A fascinating, challenging and troubling look at our dogs
Written: Feb 08 '02 (Updated Feb 25 '02)
Product Rating:
Pros: broad, well researched, fascinating, easy to read
Cons: sometimes clumsily written, some pro sled-dog bias
The Bottom Line: I recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution and development of dogs. Author carefully examines the history of different working breeds and their relationships with humans.
jaseroque's Full Review: Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger - Dogs: A St...
Several years ago, I attended a wonderful animal behavior seminar by Ray Coppinger on the evolution and development of domestic dogs. He was outspoken and funny, goring sacred cows and presenting compelling hypotheses in a most satisfying manner. I am fascinated with the origins and behavior of our domestic dogs, so I kept an eye out for any books authored by Ray, but did not find any for many years. Then, last Sunday in the library, I came across Dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior & evolution by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger in the new-arrivals section of the public library. I snatched it up and dragged my fiancé out of the library without giving him the time to find a book of his own.
I read Dogs cover to cover in four days.
It was a tremendously thought provoking read, sometimes awkward, and occasionally troubling and challenging.
First, let me tell you what Dogs is NOT about. It is not an endearing book about puppies. It does not contain gushing stories about people’s pet dogs. Nor is it a how-to book about dog training, or about behavior problems in pet dogs, or about how to choose the right dog breed for you.
Dogs is a hard-nosed, new look at how dogs may have evolved, how they entered into their increasingly close relationship with human beings, and how this changed their shape and behavior. The Coppingers challenge the hypothesis that domestic dogs descend from captured, tamed wolves. Instead, they postulate that human settlement created a new food resource for the dogs’ wolflike ancestors: the village dump. Individuals that were less shy and flighty benefited more from the dump than those that ran away easily, and gradually, the “tamer” ones bred with each other and became specialized scavengers. They changed in shape and behavior to fit their new niche. Over many generations they became the “village dogs” that are still seen hanging around dumps today all over the world. It is from these village dog populations, evolving wherever humans settled down, that our domestic dogs derive. Not directly from wolves at all.
The Coppingers discuss how the tremendous variety of dog breeds may have emerged from the prototypical village dog, and show how it might not be that difficult after all to get a chihuahua or a Great Dane from the same stock. For example, the difference between the bulldog’s foreshortened face and the borzoi’s long roman nose is the result of a single gene that regulates the growth of the nasal bones. All the other skull differences between the two breeds are the result of the other bones accommodating the foreshortened or elongated nasal bones during development.
In each of several type of dogs(livestock guarding dogs, sled dogs, herding dogs, hunting dogs, household dogs, and assistance dogs) the Coppingers describe how the specialized behaviors and physical shape evolve over generations, and develop within an individual (or fail to do so) under certain rearing conditions. The authors explore the complex interactions of nature and nurture in generating the behavior of our domestic dogs.
For each type of dog (livestock rearing, herding, sled dog, hunter etc.) the Coppingers take a hard look at the relationship between the human and the dog: who benefits and who loses from this relationship? Is the dog-human relationship truly mutual, with each species benefitting from the other, as is popularly supposed?
The Coppingers’ conclusions are disturbing. Their research and observations indicate that there are, in fact, no true examples of biological mutualism in dog-human relationships. Some, such as sled dogs and livestock guarding dogs, only come close to mutualism. Household dogs are actually parasitic in the biological sense, costing far more in money, time and resources than they benefit their owners. Worse, the relationship between hobby breeders and their dogs is amensal: the dogs come to harm at the hands of their unwitting owners, who conduct massive inbreeding in “closed stud book” breeds, and sometimes strive for traits (like the bulldog’s nose) that are painful and detrimental to the dogs.
Most disturbing of all, the authors place assistance dogs into duolosis, or enslavement, under human beings. They describe the broken, uninformed rearing practices of the service dog industry that disregard puppy development and result in the failure of half their dogs. The authors note that service dogs are neutered, making them biological dead-ends, and making it impossible to breed from the best to create the best dog for the job. Lastly, they state that assistance dogs are forced to suppress natural behaviors and perform tasks they have no natural motivation to perform.
General Comments
The Coppingers have extensive, first hand experience with thousands of different kinds of dogs, which makes this a fantastic book. They raced sled dogs, they bred, raised and trained livestock guarding dogs and herding dogs, they have studied walking hounds, pointers and retrievers. Both have PhD’s, in animal behavior and evolutionary biology. Such experience is phenomenal, and puts them in a unique position to write a broad book about the evolution and development of dogs and dog behavior.
