I was lucky enough to have the chance to talk to James Serpell earlier this year about the new edition of his book, The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behavior and Interactions with People (2016) and discuss some of the myriad ways in which our understanding of dogs has come on since the first edition appeared in the mid-nineties.
After talking about the current state of knowledge about the origins of the dog (and there are still question marks over the where, when, why and how), I asked James about some of the significant new areas that the second edition of his book covers. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of this part of our interview. You can listen to the whole thing using the links above or below.
James Serpell
Well, there are so many. I mean, behavioural genetics is a growing area and a lot of behavioural geneticists are now starting to focus in on the dog as a potential model for understanding the evolution of behavioural characteristics.
The dog is potentially a nice model because we have this incredible diversity of different breeds, all of which have been selected for a slightly different temperament traits and behavioural characteristics, so it looks like a very intriguing kind of potential model for studying the genetics of behaviour with obvious translational relevance to the evolution of human behaviour or traits as well. So that’s one area that’s I’d say developing.
The area of dog training and behaviour modification has really evolved tremendously since the first edition came out, with this increasing focus on reward-based training and moving away from punishment as a viable method of training dogs.
The area of animal-assisted interventions of various kinds in human therapeutic interventions involving animals, primarily dogs – that’s another area that’s just exploded really since the first edition.
It was necessary to introduce new chapters as well to cover things like the impact of feral dogs on wildlife. Things like that, which really hadn’t even been considered in the first edition. We knew there were free-roaming dogs and we had chapters about the ecology of free-roaming dogs, but I don’t think people at that time realized what a huge impact some of these dog populations were having on wildlife, conservation-sensitive wildlife.
Hedgehog & Fox
You mentioned training there and in the introduction to the book you write about your hope that the book will be an antidote to ‘the snake oil salesmen’ who peddle at best sort of half-understood theories and at worst downright wrong theories about how dogs learn and interact and behave and therefore should be trained. Do you think that is a message which is getting out there? Which is being understood? In other words I’m asking, I suppose about the interface between the academic research and how that is popularly received by the public and the people they pay money in order to train their dogs for them.
James Serpell
Yes, although I think there’s a sort of a sort of disconnect between what’s happening in popular media and what’s happening out there in the dog-training community. So I think in the dog-training community as a whole the message is getting out – slowly – that reward-based methods of training are better and more durable and produce a better relationship between the owner and a dog.
But at the same time, there are popular TV pundits who are still selling very old-fashioned methods of dog training based on what they call dominance or leadership type roles, which really has been horribly misunderstood by the public at large to mean that you need to dominate your dog in order to get decent behaviour from it, which is really not any longer considered appropriate in scientific circles.
Hedgehog & Fox
And that old wolf model, extrapolating from what was understood to be natural wolf behaviour, is very tenacious isn’t it? No matter how many times it’s discredited, it’s very tenacious that we that we should simply read the behaviour of our dogs as matching that of their ancestors.
James Serpell
Yes, I think to some degree there’s a certain inevitability to people assuming that because dogs are derived from wolves that some of their behaviour is also derived from wolves. There’s also a lot of misunderstandings among the dog-training community about this. You know, people have tried to push out the idea that wolves don’t show dominance behaviour and that’s not true either. They do. Or they try to say that it only occurs in captive wolf populations, which is also untrue.
Wolves in the wild do definitely show dominance behaviour. But what’s interesting is that it’s mainly to do with younger animals showing deference towards older, much more mature animals. So there is a hierarchy, but it’s based on age and seniority rather than being ‘the tough guy’. And unfortunately that message has been hard to get across.
And, you know, you will see your own dog in the family showing these signals of deference towards primarily the adult members of the family. It hasn’t disappeared. But it does not necessarily imply that that dog is trying to be a social climber or assert itself in the social hierarchy against people.
Hedgehog & Fox
How much progress do you think we’ve made in understanding what constitutes quality of life for a dog? Is that an area which still needs further investigation and communication?
James Serpell
I think it does, yes. I think there’s a tendency to assume that compared with other domestic animals, dogs have it pretty good, you know, they live the life of Riley in people’s homes and get regular meals and that sort of thing.
But I think there is a slight misunderstanding there that many of the dogs we keep are not kept particularly well. We’re talking for one thing about a highly social animal, animals that are very distressed normally by being separated from either other people or other dogs. And yet the vast majority of dogs live in single-dog households and they get left at home alone for much of the day when their owners are out at work or out at school. And that in itself is a significant welfare problem for many dogs. Some dogs adjust to it OK and just sleep through the period of the day when there’s nobody around, but many dogs become extremely distressed by this level of separation.
