What is a Dog? Part 1
This might seem like a strange question, but if you stop and think about it, you’ll see that the answer depends on who you are and where you’re standing. A vet will be interested in the dog as a collection of physical parts and processes. Vets learn about dogs by looking at their bodies inside and out, taking samples, making x-rays, sometimes cutting a dog open. When a vet knows how a dog works as a physical system, s/he knows about dogs. Behaviorists want to know how a dog will behave. To them, a dog is what they call “a black box” — a behaving thing you can’t look inside of. You have to stand back and watch this thing behave, and eventually you will be able to say things like “dogs bark at men more than they bark at women,” or “if you give a dog a treat every time it sits… [Read in full]
What is a Dog? Part 2
Before we can talk about what a dog is, we have to clear up some misunderstandings. The first, most important one is: A DOG IS NOT A TAME WOLF. IT IS NOT EVEN THE DESCENDANT OF THE WOLF. Until about a hundred years ago, dogs were dogs, and other animals were other animals because that’s how God made them. Then came Darwin. People began to speculate that animals that looked like each other must be related to or descended from each other. Dogs and wolves were thought to be relatives, but even so, people who wanted to know about dogs still looked at dogs. It wasn’t until after the second world war that the idea of the dog as a barely tamed wolf in our living rooms became popular. This was mostly the doing of Konrad Lorenz… [Read in full]
What is a Dog? Part 3
Most people who write about dogs have read lots of books about the gray wolf. When they write, they simply transfer everything they’ve read about this wolf to dogs. This means that most dog books are really about the gray wolf. As we pointed out on the previous page, this is like watching chimpanzees and then writing a book about human psychology. Or like watching human men behave and then suddenly writing a book about human women. But there’s another problem. Most of the studies of wolves are done by watching captive wolves because wild wolves are so hard to spot and observe. Studying captive animals means you are watching animals behave under abnormal circumstances. So most of what people write even about wolves has nothing to do… [Read in full]
What is a Dog? Part 4
Some people have actually studied dogs. Most of them have studied dogs in laboratories. When you look at dogs this way, you are taking them out of their natural surroundings and studying them as collections of parts. This is probably a good way to understand isolated pieces of behavior. Pavlov succeeded in discovering that dogs can associate a bell or the sight of a caretaker with food. Skinner discovered that rewarding behavior will make it more likely to occur in the future. These are examples of discoveries about how parts are interacting inside the dog (ears, nose, brain, salivary glands, stomach juices). These are certainly pieces of the puzzle, but they only tell us about the dog on one level. Some have studied dogs in groups in laboratories…[Read in full]