This was a challenging book to read. Some of the challenges were fun (in my opinion), like the new hypothesis about the origins of domestic dogs. The new story of how dogs joined up with humans is a compelling one, and has all sorts of interesting implications for how we treat our current dogs. Much dog training revolves around treating the dog like a little wolf, insisting that the human become “alpha wolf” and demand appropriate submissive behavior from the dogs. This, according to the authors, is grossly misguided.
Other challenges were troubling, like their conclusions that household pets are parasites, and assistance dogs are deeply unhappy at their jobs. I found the assistance dog chapter particularly difficult to read. Hopefully, this book will start some discussion among the dog circles. Perhaps the assistance dog programs will take a second look at their breeding, training, and rearing practices after reading this book.
Tone and Style
Dogs is very easy to read. The sentences are short and snappy, the points are clear. This book is quite readable by a non-specialist who is interested in the subject. However, the prose is sometimes clumsy. There are some grammatical errors (e.g. using “onset” as a verb) and awkward turns of phrase (one memorable sentence began with “But, however and nevertheless...”) There is some verb tense confusion. A number of the points are rammed home again and again, sometimes in redundant sentences (e.g. “The distance at which the threshold is crossed is also dog-specific. And dogs all vary as to where the threshold is reached.”)
Organization
The overall organization of the book is fine -- the book has four sections, dealing with the origins of the dog, working dogs and people, non-working dogs and people, and how and when the different breeds may have come about.
Within a section, however, the organization was sometimes confusing. In some places the authors address several topics in quick succession, without sub-headings, almost like a stream of consciousness. Occasionally, vocabulary terms were defined well after they had been discussed them in depth. For example, the term “motor pattern” is an important concept throughout the book, but is not defined in detail until p. 217.
The Coppingers’ passion
The Coppingers raced sled dogs for fifteen years. It shows.
In the sled dog chapter the Coppingers lose some of their focus on the evolution and development of dogs. Much of this chapter consists of detailed descriptions of the physics of sled pulling, how to build a perfect sled dog team, how to take corners, and other minutia that must preoccupy the professional sled dog driver. Unlike the other chapters which delve into the history of the different working dogs and how they might have emerged from the village dog, the sled dog chapter deals entirely with the modern sled dog.
More alarmingly, I find that the Coppingers lose some of their objectivity when discussing sled dogs. They assert that sled dogs and their masters are at the “pinnacle of human-dog mutualism,” a remarkable claim, especially given their careful analysis (and rejection) of mutualism in the cases of sheep-guarding and hunting dogs.
For most of the book, the Coppingers are excellent evolutionary biologists. They are nuanced in their descriptions of natural selection, adaptation, and evolution. They point out, correctly, that all adaptation is local. For example, a polar bear may be well adapted to its local environment of ice and snow, but pick that bear up and put it in a desert and it will die. A desert fox, however will do very well in the desert but would die in the arctic. To say that polar bears are “more evolved” than desert foxes makes no sense. In the sled dog chapter the authors make just this error: they make the startling statement that sled dogs are “an evolutionary advancement over wolves... as close to an evolutionary perfection as you can get.” This is a ridiculous, superlative statement coming from a biologist. Sled dogs may be well adapted to pull a sled, but put them in the wolf’s environment in the wild and they will die. Similarly, harness a wolf to a sled and it will do badly too. These kinds of value judgments and comparisons between different animals in different environments are unhelpful, and unbecoming to a biologist.
At the end of the sled dog chapter, the Coppingers assert that they and their sled dogs shared a “common language, one that is well understood by people who are close to dogs,” even if it was not true mutualism. This left me scratching my head -- how can they claim the existence of a special, mystical human-dog bond in the case of sled dogs and their masters, and not in the case of shepherds and sheepdogs, or hunters and their dogs, or dog-owners and their companions, or blind people and their seeing-eye dogs? I’d say either leave that kind of bond out altogether (it being subjective and untestable) and stick to the easy-to-define symbiotic relationships, or explore such a bond for every pair.
Conclusion
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the evolution and development of the domestic dog. The Coppingers describe a new hypothesis for the origin of the dog, and carefully examine the history of our different working breeds and their relationships with humans. At times the book is awkwardly written and clumsily organized, and the Coppingers lose some of their focus and objectivity when dealing with sled dogs, but in spite of this the book is definitely worth a read.
The Coppingers explore how dog breeds have evolved into their unique shapes and behaviors. Concentrating on five types of dogs--modern household dogs,...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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