Dogs also like to get a tremendous amount of exercise. They’re very active animals. And in my community here in the US it’s actually illegal to let your dog off the leash unless it’s in a confined space, in a dog park essentially, and most people don’t have access to that, which means that your average dog gets walked around the block on a leash twice a day. And that’s really inadequate in terms of exercise. And I think this is the explanation, or at least a partial explanation, for why so many of these dogs develop behavioural problems. They’re just simply not exercised enough.
The list goes on. There are of course all the problems associated with the way we’ve bred these animals. So many of them now have severe health problems due to either inbreeding or being bred to a very peculiar shape. So squashed faces and short bandy legs and all these other characteristics that we bred into our dogs, which are not natural and which cause them health problems and welfare problems. So yes, there’s a lot more that we need to do in that area in terms of research.
Hedgehog & Fox
One of the conclusions that I drew from reading the book was that dogs were better at understanding us than we are at understanding them. Is that fair?
James Serpell
Yes, I think that’s a very fair observation. I think that’s because that’s been essential to their survival, so that ability to read humans has really been the key to their success.
The human ability to read dogs certainly pays off in certain situations. For example, if you’re using a dog for a working role of some kind. So the classic example would be the shepherd with his working Border Collie. Obviously he has to be able to read his dog very well in order to use that dog effectively. But for many of us it’s enough that the dog just greets us and is nice to us and seems overjoyed when we come home. There’s not much onus on us to really understand our dog so well. And I think that’s just an unfortunate product of the relationship we have with these animals.
But certainly for the dogs, they would never have survived as long as they have been as successful as they have If it wasn’t for their uncanny ability to read us and anticipate our feelings and our emotions.
Hedgehog & Fox
One question I came to the book with, which I was I was keen to know what the latest scientific research said, was about whether dogs possess a theory of mind, in other words if they can intuit the contents of human beings’ minds and work out what we’re thinking. And it sounds as though the jury is still out, but there’s quite a bit of scepticism about whether they possess a theory of mind.
James Serpell
Yes, I would agree the jury is still out. The other question is whether it’s possible to have a kind of a rudimentary theory of mind or whether it’s an all or nothing thing.
You know, we know that two-year-old children don’t appear to possess it and then at about three they start to develop it. That suggests that it is pretty much all or nothing. On the other hand, it may be that there is a capacity to learn about the other individual and their habitual ways of behaving that could be a kind of precursor to developing a full-blown theory of mind.
I don’t know whether there’s necessarily a kind of an ‘aha!’ moment when you’re three years old and you go, ‘oh wow, I just suddenly realized this person thinks like I do’, and I’m not sure that dogs do that. But nevertheless they show some remarkably uncanny capacities to anticipate what their owners are planning to do and things like that. And it’s very, very hard to tease out how much of that could be some sort of rudimentary theory of mind and how much of it is just simply very skilful reading of non-verbal signals that humans are simply not conscious of giving. And so it’s really tough to pin it down.
There are lots of cognitive psychologists doing experiments with dogs to see if they can try and pin it down or determine once and for all whether or not dogs, or at least some dogs, possess something like a theory of mind.
But I agree the jury’s still out and we shouldn’t assume that all dogs are equivalent. You know, there’s a vast range of abilities, cognitive abilities, in the dog population, so some dogs are clearly not the brightest spark in the firmament and other dogs seem to be remarkably bright. The dogs that, for example, have huge vocabularies of words that they recognize and can distinguish between. So it raises the interesting possibility that there are some dogs out there with a theory of mind, but the majority of them don’t have it.
Hedgehog & Fox
I was really interested in the chapter that you wrote about what we could call the cultural status of dogs. You look at lots of different areas of the world and different times, and a word that you keep coming back to is ‘ambivalence’. So although we might think of dogs in the Western world as cherished pets, treated almost like children, there is a deep ambivalence to dogs running through many societies including our own, to the extent that it does seem to be something which almost defines our relationship with them. Can you say a little bit about some of the salient characteristics of that?
James Serpell
Yes. It crops up, like you say, across cultures and across contexts, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at cultures, for example, that eat dogs or cultures that keep them as pets or cultures that use used for hunting. You find this self-same kind of ambivalence about the actual status of the dog relative to humans.
