Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet

The capacity for love that makes dogs such rewarding companions has a flip-side: They find it difficult to cope without us. Since we humans programmed this vulnerability, it's our responsibility to ensure that our dogs do not suffer as a result.

Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans consists of, let alone that of animals.

Love-that which biologists, nervous about being misunderstood call "attachment"-fuels the bond between dog and master or mistress.

Skepticism about comparisons between wolves and dogs is further warranted by the fact that, although DNA analysis indicates that dogs descended from Eurasian grey wolves, none of the wolves that have been studied over the past seventy years or so, American or European, can possibly be considered the ancestors of the domestic dog: The two certainly had a common ancestor many thousands of years ago, but there is no evidence to suggest that modern wolves closely resemble these common ancestors.

Apart from deliberately bred wolf-dog hybrids, it has not been possible to trace the DNA of any of the dogs in the Americas to North American wolves, not even the “native” dogs who were there before Columbus.

In the past, when dogs’ functions were mostly rural, it was accepted that they were intrinsically messy and needed to be managed on their own terms. Today, by contrast, many pet dogs live in circumscribed, urban environments and are expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as adults. As if these new obligations were not enough, many dogs still manifest the adaptations that suited them for their original functions—traits that we now demand they cast away as if they had never existed. The collie who herds sheep is the shepherd’s best friend; the pet collie who tries to herd children and chases bicycles is an owner’s nightmare. The new, unrealistic standards to which many humans hold their dogs have arisen from one of several fundamental misconceptions about what dogs are and what they have been designed to do.