Jules Howard's message is profound. It is simply that the more compassionate we have become in our explorations into the minds of dogs, the more intelligent they have shown us to be.
ZOE WILLIAMS: While you doubtless don’t need to be reminded of the aeons we’ve known dogs and loved them, zoology has had a tendency to neglect them. “For decades in the 20th century,” [Jules] Howard writes, “dogs were considered unworthy of rigorous study,” since focusing on them for insights into the animal kingdom was “like trying to understand the adaptations of a chicken’s egg by studying the crumbs of a wet cake”. Dogs were somehow rendered inauthentic, almost processed, by their emotional and physical proximity to us.
In fact, counters the author of [Wonderdog: How the Science of Dogs Changed the Science of Life], not only do dogs warrant close study – “nothing else on Earth has such a wide range of variations within the same species category” – but every time we’ve done so, we’ve unearthed incomparable wisdom about ourselves. Except when we’ve been wrong: Rudolph Schenkel’s 1947 paper on wolves, hypothesising alpha behaviour and its attendant hierarchies, was applied for years in the fields of both dog and human behaviour…
While Howard includes these moments of playful humility on behalf of earlier science, his message is profound, though he insists that it’s “straightforward”: “It is simply that the more compassionate we have become in our explorations into the minds of dogs, the more intelligent they have shown us to be”…
Does he mean we can apply what we learn about dogs’ brains to our own? Or that the leap of trying to empathise with another species is one that builds our compassion? Or that only by extending our imaginations to take in how intelligent a dog could be can we unlock our own intelligence? He means all these things, and more. Pavlov’s famous discovery of classical conditioning in dogs was the first real departure from the previous understanding of the mind as a “black box” that would always remain mysterious…
One of the most fascinating chapters concerns the anti-dog vivisection movement, raging for almost a century from the mid-1800s, which distilled not only a clash between science and morality, but also the mobilisation of middle-aged women against the establishment and its permitted cruelties, bisecting as it went the Suffragette movement and that of the rights of the child. Are we taming or being tamed? Both, the author insists throughout. It would churlish to force a choice, when it’s worked out so well for us all. SOURCE…
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