Cats like to stare at things and lurk: They’re built for surfing on the Web. We bond with them in little spurts, like videos on YouTube. Dogs, meanwhile, demand a lasting interaction. They’re thick and shaggy, musty-smelling like a book, and while they have their standard tricks, they’re famously unable to adapt.
MY DOG BURNS
No more shall bear beauteous form
Be seen in the raging storm.
No more shall her wondrous tail
Dodge the quickly dropping hail.
She lived a quiet harmless life
In Hartford far from madding strife;
Nor waged no War on peaceful rat
Nor battled with wild fierce tomcat.
No, No, my beloved, dear ’cause dead
What tough thy coat was a brick dust red?
Like a good author, thou was a trusty friend
And thy tail, like his, red to the very end.
[Researchers] found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see. This suggested the dogs were able to alter their behaviour when they knew their owners’ perspective had changed.
New
study indicates dogs have “flexible understanding” that lets them understand the viewpoint of a human. Also see
The Genius of Dogs.
“All roads lead to the Doghouse.”
Vintage placemat from Seattle’s famous Dog House restaurant, 1955.
It makes sense because some researchers … speculate that wolves first became domesticated when people settled down and started farming.
The hungry wolves would have been attracted by their garbage dumps full of food scraps. But…to take advantage of this convenient new food supply, the wolves would have to adapt not just to being near people, but also to eating their food, which now included starchy grains and vegetables.
So any wolves who could digest starch would have had an advantage [and] today’s domesticated dogs are probably descended from them.
Fascinating NPR Morning Edition episode on how dogs evolved to love carbs in order to live with people. In the research paper published in this month’s Nature, the team behind the study notes:
…novel adaptations allowing the early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive on a diet rich in starch, relative to the carnivorous diet of wolves, constituted a crucial step in the early domestication of dogs.
More on the fascinating history of how dogs became domesticated here, and more on what they mean to us humans here.
If you resist too much the power of the big primary-color emotions that surround the dog, you’re missing the experience.
