Customer Reviews

Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book blew me away with its insights and made me want to throw it across the room many times. It is simply the best evolutionary and biological look at dogs around, while at the same time is seriously marred by the authors' excursions out of science into a weird pseudo-ethical debate about "what's REALLY best for dogs."

As the owner of a young Great Pyrenees (now 20 months) brought home at 5-1/2 weeks as a pet out of a litter of working livestock guardian dogs, I was fascinated by the Coppingers' description of the "predatory sequence." I could suddenly understand the behaviors I'd observed at the dog park, the startling differences between my dog and the border collies there. The very idea that there are literally millions of the type of dog I own--a breed that seems unusual if not rare in the U.S.--out there in central Asia even today migrating with herds of sheep as they have done for millenia...this just gives me chills. As humans we like to tell ourselves stories about our breeds: how they developed, why they have this or that characteristic that was "bred into them" for some special purpose. And yet the story the Coppingers tell about the livestock guardian "breeds" rings so true in a historical, scientific and geographical context that it is awe-inspiring. All of this part of the book is well-argued and based on convincing evidence.

While I do agree that human breeding of dogs according to strict, but essentially fanciful, "breed-types" should be subject to serious ethical discussion, I wish the Coppingers had simply made their effective points about the underlying nature of breeds and left it at that. The cloudy discussion of whether or not people's present-day association with dogs is really "bad" in some esoteric way for dogs just doesn't come across as convincing in this book. Their ideas, which are not very precise, seem to be based on biological definitions of "evolutionary success" that are in themselves just human words and concepts with no more functional weight than an AKC breed definition. This is an area where the Coppingers seem to have abandoned their incisive real-world observations and fallen for their own "scientific" jargon.

Do we want to know if the human-dog association is bad for dogs? That's like asking the question, Is marriage bad for people? Obviously for some dogs it is wonderful, for others it is a disaster, for others it is irrelevant. Dogs hardly seem to be going extinct--what more can they ask from an evolutionary perspective?

The first half of the book was quite enjoyable and thought-provoking. The authors describe how dogs evolved from scavenger village dogs, rather than directly from wolves. They argue that dogs are a distinct and extraordinary creature, not an inferior subspecies of wolves, with behavioral traits that are different from and often surpassing wolves.

I found the second half of the book, however, to be a bit preachy, pessimistic, and overstated. One main premise seemed to be that keeping dogs as household pets (as opposed to working dogs) is a lose-lose situation for the dog and the owner. Humans lose because pet dogs take valuable resources, time and money, away from our species, resources we should be investing in our offspring. Pet dogs rarely give back to us in terms of affection or whatever enough to make up for what they take from us. Dogs lose because they are slaves to our every whim, often subjected to inadequate care and boredom, and purebreds are being bred for appearance at the expense of their own health and genetic vitality. The author lashed out at showdog breeders.

Point taken, but I think the authors overstated their case, throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't believe dogs tap us out of resources to an unhealthy degree. If anything the huge dog industry (food, supplies, vet care...etc.) benefits our economy. I know many families who find great joy in owning a dog as a pet, and I think dogs add to a parent-child relationship rather than detract.

I also thought it quite hypocritcal, given the author's use of dogs for sled racing, when the author ripped on the use of dogs to assist people with special needs, such as people bound to a wheelchair. The author argued that it is unhealthy and unnatural for the dog, but that sled dog racing was somehow exempt from the criticism.

My recommendation is to read this book with a highlighter in each hand -- one color for illogical personal conclusions, and the other for valid observations (often made by others). It is fun to read -- but a truly mixed bag full of potential pitfalls for the novice that accepts as proven truth the comments made by the authors.

This book undertakes a topic of tremendous interest to almost every dog owner -- no matter what breed! It is written in a readable fashion while seeming to be based on the years of experience that the Coppingers have had. Thus, while I own Ray Coppinger's non-serious book on "fishing dogs," I was hoping that this book would be as insightful as "The Domestic Dog," edited by James Serpell (which includes a chapter by Ray Coppinger and Richard Schneider -- carefully edited I now suspect) or as informative as "Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals" edited by Grandin or even the small volume "A Concise Survey of Animal Behavior" by Honore and Klopfer.

It isn't.

The Coppingers have evidently spent years with dogs; they are often cited in work with livestock guard dogs and have a confessed love of sled dogs.

Interesting topic - some real experience -- all that is lacking is an editor or someone to point out the serious lacks in logic that the Coppingers blythely sprinkle throughout this book.

