Dogs

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Hello. My father never wanted our dog. Trouble began early over its name. Mother, who wasn't exactly streetwise, wanted to name it Puck. Dad was horrified. He said, Can you imagine what the neighbors would think if they saw me running down the street shouting that? It was finally agreed after days and days of discussion that this rather scruffy new member of our household should be called lucky. That, however, proved to be thoroughly incongruous.

because father treated him as a delinquent child who needed to be harshly socialized. Rydyn ni wedi bod yn ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod i'r ystod. No dogs were ever allowed in the front room, so much so that the demand became a commonplace way for us children to attack each other. Get in your box, Christine. You get in your box, Lawrence All the way.

made me eager to read a new book, which promised to show me that the and I'm quoting, the power of the human canine bond has never wavered. And that book is entitled Collard, How we made the modern dog. And it's also... is Chris Pearson, Professor of Environmental History, at the University of Liverpool, from where he now joins me Chris, for most of their shared history, dogs were seen as working for us in various roles.

Rydw i mewn gwirionedd o'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw. They've helped with hunting, then once humans develop Agriculture and keeping animals, keeping livestock. Dogs were guard dogs protecting livestock from wolves and other wild animals. Transportation, whether that's in the Arctic, pulling sleds, or closer to home. In London dogs would lug meat around for butchers on their car.

There was the turn spit dog whose job it was to go on a wooden wheel in kitchens, in pubs or or large houses and basically go around the wheel and the meat would turn and cook and this was the dog's role. until they w were replaced by machinery. And they contrasted with those workers like hunting dogs who were celebrated for being noble and helping off aristocracy hunts. So dogs are really prized for what they did rather than how they looked and dogs are classified in this way.

John Keyes, who was the sixteenth century Cambridge scholar, rather than thinking about breeds today like we might think of Spaniels or Pointers or Border Terriers, he divided dogs into hunting dogs, companionable dogs that we might call pets now, those that help farmers and shepherds. So while most dogs nowadays are no longer workers, we still have police, army dogs and of course guide dogs.

Mae'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r pethau'r

So first of all, there's the expansion of cities and towns. So rural dogs who would otherwise have have worked in the countryside as guard dogs, as herders, or hunting dogs. They were repurposed and they found new roles in the city, very often as pets. But the nineteenth century city, as lots of scholars have shown, was quite a chaotic place. There was lots of noise, there was mess.

That huge amounts of change and some urbanites had a a sense of nostalgia for the countryside and owning a dog I think really scratched this itch. Many also found modern urban life anxiety provoking, so dogs provided solace and emotional support and you really see them becoming prized for their role as pets and as members of the family. They slotted into the the nineteenth century Victorian cult of the domestic ideal.

And Charles Darwin, of course, he gave a scientific gloss to all this, showing how dogs couldn't love their um owner. Another thing that was happening was industrialisation. So more and more products were being marketed at these pet dogs. You had mass produced leads, collars. the growth of dog food. James Spratt, who was an American living in in Britain. He had the idea of seeing some ships biscuits of creating uh dry dog foods and that was the growth of the modern pet food industry.

Sprats and other companies, they sponsored dog shows. There was quicker travel between cities, so dogs travelled across the Atlantic, across the Channel to these dog shows. Newspapers had endless reports on dog shows. and stories about dogs who loved humans above all else. And Grave Friars Bobby from Edinburgh, who pined for his um his dead master at his grave. He was the kind of the archetypal loyal dog.

Yeah, reading your book I became aware how sharing our lives with dogs meant we had to put up with dangers as well as benefits. Tell me how the fear of rabies cast a particularly long shadow over human canine relations and and in a way contributed, I suppose, to the beginning of what you describe as the collared dog. Stretching back to the ancient period.

Ancient Babylon for instance there were fears around rabies. It's a very rare disease, but it's one that has really terrifying symptoms. It attacks the brain and the nervous system and it seemed to turn its victims bestial. It seemed to make them mad. This really led to a lot of worries about rabies, particularly in nineteenth century city, where humans and dogs were all thrown together, newspapers reported endlessly on mad dog chases. This was when a dog who was accused of being rabbit

would be chased by crowds or chased by policemen or individuals. This changed a bit when Louis Pasteur came along and created his um vaccine and treatment of rabies in the eighteen eighties, but there were still lots of fears. And this all led to muzzling, as you say, owners being called upon to keep their dogs on a collar under lead.

really wasn't all that important. But when they became Cherished members of the family, this did change, as you point out, didn't it? A change in a way signalled or exemplified, if you like, by the dog show. I've got a reading here. This is from eighteen ninety five, and these are the words of the anti vibe sectionist. And writer Francis Power Cobb.

