italy, Israel, and other parts of the world, wolves have fed on human garbage dumps for decades without becoming tame or manifesting the morphology of the fox-model domesticates. The food in those dumps is doubtless higher quality than what they would have found in a Mesolilthic midden or a Paleolithic boneyard, but it has clearly not been good enough to persuade them to become dogs.

It is not even clear when in the dog’s history semiannual estrus became the rule. Basenjis have an annual cycle, as do dingoes, Thai pariahs, Indian pariahs, and Russian Laikas, to name a few dogs who never seem to have made the adjustment.

Most paleoanthropologists and paleontologists readily admit that differentiating between early dogs and wolves is a difficult task made worse by the poor conditions of the samples. Usually they fall back on context—if it was buried with a person, for example, then it probably is a dog, except when it is a wolf. Many of the measurements are made against modern wolves or genders are confused or samples are dismissed for comparison purposes because they do not reflect anticipated differences in size.

Late in the nineteenth century, workers building the trans-Siberian railroad found hundreds of Neolithic graves at the confluence of the Irkutsk and Angara rivers on their approach to the southwestern end of Lake Baikal. Dubbed Lokomotiv in honor of workers who uncovered it, the area was a cemetery that had been used over a long stretch of time and included single, double, and triple burials of men, women, and children, most likely northern Mongolian in origin. In 1995, archaeologists found and excavated the seventy-three-hundred-year-old grave of a large tundra wolf, Canis lupus albas. His head was raised as if looking outward and onward, paws placed against his body, a human skull tucked between his elbows and knees. Partial remains of at least two other people were also found in the grave. Because this region is home to the Chinese or Mongolian wolf, researchers concluded that this tundra wolf traveled into the area as a socialized wolf, probably in the company of a shaman. Dogs were widespread by the time, but clearly in the north, where the wolf remained sacred to warriors and hunters, they coexisted within a community that included wild and socialized wolves.⁶

Absent such contextual help, those archaeologists who tend to view genetics like an unruly child at a symphony doggedly insist that morphological change associated with neoteny is the sole determinant of domestication. Yet clear evidence, not only from wolves and dogs but also from goats and sheep and a number of other animal domesticates, indicates they are wrong. Goats were brought under human management in the Zagros Mountains five hundred to one thousand years before any morphological change that could be attributed to domestication occurred, and even those changes may have been secondary to selection for other attributes, evolutionary biologists Melinda Zeder and Brian Hesse wrote in the March 24, 2000, issue of the journal Science. Reductions in size occurring before then were probably due to environmental factors. Presumably, the changes could also have been of a nature that appealed to humans, who did not cull them and may even have encouraged their propagation, especially in the case of a freakish twist in the goat’s horns or an odd color. Other studies have indicated that habitat fragmentation resulting from human activities and captive breeding inevitably alter the phenotype of the animals involved.⁷

In fact, determining when these changes occurred is as important as understanding the reasons for them. There is a strong tradition among the scientists who have studied this question for years to look for a regulatory gene or RNA sequence or some other genetic switch that, when thrown, will set off the proper sequence of events to create the dog as a paedomorphic wolf. Despite intense efforts, no one has yet found the gene or genes or any other chemical or enzyme or hormone responsible for paedomorphosis, much less neoteny.

In recent years, paleoanthropologists who study humans—their traditional subject matter—have produced material that casts an interesting light on the transition from dogwolf to dog in terms of the latter being a more gracile, less robust, smaller brain cavity animal. Those terms fit almost precisely a transformation that occurred in the human population that emerged from the Last Glacial Maximum. In the 2008 Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, Brigitte Holt and Vincenzo Formicola describe how human legs were less robust, overall body proportions and stature were reduced, and craniofacial dimensions were altered. A general gracilization occurred. Asymmetry was the order for development.

That sounds surprisingly like the neotenic dog, except that in the case of people the explanations are grounded in the physical. Holt and Formicola observe that studies have repeatedly linked mobility and physical activity to the robustness of human leg bones, and that during the crunching cold of the Last Glacial Maximum, their mobility was restricted and constrained by the increased density of human settlement and decreased amount of territory available for hunting and hauling. The decline in stature and proportion appeared related to technological advances—the atlatl and bow and arrow—that made hunting easier, meaning it required less energy to kill the smaller prey, like deer, then most commonly available in the refuges, as well as to a long-term switch from a diet composed exclusively of land mammals to the incorporation of marine life, including seals. Moreover, many animals were experiencing a change in body size—a general downsizing with a “mosaic” of shifting body proportions associated with the changing climate.⁸

Geneticists probing the dog genome have found gene variants or alleles associated with changes in different parts of the cytoskeleton or even the whole organism. The expression of these genes with the relaxation of natural selective pressure, which tends to reject extreme changes that do not help the organism survive and reproduce, and the subsequent capture by humans of those features in the captive or domestic population, appear to account for the phenotypic changes attributable to domestication. Many of them are the sort of “hopeful monsters” Darwin said were regularly thrown into the evolutionary brew—freaks that most commonly die on their own because they are maladapted or are killed by their own kin who find their outlandishness unacceptable.⁹

That is especially true of the extreme size reduction of many dogs, as well as the oversizing of heads in many brachycephalic breeds to such a degree that the dogs can no longer give birth except by Cesarean section. Breeds with elongated, or hypercephalic, snouts, like the fox and Scottish terriers, suffer the same fate. The animals survive birth only through human intervention.

