Weight management is an important resolution for American dogs to make this year, too. American dogs are certainly like their humans in many ways—even the bad ones. Americans are suff ering an obesity epidemic, and so are our dogs. The diff erence is that our canine pals didn’t do this to themselves like we did. Since humans are responsible for their pet dogs, we’re also responsible for their weight and health problems.
The Beginning
As humans, we have the capacity to teach our loved ones how to behave in our world, in ways that protect them from the dangers of our society. We do this with our children and our dogs require the same patience, nurturing, and guidance.
Humans began to invite wild dogs (wolves, actually) into our lives as early as 15,000 years ago. “Man’s Best Friend” was destined to get along with man, for the most part. Both humans and canines are intelligent and social creatures that live in family units consisting of a dominant pair and a group of subordinate, younger family members. It is a widely held, scientific belief that early humans competed with wolves for food and resources and that they likely both preyed upon, and feared the other. Many scholars feel that when humans killed adult wolves, they may have occasionally spared their young, bringing them back so that they may have grown up living in the human pack.
After millennia passed, generations of wolves raised by humans began to domesticate, losing many of their naturally aggressive behaviors. Wolves with less aggressive traits were selectively bred with one another, producing more docile offspring. Because canines are naturally social, many dogs in human captivity will adapt as much as possible on their own to better integrate with their human families. But without our assistance, dogs can never completely acquire the skills it takes to coexist peacefully with humans in their modern homes. It’s one thing to live outside a cave or a hut, but quite another to expect our companions to know how to conduct themselves in a human manner, in a modern human environment.
Hard Wired
From their wolf lineage, dogs retain many natural behavioral traits that most of us probably wish they had lost. A brief understanding of wolf behavior helps us to better understand some of their actions. Like dogs, wolves are carnivores (from Latin carn=flesh + vore=devour), meaning animals that eat meat. Wolves are supremely adapted to chase large mammalian prey over long distances in organized hunts. They live, hunt and raise their young in packs that have a complex social structure. Wolves communicate to their pack members in a high-energy, aggressive manner that includes barking, howling, snarling, biting and mounting. This style is very effective, allowing pack members to immediately understand their individual rank in the pack hierarchy. This is important to know because it can greatly affect everything from the success of their hunts, how their young are protected, to how the pack deals with rivals in their territory.
Wolf packs are lead by the dominant mating pair, known as the Alpha wolves. All other wolves in the pack are considered subordinate and must either show respect to the Alpha pair by displaying submissive behaviors, or risk injury, banishment from the pack, or even death by challenging the leaders for their roles. Alpha males must lead the pack using violence and intimidation to ensure their role as pack leader. Younger males often challenge the Alpha leaders for their position. This struggle for dominance also occurs between the female members of the pack.
The wolf's primary objective is finding enough food in their environment to meet their caloric requirements. Because of their relatively large brain size, muscular strength, and cardiovascular endurance, wolves require a high-calorie, high-frequency diet. Wolves face many obstacles regarding optimum nutrition, including competition from other predators, as well as other pack members. When food is available, they often gorge themselves in an attempt to help erase nutritional deficits. Wolves make the most of food sources by consuming nearly every part of their kill. Their strong jaws and deep-rooted carnassial teeth allow them to crack bones open to reach the nutritious marrow inside. The wolf's simple digestive system even permits consumption of the bone itself, which is rich in essential minerals.
The Wolf in Dog's Clothing
Though they are domesticated, dogs are still inherently dogs. And deep within each one lies an inner wolf. Canines are classified under the family Canidae, a branch of the order Carnivora. The fossil record indicates that the Canids evolutionary history dates back to the Paleogene period, around 55.4 million years ago. The modern members of this family include wolves, coyotes, foxes, dingoes, jackals, and our domestic dog. Most scientific communities recognize the dog as a subspecies of the gray wolf. In fact, their taxonomic classification of Canis lupus familiaris is derived from Canis lupus, the wolf's classification.
The wolf's instinctive behaviors can be seen in your dog. Without proper training, your dog may see no harm in barking excessively to communicate to you, other members of your family, or distractions outside such as people or other animals. Your untrained dog may also find it perfectly acceptable to snap at or even bite visitors to your home, chew on your furniture or other belongings, or break into food sources. Since dogs tend to be unable to distinguish the difference between their human families and other dogs, it's all too common for untrained dogs to challenge their owners for the Alpha position of leader in their "pack", or family. Just like wolves, dogs respect strong leadership but will easily make a challenge for the leadership role if they sense weakness in their current leader.
The Differences
As similar as dogs are to their wild cousins, there are key differences that are vital to the success of our relationship with dogs. Over the course of the last 15,000 years, domestic dogs have diverged slightly from the wild wolf model. Some of these differences are physiological while others are strictly behavioral. By consuming food provided by humans or scavenging, dogs have not needed the full arsenal of predatory tools necessary to bring down large ungulate prey such as deer, moose, or antelope. In turn, dogs' brains, skulls, and teeth are proportionately smaller than wild canids An ability to respond to human interaction and learn new skills through repetitive conditioning is a behavioral trait that humans were quite receptive to. This trait is generally missing in wolves and other wild canids, which learn more effectively through observation. In studies, dogs seem to show little regard to other dogs and typically fail to develop the social hierarchies displayed in wolf packs. Feral or wild dogs often resort to living as scavengers, treating other dogs in their group as competitors rather than learning to adopt cooperative hunting strategies. However, dogs can be trained by humans to hunt cooperatively with humans, which was of great value and a key factor in the development of our long term relationship with dogs.
The Breeds
Humans learned to selectively breed dogs to enhance desired physical characteristics thousands of years ago. Due to their genetic composition, canines respond to selective breeding with greater morphological change than any other species of mammal. Early domestic dogs still bore great resemblance to wolves, which were feared as predators or despised as competition for prey. Dogs with softer, less wolf-like features were deemed safer and friendlier, thus more desired. A male and a female with flopped ears, for example, might be bred to produce litters of pups with the same trait. Floppy ears seem less alert and less wolf-like than pointed ears that stand erect. Since domestic dogs are inherently juvenile in their nature, compared to wild canids, humans tend to regard them as “children”. This parental view of dogs helps to strengthen our bonds with them. Today, the Labrador Retriever is regarded as the world’s most popular breed. This is partly due to the fact that it’s soft gaze, large eyes, and flopped ears appear less predatory, and thus, less threatening to our safety than the erect ears, alert eyes and larger skull of the wolf. It’s important to consider the eyes of domestic dogs compared to wolves. Domestic dogs have been bred to have larger eyes combined with smaller irises that reveal more of the sclera, or “white” of the eye. Human eyes are similar and we respond to the subtle eye movements of humans in our body language. Dogs with eyes most similar to our own are, not surprisingly, the most popular.
As the centuries passed, dogs were bred primarily to help man complete tasks with greater efficiency than otherwise possible. Dogs were specially bred to cooperatively hunt, herd livestock, safeguard humans, property, or livestock from other humans or predators, work for us, such as pulling sleds, or simply to entertain us. Dog breeding technology increased dramatically during the last 300 years, giving way to many of the popular breeds we know today. From giant Irish Wolfhound to the tiny Chihuahua, dogs have been bred to meet our needs and have earned their place in our homes, as well as in our hearts.