Book: The Genius of Dogs

After finishing the heavy, but very important and insightful "The Sum of Us" (I did not realize the last 120 pages were notes on the preceding 280 pages), I decided to start a lighter book next time.

This 2013 book is about all the ways dogs are very good at being dogs.  By domesticating us -- and yes, there's considerable evidence primitive wolves chose primitive people to provide them with food & shelter in return for protection -- Canis lupus familiaris sleeps in soft beds, gets 3 meals a day, and the only price they have to pay is rolling over on their backs occasionally and looking cute.

Fossil records indicate proto-wolf bones and proto-human bones were intermixed, indicating co-habitation during the last several ice ages as long as 1.2 million years ago.  This was when, maybe not coincidentally, Homo sapiens moved into the areas formerly dominated by Homo neanderthalis.  Dogs may have helped modern humans drive out, and then extinct, their closest ancestors and competitors.  If Neanderthals didn't like dogs, they would have had disadvantages in hunting and keeping warm at night.

Just sayin'.

Dogs will follow the gaze of a human to find a treat or a hidden toy.

Chimpanzees -- mankind's closest relative -- cannot do this.

Wolves -- domestic dogs' closest relative -- cannot do this.

Only infant humans and dogs (even infant puppies) can do this. It's ingrained, not learned.

Although dogs outperform wolves and all other non-human animals in responding to human gestures, they're not smarter.

Wolves will consistently outperform dogs in running mazes to get to a food reward, as will rats. Although apocryphal stories abound about dogs finding their way home across vast distances, they are apparently the exceptions. 70% of shelter dogs are runaways, who could not find their way home and were unchipped and unclaimed.

If you train a dog that a treat is hidden to the left of a marker in a field, then have them enter the field from the opposite direction so the treat is now on the right, they will consistently look to the left. Most dogs have no innate sense of direction.

Dogs have a well-developed sense of fairness.

For instance, just now I gave one of my boys a chicken jerky treat because he was hanging around while I made scrambled eggs. He took it into the bedroom to eat it on the bed.

Immediately my other dog came out looking for HIS treat.

My boys show no food aggression toward each other, but we're careful to give both the same treats at the same time.