Because the authors knew a border collie ("with papers" p. 174) that they describe as a "superb sled dog," they make the leap that "any dog will do for any job if raised and trained properly" (p. 154). In fact, attempts to support this theory have failed miserably.

A prime example that I am familiar with as a livestock producer and one that is within the Coppingers area of expertise was the attempt to use retrievers (Chesapeake?) as livestock guardians in western sheep flocks. That unsuccessful endeavor has been deleted from memory -- and the pages of this text.

Instead, this text published in 2001 quotes 1985 initial observations about training and guard dogs and omits almost two more decades of real study on that topic -- some by the same source -- research which does not support the authors' premise.

How many other topics in this book are as slanted in coverage?

A readable, fun book which must be read much like any work of fiction -- it's up to the reader to pick out the eternal truths and to simply puzzle over the rest.

Scientists use a cold and objective eye when they approach their subjects, and the Coppingers are scientists par excellence. Much of this book is difficult to read for a dog-lover. The authors strip away all the isn't-that-a-cute-puppy feelings and leave one wondering if any dog-human relationships, other than working dogs like sled-dogs and sheep-dogs, are justified.

The authors carefully build a scientific and convincing case that dogs did not evolve from the oft-thought-of cave-man-tamed wolf pup, but rather that they evolved to fit the niche of village dump-scavenger. That's easy enough to accept. Then they take it one step further to conclude that modern junk yard dogs are happier and healthier (at least genetically) than a pampered family pet. Believe it? Here's the scientific argument: family pets are really worse than parasites-their relationship to people hurts the dog (in-bred purebreds that can not breath properly or even procreate naturally, are miserable and die young), and hurts the people (dogs spread disease, bite children, and take money and time more properly spent on children). Believe it now? Read the book and see if the authors can convince you.

Most disturbing is the Coppinger's analysis of service dogs, which suffer only slightly less than house dogs in the scientific analysis. Service dogs, they conclude, have a relationship to humans defined as dulosis: slavery. The reasoning is that the dogs are "captured" into work their breeds are not evolved for, "mutilated" (altered) so they cannot reproduce randomly, and "forced" to work. Well, unlike house pets, at least the service dogs benefit their human partners! The Coppingers go on to suggest that we need to examine the way service dogs are trained and used in order to improve the dog's end of the equasion. So in the end, they give a more reasoned, less evocative analysis of service dogs than the emotionally loaded term "slavery" might suggest. I pray that militant animal welfare groups do not take the term "slavery" as a rallying cry to accost the thousands of responsible people helped by service dogs in a frightening and dangerously misguided attempt to free "enslaved" animals!

At one point, the authors take Stanley Coren's "The Intelligence of Dogs" to task, partly because it is unfair to dogs of various breeds to be rated via standardized tests, but mostly because the press and public did not read it carefully and a whole new mythology of dog breeds was born. I sincerely hope the press and public will read this book more carefully-if for no other reason than for the sake of all the service dogs and their people.

There is a lot of truth, bluntly stated, in "Dogs: a Startling New Understanding..." We need voices to kick our complacency in the butt and challenge our warm and fuzzy ideas. Here's hoping that people read this book thoughtfully and carefully, for the scientific treatise that it is.

This new book on the origins and behavior of dogs by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger is the most influential look at the nature of dogs in several decades, and it promises to be controversial.

For example, the book is going to make some dog trainers get their hackles up. Trainers who base their methods on the concept that a dog is just a wolf in civilized clothing will be especially upset, because the Coppingers say that is simply wrong. They admit that there is "no appreciable differences" in the genetics of coyotes, dogs, jackels and wolves, and that these species can interbreed. Still, they say, "dogs have diverged, changed, transmutated from their wolflike ancestors."

Thus, training programs that say the owner/trainer should be the "alpha wolf" and the dog a subordinate member of the pack is wrong, because dogs are not wolves. The brains of dogs are different from the brains of wolves, just as the brains of humans are different from the brains of chimpanzees, a close relative, they argue. Dogs don't think and react to signals as wolves do.

The authors also suggest the idea that humans captured wild wolf pups and domesticated them may well be wrong. Their alternative theory on how dogs became tame has important implications for how we understand our best friends.

This is not a recipe book for dog training, nor is it an easy "10 tips for a well behaved dog." Some sections are rather technical. But overall, the book is easy to comprehend. It may very well set the stage for renewed and lively discussions on approaches to dog training in the 21st century. For dog breeders, trainers and serious dog lovers, this book is absolutely must reading.