The discoveries of genes responsible for this dazzling display continue to pile up. In 2010, a team of dog geneticists announced that they had associated 51 gene loci on the dog genome with 57 breed-specific physical characteristics using a detailed new canine SNP map, called CANMAP. Surveying 60,986 SNPs across the genomes of 915 dogs from 80 breeds, 83 wild canids, and 10 randomly breeding African village dogs, they found that, in most cases, differences in three or fewer loci accounted for the large phenotypic differences between breeds. They include overall body size and external dimensions; head, tooth, and long-bone shape and size; coat characteristics; floppy ears; and snout length. These findings appear to support the argument that breeders selecting for specific traits, especially freakish ones, are responsible for the dogs we have, not some mysterious biological process of juvenilization. They should spur the search for the genes involved and how this entire puzzle fits together, a puzzle that seems at once simpler and infinitely more complicated than anyone had imagined.¹⁰

Geneticists have found a variation in fibroblast growth factor-4 in breeds with disproportionately short and bowed limbs, a form of dwarfism called chondrodysplasia in dachshunds, basset hounds, corgis, Scottish terriers, and similar breeds. Scientists have also shown that changes in the forequarters, hindquarters, and jaws of animals are interrelated in such a way that selective breeding for strong, straight, heavy leg bones forces a shortening and broadening of the muzzle, enlargement of the cranium, and strengthening of the jaw muscles in the head. The result is a mastiff-type animal. Long, straight, light legs mandate a longer, thinner head to produce the greyhound/sight hound type. Aware of itself physically, as all dogs consummately are, the mastiff makes its way through the world with power and explosiveness, rather than speed, the way the sight hound does. Other work has shown that the dog’s skull in morphological terms is comprised of modules that can be manipulated separately to create the vast spread of heads apparent today. These findings follow those showing that the masticatory muscle is responsible for much of the size and shape of the dog’s jaw, so that if the animal’s diet changes in such a way that it doesn’t have to crush bones and break through cartilage regularly, the muscles will weaken and, over time, the jaw and muscles change to reflect that. Tooth size and shape change, as does the morphology of the skull itself.¹¹

Perhaps the earliest—and most obvious—morphological change in the transformation of dogwolves into dogs was reduction in size—creation of small dogs and, with it, as I noted earlier, the fundamental divide in dogdom between big dogs and little dogs. That was because the small dog was “new” under the sun and associated with human, not wolf society. The appearance of that mutation and its propagation through early dogwolves led to the emergence of an animal that did not exist in the natural wolf population. Its rarity made it even more desirable. It is possible that other quirks appeared earlier among dogwolves—brachycephaly or curled tails for example—but those mutations were not rare enough to be category changers.¹²

These alleles seem to make for simple explanations that fail to address the behavioral issue of juvenilization in the transition of wolf to dog, manifest in part, the argument goes, by the failure of the male dog on going walkabout to track, stalk, hunt, kill, and dissect its food. Even in the most wolflike of dogs, the ultimate act in the hunting cycle—killing the prey—is interrupted. For mastiffs, the situation is even worse, since their level of neoteny dictates that they cannot engage in any predatory activity, that instead they thwart predator attacks by attempting to play with the attacker, thereby confusing it to such a degree that it stops and retreats—laughing, I hope.¹³

Historically, mastiffs have been prized for their ferocity and tenacity against predators and humans. The sheep-guarding dogs, working in conjunction with shepherds, killed predators in defense of their flocks. They also reportedly could spot at a glance any sheep who didn’t belong and gently escort it home. What appears genetic can often be something else, especially among highly social animals. The desire to hunt is innate, I expect, but desire without education leads to floundering experimentation as I have noted. Wolves born and raised in captivity without exposure to wild wolves are fundamentally clueless about hunting, killing, and consuming prey not because they’ve undergone a genetic mutation but because no one has taught them how to do it. Recent studies have shown that free-ranging dogs will kill profligately without eating, not necessarily because they do not know how or because they are inhibited but because they are being fed regularly by humans or otherwise are obtaining human food.