I may boast of being a true dog lover. I am not a dog fancier. I take no interest in the various points of conventional beauty which are the glory of dog shows. On the contrary I am so deeply interested in the character of dogs and their intellectual possibilities that I rather resent the importance attached to the length of their tails or the precise angles of their noses. Now, that sentiment wasn't really very widely shared, was it? Because

Dog's new status fed into concerns very much about the appearance and breed of dogs. Yeah, this was a a huge development in in human dog relations, the rise of the pedigree dog and the kennel club and the dog show. So when dogs were workers, what they did was most important. So a dog had to be strong to say fight off a wolf job was to protect sheep. But in a nineteenth century city On the one hand you had the working class urban dog fancy. These are mainly men who bred dogs.

initially for fighting, but as dog fighting became banned, they started breeding dogs to show them and they became really interested in how dogs looked and they started breeding dogs for that. On another level you had the more upper crust dog owners

um who came from fox hunting backgrounds. They were rich industrialists. They were the aristocracy. And they formed the Kennel Club, modelled on the the Jockey Club with um a swanky address in London and they started registering the lineage of dogs, recording it in a stud book. and they started saying how dogs should look. So a nose should be a certain length, a tail should look a certain way.

And this, in a nutshell, took off. Lots and lots of people got into dog breeding. There were these dog shows that got bigger and bigger every year. They spread across the world. The first Kennel Club was in Britain, but then others followed in the US, in France. across the British Empire and India, and these breeds became widely reported on in the press. And what you have too is this nationalisation of breeds. So the British they celebrated their own breeds, the French

theirs, the Germans theirs, and so on. And with empire, breeds got extracted from colonies and brought back to Europe into the dog shows. The most famous example is the Piccanese dog, who British and French soldiers Started breeding them.

This was a huge time when how dogs looked, how exotic they were became really, really celebrated. And it is Chris, isn't it? This it's an obsession with pedigree which really has some rather unpleasant overtones, yn ymwneud â sut y mongrels yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r

And this fed into ideas about breeding and race in many ways. But what was happening at the same time was that as the pedigree dog was celebrated, the dog without an official breed, which was the majority of dogs, particularly the dogs of the poor who often walked around the streets to the day, they were let out of the house.

They had more freedom to breed, and so their breeding was outside of the control of humans. And many middle class and upper class breeders and commentators transferred their prejudices About poor people onto dogs. They called these dogs the dangerous classes who made mischief and horror of horrors might breed with a pedigree dog which would uh destroy the value of that dog. So there was a turn against yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r the street dogs Asia, of Africa, of the Middle East.

And you managed to show how the fortunes of dogs reflected all kinds of other societal shifts. I mean a key one here, I suppose, being the fight for animal rights. Tell me how dogs fit into that history. The animal welfare, animal rights movement sprung out of the eighteenth and nineteenth century humanitarian movement. with the aim of increasing compassion and reducing suffering. The RSPCA was um was founded in Britain uh just over two hundred years ago, eighteen twenty four,

And dogs were one of those animals that really appealed to animal welfare people and animal protectionists. They were beloved pets. and they had this seemingly loyalty and dedication to humans. One French animal protectionist described dog um very memorably as love machines. Alongside trying to protect working horses, they tried to protect dogs and to protect them from dangers of children who were often said to play pranks on dogs. Scientists, vivisectionists who did experiments on live dogs.

And also um for many middle class, upper class animal protectionists, dogs needed protecting against working class cruelty and say butchers who would overwork their dogs on um on the dog car. They set up dog shelters, they set up educational campaigns. But it should be said, and this is a very difficult part of the story, is that actually animal protectionists, they were involved in the the mass killing of many street dogs.

in so called humane ways by putting dogs to sleep in the lethal chamber. So if animal protectionists the life of the street dog was so bad they were subjected to disease, to hunger, to cruelty that the kindest thing to do was to put them to sleep. So in dogs homes and dog shelters millions of uh street dogs and also street cats were were put to sleep in the name of uh humanitarianism.

