In Aesop’s fable of the Dog and the Wolf, the latter declares that it is better to starve free than be a fat slave, but the fact is that, without man, there would be no dog at all. When people eventually began to form permanent settlements, a new food source appeared: waste. Wolf packs, less fearful of man than others, less aggressive too, took advantage, and turned themselves into dogs. Natural selection works in mysterious ways.
Years ago, before the gender police were on the prowl, this book’s top title would have been Man’s Best Friend, for the ‘genius’ that it describes is the dog’s talent for inter-
action with humans. Neither a teaching manual nor an anthology of heroic dog stories, this is a work of scholarship. It has 67 pages of notes. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find a more cheerful, optimistic and warm-hearted read. Difficult, too, to find another book about dogs touching not only on Darwin and Skinner, but also on Stalin. Even Justin Bieber gets a mention.
Brian Hare is Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, well-known enough to be identified by American Kennel Club types as ‘that dog guy’. It seems unlikely that anyone in the world knows more than Hare about the way dogs think.
The book is in three parts. The first is the most fascinating, telling the story of how Hare discovered the cognitive associations that dogs and humans share and how dogs became ‘the most successful mammal on the planet (besides us)’.
In doing so Hare scuppers notions that men adopted wolf puppies or that wolves and men hunted together. In almost every culture the wolf has been regarded as a menace. The last English wolf was killed in the reign of Henry VII.
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