A new book out by a Radford University professor and noted dog expert further delves into the social bond between humans and man’s best friend. “Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond,” by Darcy Morey, traces the evolution of the dog from some 15,000 years ago to the present day.
“The dog/human relationship is … I think it’s a pretty amazing thing,” according to Morey. “For people to relate to a non-human animal the way they relate to dogs is, in an evolutionary sense, an amazing thing.”
Morey says there’s a symbiotic relationship in the social bond between the two species. “Dogs benefit in the terms of sheer numbers … People benefit in a variety of ways, whether it’s a positive impact on hunting strategies, their role in transportation, that sort of thing.”
Why did the earliest humans domesticate dogs and not some other animal? “Domestic relationships are not restricted to human beings. You can just as easily ask whether ants domesticated aphids or aphids domesticated ants.”
“Obviously there are any number of other animals that can be considered domesticates as far as people are concerned. But considering how any given domestic relationship was started, you need to consider each animal separately. There’s not one size fits all.”
Morey describes himself as a “dog person,” although he grew up with a house cat. He says there’s definitely a difference between the way people interact with dogs and the way they interact with cats. “Dogs have a really distinctive relationship with people. Cats have their own kind of distinctive relationship with people, too, but it’s different from dogs.”
“People relate to dogs very much like other people. I don’t think that’s the way they relate to cats. Cats tend to be solitary and they tend to be pretty nocturnal, so they’re relatively self sufficient. Still, a good many people find them pretty pleasing to have around, and that’s especially true if they’re individually affectionate, which they can be. But dogs have so many human-like qualities that it’s much like having a person there sometimes.”
One chapter of the book is devoted to dog burials. Morey says the earliest humans buried their dogs because they were treating them like people, an extension of the family bond.
“They sometimes buried them with people. The point has been made in some of the original reports from a good many years ago, that dogs in certain areas were buried, curled up in kind of a sleeping position, and you can just see that from the photographs of them.” People thought the dogs would join them in the afterlife.
Morey is a member of the Radford University Forensic Science Institute research faculty. He published his first paper on dogs as a graduate student in 1986, and did his doctoral dissertation several years later on the evolution of the domestic dog. He is considered by many to be one of the world’s leading experts on the evolution of dogs.
By Beverly Amsler [email protected]