The book ends with a chapter on dirty dogs. your quotation, focusing on the perennial scourge of dog mess, and you suggest that it illustrates the way in which the making of the modern dog is really an ongoing and incomplete endeavour. What on earth do we learn by studying attitudes to dog poo. This huge amount of change. So dog mess went from being underused resource in the nineteenth century um urban economy when pure finders would s spend their days with a stick and a bag picking up dog poo.

putting it in the sack and then selling it to tanneries where it was used to treat um animal skins. In the nineteen thirties you have the first public health campaigns against dog mess. This is because there was a huge shift in urban ecosystems. Horses were being replaced by cars, by trains, by trams, and they were taken off the streets as what's a horse manure as well.

streets were also paved and cleaned better. So this was almost like a blank canvas for dog mess and public health officials, doctors, they started to really worry about dog mess and the parasites Contained within them. So some cities banned dogs entirely because of this. Reykjavik in Iceland is the most prominent example.

In the nineteen seventies in Britain and in the US there were more and more campaigns about dog mess. We had the nineteen seventy eight pooper scooper law in New York, where owners had to pick up after their dog. In Paris you had uh repurposed And as you say, it's an ongoing issue where councils today are still trying to resolve this this problem. It's just a reminder of dogs' animality, the fact they're still animals, they produce mess.

but also the fact that despite centuries of trying to create the the modern dog, we still trying to educate owners to conform to to modern expectations. I like that phrase, their enduring animality. Chris Pearson, thank you. Thank you so much for the moment. At the BBC, we go further, so With a subscription to BBC.com, you get unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7 plus.

hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. From less than a dollar a week for your first year, read, watch and listen to trusted independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to bbc.com. Find out more at bbc dot com slash unlimited. Now, you must forgive me if I briefly turn back to that story of the longstanding battle between my father and the dog we call Lucky. I still recall the dramatic contrast between my father's view of the animal as well.

as an animal, and the view of my mothers and sisters, that Lucky was really a little human being that required constant cuddling and stroking. Species, stories, and the animal sciences.

seriously questions the assumption that there is a special dog human bond. His author who now joins me in the studio is Marian Motamedy Fraser, who is honorary research fellow at University College London, Merhyn, yn ymwneud yw'r hyn yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw.

and I live with a dog. But they weren't enough in themselves to prompt me to write a book like this. The book actually came out of some volunteering work that I did at a dog training and behaviour centre. So I had a lot of opportunity to kind of learn about how people think about dogs and also to meet a lot of dogs, uh close up, a lot of dogs and their owners. As a consequence the dog human relationship began to look very different to me. Not in the sense that people don't love their dogs.

They absolutely do, there's no doubt about it. The question is whether that's good for dogs and I think that's a different kind of issue. So to me this relationship began to look less like a natural relationship and more like a political relationship. even though it's the case especially in relation to dogs of that political dimension as easily disguised.

by the stories we tell about them. Marion, I've got a clip here. It's a recent clip from BBC One's Reporting Scotland. It's on the Scottish Kennel Club Championship Dog Show. Thousands of dog owners hope for a rosette and a chance to qualify for Crufts next year. Outside some very rare dogs were displaying the rather common trait of wanting treats. These are Dandy Dinmont.

Dandies make you smile. You can't help but smile when you see their happy faces and wagging tails. There are less than a hundred a year born in the UK, three hundred worldwide. So they're actually rarer than the giant pandas in Edinburgh. This Sky Terrier was keen to get her own camera time. In fact she's an old hand, having starred in films as Greyfriars Bobby. I fell in love with the story of Greyfriars Bobby as a child.

It is a very rare breed but it's a wonderful companion and very, very loyal. Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n ymwneud â'r hyn.

I mean you're right, we do think more in terms of breed and that is justified because a lot of dogs' immediate problems relate to breeds and breeding. But I'd say basically since the late nineteen nineties a very particular story about dogs has emerged and taken hold, which is about dogs as a species. And that story is basically a scientific story. All animals are given a story about how they come into existence over time.

But Dogs' species story is especially well developed. It's a very particular story that puts humans at its heart. The story is dogs were wolves until they were domesticated. So without domestication, one has to assume that there'd be no dogs. What's important about the story is that via domestication the relationship between dogs and humans is naturalised.

And one of the things I explore in the book is just how much work it takes to create a story like this and how tenuous the evidence often is. So I'm just going to give an example that's come out since the book was published. It's a piece of research in Royal Science Open Science.

And the title of the article is Coyotes Can Make Puppy Dog Eyes Too. Now that's significant because puppy dog eyes is a big part of Dogs' Species Story. It's seen as the product of human relationships with dogs and also proof of it. Turns out coyotes can make poppy dog eyes too. So these scientists they say this musculature might have been a coyote inheritance in dogs that was lost in wolves.