The authors are trained ethologists with a life-long interest in dogs. Their views are also shaped by visiting and studying dogs in many parts of the world. That's further enriched by their experience in training and working with many different types of dogs -- in particular, herding dogs and herd guard dogs, sled dogs, and village dogs.

Ethology is a branch of biology that studies animal behavior. It emphasizes evolutionary principles in behavior, often identifying continuity and change in patterns from studying closely related species. It also emphasizes studying the behavior in the natural context or setting. (Comparative psychology, by contrast, had grown to primarily favor the laboratory method and setting -- until the revolution of ethology and Eckhard Hess's work shook it up.)

This book is a work for the serious student of canine behavior but written in a style that's readable by anyone with an interest in a scientific approach to and understanding of dogs. It greatly expands (and makes far more readable) the material in the Coppinger & Schneider chapter in "The Domestic Dog", James Serpell (Ed.) published six years earlier, but it also extends it into other areas.

Its most important thesis is that dogs probably derived from wolf-like animals which hung around mesolithic villages and were scavengers, quite similar to "village dogs" in many parts of the world. They were not wolves, captured as puppies and then tamed. Wolves do NOT ever become tame or trainable. I found their argument on these point to be extremely convincing.

The serious student of dogs will also find their ethological observations and comparisons of dogs valuable.

Despite its great worth and contribution, the book is not without some petty flaws.

I'd have liked more discussion on how the sequence of actions, like beads on a string, of orient/ eye-stalk/ chase/ grab-bite/ kill-bite/ dissect/ consume becomes fragmented so that some elements disappear while others remain. And how the differences arise for different dog "types". As ethologists, they know that there are many different behavior sequences in a species of which the predatory game killing pattern is only one. What about various social behaviors? Play behavior? Reproductive behavior? Adult attitude toward puppies?

I became frustrated at the authors' lapses in consideration for their readers in their word usage, "transhumance" being one example. They used it several times before it was ever defined. It means the shepherds or drovers making seasonal migrations with their flocks in the Mediterranean region. Either explain it sooner or, even better, use terms familiar to English speaking readers. (On a websearch for "transhumance," the first 30 hits were all French except one, translated into English, from a Swedish university.

The authors' descriptions of genetic processes are neither models of exposition or of clarity. E.g., I think once a claim was made that a behavior cannot be genetically controlled because there are alleles at the same locus. (An allele is a gene's partner at the same locus on the companion chromosome.) In a single gene model, one can, for example, have a dominant or recessive gene as an allele. That makes it not genetic? The reader interested in genetics should not look to this book for understanding. Use a basic college biology text.

Another example is discussing how experience "shapes" the developing neurological "wiring". But "shape" then becomes so often used as a noun, and such a big deal is made about it altering the shape of the brain, that I found myself writing in the margin, "Are they reintroducing phrenology??!!" (Phrenology was the pseudo-science popular in the early 1800s; it purported that the abilities, characters, and deficits of a person could be ascertained from the bumps and valleys on the skull since the skull would reflect the underlying volume of the brain.) Basic introductory tests in psychology will cover this relation between early experience and brain function far more clearly.

The authors rile some sacred cows, possibly deliberately, perhaps to provoke discussion (and maybe controversy and publicity?).

They take aim at restricting the gene pool in AKC registered breeds. This gradually develops more genetic abnormalities and health problems -- eyes, hips, skin conditions, etc. Also, they
suggest that AKC breed clubs, by presenting a picture of the ideal dog with little or no behavioral measures of excellence, inevitably tend to accentuate some characteristics more and more. This leads working dogs to lose their superior abilities in some areas and become unhealthy caricatures of their ancestors. The bulldog, with continual respiratory problems and unable to breed on its own, is given as an extreme example. This is a worthwhile topic to discuss, IMO.

They also question whether people are dogs' best friends or are dogs being used as robots or slaves. While they raise some interesting questions in this area they give no answers. (I found myself wondering, would they include or exclude themselves -- and their history of dog ownership and use -- from such an indictment?) But also a worthwhile topic for discussion.