Feral animals present conceptual problems for scientists and environmentalists because they are category benders. If domestication involves juvenilization of the parent wild stock, in terms of appearance and behavior, how can the resulting animal revert behaviorally without also resuming the wild form? The problem is especially acute in dogs, where conventional wisdom holds that the dog is so enfeebled, it cannot establish itself in reproducing packs or groups independent of human food—even if only garbage.

Male feral dogs, it is said, unlike wolves, seem not to contribute to the rearing of their young, except when—like Indian dogs and dingoes and feral dogs in Alaska and anywhere else they live free of human society—they do, and how they came to do that is an excellent unasked question. Part of the reason for this apparent contradiction is the habit among some observers of erroneously grouping free-ranging dogs with feral dogs, as if they were the same. They are different: Free-ranging dogs are simply roamers who usually are associated with a person or family from whom they receive food. They are dependent on that food, even though they may also scavenge and hunt. Feral animals, on the other hand, are domesticated animals or their offspring who live free of human society.¹⁴

Sometimes, scientists simply redefine, or put into a different category, the animal who seems an exception to the rule rather than address directly the reasons it is different and possibly modify their basic definitions and categories. The dingo, for example, is a feral dog who is so wolflike, save for its curled tail and a tendency toward a ginger coat, that taxonomists and wildlife biologists insist on classifying it as a separate subspecies of wolf from other dogs. Many scientists include in their papers statements that the dingo is a primitive dog or a “semi-domesticated dog,” which allows them to judge it separately from dogs in general.

By most measures, the dingo arrived in Australia fifty-five hundred years ago, close to fifty-five thousand years after the Aboriginal people. There were probably just a few of them who arrived by dugout, and, I like to think, escaped their cages, knowing they were being carried for food because they had already watched two of their siblings die. They went walkabout and never looked back. By comparison, the Bali dog is said to have arrived there close to twelve thousand years ago, as a fully domesticated dog, which it has remained. The Aborigine embraced the dingo, the dog, after their own fashion, forming with it in some places, especially the Outback through which they roamed, a loose confederation that involved taking and raising dingo puppies until, grown, they dispersed back to dingo society, following them on the hunt, and dealing with them day and night in the Dreaming. In coastal villages, which tended to be permanent to take advantage of the abundance of the sea, the Aborigines kept them on as dogs. Throughout Australia, Aborigines accorded the dingo an honored place in Dreamtime, their cosmogony, and their superreality.¹⁵

The dingo, of course, had the good fortune to land on an island without what we might call a terminal, or apex, predator, the larger, putatively more powerful marsupial thylacine wolf notwithstanding. A dog among other dogs before arriving in Australia, the dingo managed on its own to re-create wolfish pack society, albeit with a few twists that were probably useful adaptations to local conditions. The only model the dingo had to guide it in that endeavor was the society of its Aboriginal friends, which is why I have suggested that the infanticide committed by the alpha female against the puppies of any other breeding female in the pack might be an adaptation of the infanticide practiced among the Aborigine. It is also interesting to note here that the first early socialization or sensitive period in dingoes appears to stretch to about eight weeks, compared with fourteen in modern dogs and five to six in wolves. Whether the dingo’s socialization period is significantly shorter due to the pressure of life in the wild and more than a century of human persecution, or the modern dog has been stretched beyond its ancient forebears, is difficult to say. That is another way of suggesting that the initial extension was short and remained that way in the early dog well into the Neolithic.

Demands for purity of blood and category create interesting problems. Persecuted in the name of predator control since the arrival of Anglo-Europeans in the nineteenth century, the dingo, with its lands invaded and its packs shattered by death, has, not surprisingly, hybridized with imported dogs—sometimes with the active encouragement of humans, according to reports, to improve herding dogs on far-flung out-back stations. But while the wild dingo is believed to help the domestic dog, the domestic dog is considered the ruination of the wild dingo. The domesticated herder is celebrated for its toughness, independence, and intelligence; the wild hybrid is one of the most reviled creatures on the planet, more despised than the dingo itself. The contemporary dingo-dog hybrids are accused not only of befouling the unique dingo genome but also of being more relentless killers of livestock.

