Clever Dog: Understand What Your Dog is Telling You. Sarah Whitehead

ask? What about those classic wildlife documentary scenes where you see two wolves – or even a group of adolescent youngsters – wrestling over a piece of hide or the last bone from the kill? Surely hierarchy has a part to play there? Well, in my view, only humans would watch a group of dogs tussle over a remnant and instantly come to the conclusion that they are competing. What about the possibility that they may be co-operating to rip apart pieces of carcass that are impossible to tackle alone? How about the idea that they might be gathering information about each other? Dogs that rely on a team to hunt need to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They need to know whether one individual is faster, stronger, slower or weaker on the right side or the left, and the time to find this out is not at the moment when an extremely angry warthog is bearing down on you, but well in advance during everyday interactions.

      Of course, many dog owners find the idea that dogs are really wolves in disguise appealing. It’s fun – and rather powerful – to imagine that somehow humans took wolf cubs, raised them in their caves and ‘created’ domestic dogs. The myth says that we then managed to manipulate how they look and act, breeding them for long coats, short legs and droopy ears, and as long as we maintained ‘alpha’ status then we remained in control. The myth is wrong, though. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, domestic dogs are not the same as wolves. Despite sharing the vast majority of their genes with their cousins, they are simply not the same creature, as some wonderful 1960s studies demonstrated rather neatly.

      In 1959 Dmitri Belyaev, a Russian geneticist, launched a long-term experiment to tame foxes with the initial aim of making them easier to handle for the fur trade. While this may seem horribly unethical to us now, in those days it was essential that captive animals bred for their fur were easy to care for and manage – primarily because injury resulted in the potential loss of the pelt’s commercial value. Starting with a population of caged wild foxes, which demonstrated typical fear and aggression towards humans, Belyaev selected cubs from each generation based on one criterion only – those that were tamest around people.

      Changes began to appear very rapidly. It took only six generations of breeding for the foxes to start showing friendly behaviours, such as approaching when their keepers arrived rather than running away. Even more amazing was that after only thirty-five generations of breeding for friendly temperament, Belyaev’s foxes began to act like domestic dogs. The foxes wagged their tails when they saw their human carers approaching, whined for affection, used appeasement signals and made care-soliciting gestures. However, what was remarkable was not that Belyaev succeeded in breeding friendly foxes that seemed truly to like human contact; it was that with those behavioural changes came unexpected physiological ones too.

      The friendly foxes lost their pricked ears and developed floppy ones instead. Their coats changed and acquired black and white patches, like a Collie, and became long and plush. Their tails turned up at the end, like a dog’s, rather than hanging down like a normal fox’s brush. In addition, the females came into season twice a year, like a bitch, rather than once a year, like a vixen. The foxes also started to bark in a way that was quite unlike anything the keepers had ever heard from a fox before.

      Clearly, the genetic shift that caused ‘domestication’ in these foxes also had many other effects, which resulted in dog-like characteristics. Perhaps, as some eminent ethologists such as Ray Coppinger believe, a very similar set of circumstances occurred among wolves. Some of them might have shown less fear of humans way back in our collective past, and they were the ones that were inevitably ‘selected’ for breeding by the people who lived close to them, and probably used them as a food source too.

      Such ‘domesticated’ attributes are certainly abundant in the juvenile and social dogs that we keep today. Artificial selection for appearance has done the rest, creating dogs as huge as the Great Dane and as diminutive as the Chihuahua – but this has only occurred relatively recently in dog terms. However, although domestication may have taken the adult wolf out of the dog, it’s important to understand that the dog itself is not fully ‘tame’ unless we help to make it so.

      My mother, a primary school head teacher for thirty years, always stood by the adage, ‘Show me the boy before he is five, and I’ll show you the man’. While genetics have a huge part to play in canine behaviour traits, there is little doubt that the early weeks of a puppy’s life are also integral to the way the dog will behave as an adult. If you deny a puppy the chance to meet other dogs, people and the outside world, you can end up with a dog that is effectively institutionalised and fearful of all new experiences.

      Puppies who are not exposed to all the sights, sounds and smells that life has to offer before the age of twelve to sixteen weeks may never gain confidence in later life, and may always have problems relating to other dogs or humans. This makes sense. Keep a child locked away in isolation until he or she is eight years old and we would not expect him or her to make a quick and easy social recovery. In fact, we would expect that he or she would be affected for life.

      It’s obvious that puppies should have lots of positive experiences in those early days and weeks, but they also need to experience ‘real life’ in a gentle way too. Only by experiencing different emotional states can dogs learn to cope with them, and this means dealing with negative emotions as well as positive ones.

      The first time anything negative happens in a puppy’s life is at about four weeks of age. Up until then, everything that it needs and wants has been supplied by its mother. Warmth, food in the form of milk, protection, even going to the toilet is prompted by mum – who licks the puppies’ bellies to stimulate them to urinate and defecate. Then, gradually, the puppies begin to grow teeth. These are small and sharp and now when they latch on to their mother to feed, they hurt her! This produces an important reaction – mum starts to say no. For the first time in their lives, the puppies are denied something they want. Every time they see her, they clamour to feed, but while she will still allow some feeding, on other occasions she will turn around and walk away from them. Soon, she will also walk off during feeding, leaving puppies to drop off her teats unceremoniously as she goes. As time goes by and the puppies start to develop more muscular co-ordination and the ability to move more quickly and determinedly, mum may have to step up her rejection techniques. She might fix them with a direct stare followed by a deep growl or even a snap or nose-butt if the hungry pups don’t back away. In this way, the puppy learns what hard stares mean. Here we should also explode the myth that mother dogs shake puppies by the back of the neck to discipline them. Picking up and shaking only has one purpose in the canine world: it’s a killing mechanism (and one that nearly every dog owner is familiar with, as dogs play at ‘killing’ their toys as part of an enjoyable game). It’s clearly not a maternal gesture.

      Over time, puppies learn to control their own impulses to rush at their mother and mob her in an attempt to get a feed. In a wild situation, the mother and other adults would bring solid food to the pups via regurgitation, thus successfully redirecting their attention from teats to mouth. For this reason pups still want to lick at our faces and mouths. Domestic dogs rarely regurgitate for their puppies – yet another link with their wild cousins which has been diluted by social evolution. However, it’s at this stage that humans start to take over the parental role and supply solid food in a dish to take over from where mum left off.

      The whole weaning process is the pups’ very first lesson in how to cope with that most difficult of emotions – frustration. Of course, it won’t be the last time that puppies experience this. Living with humans exposes them to frustration every single day. In order to get used to it, puppies between eight and eighteen weeks should get out and about to meet and mix with as many other dogs, people, sights, sounds and smells as possible. This builds confidence and reduces anxiety, but it also buffers the puppy for the fact that not everything is going to go their way, not everyone they meet is going to be lovely, and not every dog is going to want to play. Getting this in perspective is basically a numbers game. Venture out for the first time at fourteen weeks old and bump straight into a grumpy adult female Dobermann, and the pup might be forgiven for believing that all other dogs are like this – and learn to avoid them. Meet fifty dogs – males and females, young and old, some lively and playful, some snappy and irritable and some indifferent, and the pup’s view of the world will be far more balanced.

      A local vet gave me a call to say she