I am a former musher who is now disabled and has a service dog. When I was a musher, I was attacked for being "cruel" to let my dogs pull a sled, now I am attacked verbally by the public on the average of several times a month for being "cruel" to have a service dog to help me. When I read this book I was fairly astonished to see the author use exactly the same arguments used by the anti mushing agenda to attack the use of service dogs, while defending the use of sled dogs! This is illogical to the extreme, and real hypocrisy. Oddly, the anti service dog folks ( who are usually also rabidly anti mushing if you ask them) seem very ready to refer to this book to defend their "service dogs are slaves" point, but pointedly avoid any of the book's many references to the fact ( and it is a fact ) that dogs like to pull sleds when treated kindly and fairly. Back when I was a musher, people also called my sled dogs "slaves". As the old saying goes, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Just because Mr. Coppinger likes mushing and does not need a service dog seems to be his main motivation in this argument- not very scientific. Also, he implies ( as the anti mushing folks do about sled dogs) that service dogs are abused and trained cruelly. My sled dogs mostly trained themselves with a bit of guiding from me, and my service dog was trained using a clicker and treats- he's never worn a choke chain in his life. Many service dog training groups and schools use positive reinforcement.
I got the strong impression, from other statements in the book ( such as the one about old people being a waste of time and money) that the author probably feels that people like me should just go away and die somewhere and that would be beter from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe if he were to suffer a serious accident or illness, he might develop some compassion for other people less fortunate them himself. He certainly does not seem to be able to see the contradiction in his own statements. What a disappointing book.

The Coppingers present (in my opinion) a reasonable explanation for how we domesticated dogs, as well as insights into modern dogbreeding and behavior.
The point that modern dogs are descendents of 'village dogs' - which were wolf-like animals makes sense - they weren't wolves as we see them today. (Just as humans may have evolved from an ape-like ancestor - not the modern chimp).
It's explained how humans have bred dogs for certain traits that are exaggerated from their prey-chase cycle, and I found it very helpful for understanding dog behavior in general. He mentions how the AKC doesn't have dogs interest in their breeding programs - but this is obvious - if humans had the same type of inbreeding, we'd be appalled.
I found his criticism of service dogs surprising, although warranted. He is critical of their training - which is disjointed and doesn't prepare them for serving someone in a wheelchair.
As far as the dump dogs being happier - I believe he meant that biologically speaking, they weren't inbred and those with non-survivable traits (such as those pets with breathing problems) weren't around. And biologically speaking, dogs would be happier if they were breeding, but the authors aren't recommending that we let our pets breed freely.
All of the information is presented in a manner that what the reader wants can be picked through - there may have been a couple arguments in the book which I didn't personally agree with, but they didn't stop me from enjoying the rest of the book.

Right on!

I've never quite accepted the whole 'treat your dog like a wolf' theory of dog training. If you have ever worked with a submissive dog (both of mine are submissive) you will immediately find that growling, scruffing and rolling them over will get you no where but ankle deep in a puddle of urine.

However, working directly with your dog and being social with your dog is the way to train them. Dogs have evolved and been transformed by us to work (and play) - the ultimate reward for many dogs is the act of work itself - a herding dog gets its kudos from chasing livestock, my dog gets hers from being with me and accompanying me everywhere - the motivation is social and no food or operant conditioning is needed.

This book gives you a new appreciation of the dog as a species and as part of human culture - for they are ultimately a product of mankind and like us are brilliant and flawed, trapped in their instincts as much as we are in our presuppositions about the dog.

My only negative feedback for the book is that the authors did not go very deeply into their central theory of dog evolution and some of the chapters on learning and comparisons of dog types (herders vs village dog vs sled dogs) were shallow - I would have enjoyed reading more!

Regardless, this book will remove some of the sentimentality and restore the reality of the dog in your mind. I certainly appreciate my dog that much more for reading this book.

Most dog books are either sentimental paens to cute little fuzzy wuggy nuggums, or practical how-tos on owning and traning and trouble-shooting pet dogs.

The Coppingers' _Dogs_ is a history and gazzeteer of domesticated dogs, stripped of sentimentality and informed by years of research and hands-on experience.

This isn't a must-read for dog owners. It won't give you any blazing insights that will help you convince Tiger not to chew on shows or Lenny from humping legs. There are better, more practical books for that.

This may not be a great book for dog _lovers_ either. It takes a rather blunt look at the relationship between _canis domesticus_ and _homo sapiens_ in a wide variety of cultures.

If you are interested in the big picture, and a convincing but not necessarily totally accepted scenario for how wolves evolved into dogs, you should definitely check this one out. There's fascinating stuff on how "pariah dogs" might have morphed into basic working breeds, the differences between wolves, dogs, and coyotes, and much more.