Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

by Alexandra Horowitz

The wolves taken up by humans were probably less hunters than scavengers, less dominant and smaller than alpha wolves, and tamer. In sum, less wolfy.

Most dog breeds we recognize today have only been developed in the last few hundred years.

early dogs would have inherited the social skills and curiosity of their wolf ancestors, and would then have applied them toward cooperating with and appeasing humans as much as toward each other.

lost some of their tendency toward pack behavior: scavengers don’t need the proclivity to hunt together. Nor is any hierarchy relevant when you might live and eat on your own. T...

Domestication mirrors what nature, through natural selection, does over hundreds of generations: a kind of artificial selection that hurries up the clock.

kind of flexibility to changing status and roles is well suited to dealing with the new social unit that includes humans. Within

openness of these canids allowed them to adjust to a new pack: one that would include animals of an entirely different species.

loitered among human loiterers, and was eventually adopted and then molded by humans instead of solely by the caprice of nature. This

The present-day wolf is not the ancestor of the dog; though wolves and dogs share a common ancestor. Even the modern wolf is likely quite different than the ancestral wolves.

Dogs have more leisure to learn about others and to become accustomed to objects in their environment. If dogs are exposed to non-dogs—humans or monkeys or

rabbits or cats—in the first few months of development, they form an attachment to and preference for these species over others,

they scavenge or hunt small prey individually or in parallel.

For dogs, socialization among humans is natural; not so for wolves,

with human infants “attachment”: preference for the primary caregiver over others. They have anxiety at separation from the caregiver, and greet her specially on her return.

wolves pay more attention than dogs do to physical objects and handle these objects more capably.

Wolves seem to be better at solving certain kinds of physical puzzles. Some

Having been folded into the world of humans, dogs no longer need some of the skills that they would to survive on their own. As we’ll see, what dogs lack in physical skills, they make up for in people skills.

The difference is this: dogs look at our eyes.

we look. Dogs look, too. Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long

We not only avoid eye contact with strangers, we rely on eye contact with intimates.

Some behaviors and physical features are selected for—retrieving prey, smallness, a tightly curled tail—and some just come along for the ride.

get a dog whose acute sensitivity to motion leads to their being temperamentally high-strung.

But it is not so simple: dogs, like us, are more than their genome. No animal develops in a vacuum: genes interact with the environment to produce the dog you come to know.

great natural variability in the genome.

what a dog experiences and whom he meets will influence who he becomes in innumerable,

But it would be a mistake to guarantee that a dog, bred or not, will inevitably act a certain way on seeing that rabbit. This is the same mistake that is made when we wind up calling some breeds “aggressive” and legislating against them.

They have different threshold levels to notice and react to stimuli.

response, from raising a head in mild interest, to a full-on chase.

However, there is no one gene we can point to here. No gene develops right into retrieving behavior—or into any particular behavior at all. But

dog must also be exposed to sheep early in his life, or these propensities wind up being applied not to sheep, but in a disorganized way to young children, to people jogging in the park, or to the squirrels in your yard.

aggressive, then, is one that might have a lower threshold to perceive and react to a threatening motion. If the threshold is too low, then even neutral motion—approaching the dog—may be perceived as threatening.

But if the dog is not encouraged to follow through on this tendency, it is quite likely that he will never exhibit the aggress...

advertised—only that it has certain tendencies. What

Neither has got it right.

The key to dogs’ success living with us in our homes is the very fact that dogs are not wolves.

observations of captive wolves.

In the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot.

They are not alpha dominants any more than a human parent is the alpha in the family. Similarly, the subordinate status of a young wolf has more to do with his age than with a strictly enforced hierarchy.

Domestic dogs do not generally hunt. Most are not born into the family unit in which they will live: with

indulging us by the fact that we are their source of food than by reasoning that we are alpha.

We can certainly make dogs totally submissive to us, but that is neither biologically necessary nor particularly

enriching for eith...

“beastomorphism,” whose crazy philosophy seems to be something like “dogs aren’t humans, so we must see...

closer to being ...

gang

We share habits, preferences...

sharing fundamental premises of behavior. For instance,

A dog has to be taught this premise for habitation; no dog knows about the value of rugs.

In fact, rugs might provide a nice feeling underfoot for some bladder release.

humans the pack leaders responsible for discipline and forcing submission by others. These trainers teach by punishing the dog after discovery of, say, the inevitable peed-upon rug.