I like to think of the dog as this animal that lives somewhere in the interstices between animal and humans; so it’s not truly an animal any more, partly due to its domesticated status, but mainly because of its strong affinity for people. And yet people aren’t really accepting it as being wholly human, even though we talk about dogs as being members of our families and things like that. They’re not really the same as members of our family, but they’re kind of honorary members of the family. At heart we seem to be at some level uncomfortable about accepting the dog wholly as a member of the human world. But at the same time, we’re not happy thinking of it as being just another domestic animal.
So it does occupy this kind of strange no man’s land in between. I speculate towards the end of that chapter as to why this might be and the conclusion I reach is that the dog’s unwittingly become a kind of an ambassador for the rest of the animal kingdom. And this is an awkward situation to be in because as long as it refrains from behaving like a dog, we love it and treat it like a person, but as soon as it starts behaving a bit too much like a dog and doing things that dogs do that humans don’t do, then we start to think of it as something obnoxious or unclean or dirty.
So it’s a very intriguing kind of situation and I don’t see an easy way out of it, to be honest. It’s just one of those things, how humans try to compartmentalize their world. And poor old dog has got saddled with this unusual position of being on the fence.
Hedgehog & Fox
It sounds as though the expectations we have of dogs in terms of how they behave, how they interact, really are too high for them to feasibly meet. Is that fair?
James Serpell
Yes, I think it is. And in our efforts to force them into that sort of human mould, we are harming their welfare, because they aren’t humans and they have different needs and different requirements. They have adapted admirably well to the human environment. But still they aren’t human. And I think we have to at some point meet them halfway and accept that if we want to share our lives with these animals, we have to make accommodation for their needs and their interests as well as just our own.
Hedgehog & Fox
And you think because dogs share our lives and our homes with us that they raise the question of our moral responsibility to non-human animals and a particularly pertinent and difficult-to-avoid way, in a way that factory farmed animals are out of sight and so they are not going to raise those questions in quite such a flagrant way?
James Serpell
I think that’s where the ambassador idea comes in, that they are out there representing the rest of the animal kingdom.
And whenever we think about our relationships with them and how close those relationships often can get, it raises very uncomfortable moral questions about the way we treat other animals which are not so privileged and aren’t so much in favour. And that again is another source of this ambivalence. We don’t want to let dogs get too close because that’s opening the door to having to address all these other animals which we treat so poorly.
Hedgehog & Fox
If there were one scientific or historic question concerning dogs that you would really like to either discover or see someone else discover the answer to, however big or however small, is there one thing that nags you in the dark hours of the night and you think ‘wouldn’t it be great to know that’?
James Serpell
Well, if I had a time machine I would really love to go back and look at the very earliest relationships between people and wolves and discover once and for all why on earth people decided to coexist with these animals on such an intimate basis. It seems such an odd thing to do in some ways. Even though had it’s been enormously beneficial to us in the long run, it’s hard to imagine why it was so beneficial at the time. It would just be wonderful to be able to see what was going on and get a better understanding of both the human and canine side of that story.
Hedgehog & Fox
Just before the interview I was just glancing back at the book you wrote in the 80s, In the Company of Animals, and I saw that I had double-underlined a paragraph where you say, ‘prehistoric man may have loved his dogs as pets long before he made use of them for any other purpose. Affection for pets may seem in retrospect trivial and unimportant, yet it may have been responsible for one of the most profound and significant events in the history of our species’. And maybe I could ask you as a very last question, is that a view that you still adhere to?
James Serpell
Yes. Essentially. But I am totally open to other ideas and I have spent a lot of time reading about other ideas and looking at the whole history of this concept, which isn’t a concept that I came up with. Actually you can trace it back to Francis Galton, who was Darwin’s cousin, who first came up with the idea based on the observations of early explorers, who were going out to so-called primitive communities around the world and coming back with these stories about how they kept wild animals as pets.
And to these European explorers, that seemed like a weird thing for these people to be doing, sufficiently weird that they remark on it. Galton collected lots and lots of examples of this type of behaviour and concluded that maybe pet-keeping was the key, as it were, to animal domestication. But recently the theory has fallen out of favour, at least in relation to the dog. Repeatedly in scientific publications I see people regurgitating the idea that pretty much wolves domesticated themselves by becoming scavengers from human waste. I guess these things go in cycles. And one of these days I’ll sit down and write a review paper that will bring it all together and [laughs] hopefully settle the matter.