From the book: The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs Copyright 2009 by Alexandra Semyonova — All Rights Reserved
Myth 1: The dog is a descendant of the wolf. Because of this we should regard him as a sort of tame wolf in our living room.
The idea of the dog as a tame wolf has a huge romantic attraction for us. We imagine the great grey wolf of the northern regions of the Earth, a powerful wild animal weighing 160–220 pounds, who spends his days hunting deer, moose or elk…
Myth 3: Everything we know about wolves applies to dogs, too.
We’ve already seen a number of reasons why this isn’t true. The dog’s ancestor eventually became a dog because he left the ecological niche his ancestor may have shared with the wolf’s ancestors more than 500,000 years ago. The domestic dog…
Myth 4: The domestic dog is a hunting species.
We’ve seen that the evolution of the specifically domestic dog probably began when a few of his ancestors discovered human dumps as a new source of safe and easy food. It’s possible that these first dump animals were able to exploit the new food..
Myth 5: But my own dog is obviously a hunter, because he kills cats (or rabbits, or sheep).
A hunter is not just an animal that kills, it’s an animal that kills to eat. The behavioral sequence of a true predator that kills other animals in order to eat them looks like this: Scent > track > watch/orient > stalk > chase > grab > kill > dissect > eat…
Myth 10: Dogs live in a dominance hierarchy, with the Alpha dog at the top as the absolute leader.
One of the things we hear most about dogs is that dominance is extremely important in organising their groups. The story goes that their interactions are all about gaining and maintaining status. The dog with the higher rank dominates the dog with the…
Myth 11: Retake: Dogs live in a dominance hierarchy.
We have now seen that this is a rather evil human projection. Now we come to the question of what dogs actually do, if they don’t engage in dominance all the day long. If dogs don’t live in stable closed groups (which they don’t), and if they are constantly…