A major genetic bottleneck occurred with modern breed formation when the loss of diversity was nearly nine times greater than with the origination event—35 percent compared with 4 percent. The late eighteenth century, when modern breed formation began, to the present is arguably the time frame in which the dog can be said to come close to domestication. Now, with the takeover in breeding and the removal from the streets of free-ranging dogs in many industrialized countries, it appears that humans are finally on their way to completing domestication and commodification of the dog itself, with certain freaks among them maintained as Thorstein Veblen’s “objects of conspicuous consumption,” created and maintained for human possessiveness. Among some social groups, the dog is little more than a biological doll.¹⁶

These changes make it difficult to determine how much the contemporary dog differs from its forebears, yet the little visual and written descriptive data we have indicate that the changes physiologically, at least, are serious, be they the downsizing of the Pomeranian into a Lilliputian lap dog or selectively breeding dogs like Labradors, golden retrievers, spaniels, Newfoundlands, and a raft of others for more domed heads and pronounced binocular vision; or breeding old English bulldogs and Boston bull terriers with heads so big the females cannot whelp naturally. Veterinary behaviorists and trainers have told me in interviews that they believe the temperament of many dogs has been changed to emphasize the close handler-dog attentiveness and coordination necessary to win competitions, instead of the sort of independence of thought and action required of true working dogs. Today, as I pointed out, people in developing nations often eschew their native dogs in favor of Western purebred dogs both for their genealogies, which are believed to guarantee quality and purity, and their perceived obedience. Demand keeps growing while native dogs languish, accused of every form of impropriety, sloth, and ignorance.

Native dogs from anywhere south of Europe are classed with pariahs and curs—creatures of no breeding fit only for shepherds and poachers and other low-class people. In at least one major dog encyclopedia, the Canaan dog is correctly said to date from Antiquity and to have served the Bedouin as “a herder and guard dog.” Those are fair and accurate statements; in fact, as I said at the beginning, I think it highly probable that this desert dog figures in at least some of the European and Australian herding dogs. But the rest of the text says that the Canaan dog was a scavenging pariah until the 1930s, when Dr. Rudophina Menzel took some and trained them first for mine detection and then as guide dogs. She consolidated her dogs into a breed, the Canaan dog, who, following the tradition of breed formation, became endowed with all the positive virtues and attributes of the original. Also in keeping with the tradition of breed formation, the native dog was stripped of all its virtues and coated with all its vices.¹⁷

Inherently, the free-ranging village dog in India is every bit as domesticated as the pampered Papillion, and both are behaviorally and perceptually different from wolves. Those statements are based on the widely accepted assumption that domestication involves inheritable changes in the demeanor and behavior of the animal. With the exception of the extended socialization period and delayed fear response, as well as specialized behaviors, like pointing, found in specific breeds or types of dog, those changes are not easily identified. Scientists studying communicative ability have found that some dogs are incapable of reproducing the full suite of wolf vocalizations and body language because of long hair that conceals their eyes, floppy ears, truncated tails, and other features that humans value. A number of scientists have recently reported that dogs have a capacity to focus on and follow human social cues that is close to that of children but absent from wolves.

Those are compelling results that seem to point to a fundamental difference in cognitive abilities between dogs and wolves. But other researchers have demonstrated that the results are heavily influenced by the context in which the animals are tested. The standard protocol for those experiments tests dogs in a laboratory and wolves in an outdoor pen. When wolves are tested in the lab and dogs in the pen, the wolves perform with the same or greater focus on the human than the dogs had, while the dogs do worse. I have always found that while these sorts of comparisons make interesting headlines, they ultimately say little about dogs, wolves, or children. Studies that do so are rare but necessary.¹⁸

Throughout the history of dogs and humans, individuals who have done best with dogs have been those with the ability “to get inside the minds of their dogs,” to understand what they are thinking and feeling collectively and individually. These human adepts made the original meeting of species work and have kept it flourishing since. The successes they have had on the hunt or in making a safe journey have encouraged other people to try a dog, to take into and trust their lives to an animal capable of mauling and even killing them.¹⁹

How dogs are treated depends on the human culture in which they live, and therein for me lies another mystery. I have assumed that some furless bipeds were as fascinated by wolves as wolves were by them, but while mutual fascination can lead to alliances on the trail, it does not translate automatically into a fifty-thousand-year coevolutionary journey. I have seen no reports that humans must become socialized as infants to dogs in order for them to become bonded, but like other animals, humans do pass through periods of increased fear of strange animals, people, and situations that, if not addressed, can lead to the all-too-familiar, reflexive human bias toward different individuals or groups. That is why I think humans, no less than wolves, experienced some subtle alterations in the amygdala and elsewhere that allowed them to accept the dogwolf into their lives.

On the eve of the third millennium, it was still popular, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, to argue the opposite position—that children with pets were not properly socialized to other people. Since then, evidence to the contrary has become overwhelming. A study of Japanese men published in 2010 indicated that benefits of dog ownership early in life were long lasting. Elderly Japanese men who had owned dogs in childhood were more sociable than those who had not, and the earlier the exposure, the better. That conforms with studies showing that animals help make children more social, and it suggests that the effects are long lived. People with dogs in America tend to have lower blood pressure and be generally healthier and less isolated than their peers who do not have dogs. It is difficult to imagine how these positive effects of association with dogs are new to the relationship; rather, they must go back to the beginning.²⁰