That means that it's a trait that precedes domestication. So that's a very different story. It's an indication that these stories are often told with unwarranted confidence. And yet the implications of those stories for real life dogs who are living today, not eight thousand years ago, th thirty thousand years ago, or even one hundred and thirty five thousand years ago in one story, the implications for dogs are enormous.

And the touchstone for my book was a dog called Beth, who's discussed in Harlan Weaver's book Bad Dog. And Beth was basically euthanized, to use his words for her disinterest in humans. So clearly there is an ideal typical dog. It's a dog who recognises the so called dog human bond. Tell me about the effect of these species stories. I mean, you want to say they're tied to behavioural expectations, what we expect dogs to do.

Zoologist and dog trainer Patricia McConnell is really interesting. She basically says dogs are allowed just two emotions. They can be happy when they're with us. And they can be sad when they're missing us, and that's about it. Now both of those emotions obviously are organised around humans. If a dog isn't happy, say because they have quite legitimate problems with humans and humans' environments, then we say they're a problem dog.

And as a result, it's the individual dog who has to change, more medication, more socialization, and not the story that suggests that dog's happiness is defined by their relationships with humans. Everyone who has a dog certainly I'm sure is familiar with the idea of socialization. You take your dog to a puppy class.

they get socialized to other dogs, to humans, to multiple physical and sensory environments and so on. Which is kind of odd because for something that's supposed to be entirely natural suggests that the doc human bond seems to require a lot of ongoing work to cultivate. So in my view, dog um human controlled socialization essentially creates dependencies in dogs and then offers them the tools, often inadequate,

to try to navigate it. I'm not saying as things stand that we can dispense with socialization because the consequences for unsocialised dogs are very serious. not only in terms of relinquishment and death but also in terms of a life lived, among other things, in fear, anxiety and frustration. So becoming less afraid of humans is often seen to be a marker of domestication. Yet it appears that a lot of dogs are afraid a lot of the time.

And they found about eighty five percent of their four thousand or so research subjects had behavioural problems. It excluded dogs whose owners thought yw'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â phobl sydd â phobl sydd â phobl sydd â phobl sydd â phobl sydd â phobl sydd â phobl

So that's a lot of deviation from the ideal typical dog. And that figure of eighty five percent comes up over and over again. And what's really sad about that is that it's quite well documented. the owners are far less likely to address dog fear than they are to address problems that affect them directly. So an owner will take a physical problem to the vet or they'll take a dog to a behaviourist to treat aggression and invert comments.

fear, loneliness, separation, anxiety, all those kinds of things, much less

Now Chris Pearson talked about the decline in working dogs, but there's a different way of thinking about the roles they perform, isn't there? And you apply the academic concept of labour to dogs.

beyond those trained for therapy or working as sniffer dogs, what kind of labour are you talking about? I mean Chris is right to say that working dogs have declined in numbers work that humans would identify as labour has declined. And Rydyn ni'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'n gynnyddo'.

Dogs a species story naturalises companionship, also makes it very difficult to identify relationships with dogs with humans in the home as a form of labour. What's really striking about nearly all accounts of working dogs today is that they often represent the relationship between the dog and the handler as the reward for work. But today just being with humans is the rew reward for a working dog.

Which to me seems quite problematic because it means that the bond in inverted commerce is both the rationale for work and the reward for it. And so at a minimum that's gonna set the welfare bar of suffering and enjoyment very low. I wouldn't necessarily draw too t sharp a distinction between companion and working dog. One interesting question would be when does a dog ever get time off?

from servicing the bond. You know, what would time off mean to a dog who's a companion? Do you really hope that a better understanding of of dogs might encourage us to give them more freedom to live their lives as dogs? And what form might that take? I mean, how could dogs live as dogs now? Certainly the conditions under which dogs live and we all live now is very often undesirable.

And I would really like to see those conditions improved and we can do a big long list about getting rid of poppy farms, taking less control over dogs' reproductive capacities, all those kinds of things, breeding. And then there are all kinds of ethical questions like if you have a dog and you're out of the house for ten hours a day, is that okay? If you breed a dog who can't breathe, is that ethical? No it's not.

But to go back to the title of the book, Dog Politics, and the real point of the book is less about what's right and wrong for dogs. It's more about the big picture with dogs. That justifies everything else that follows. So I'd say the first freedom that dogs need is freedom from us.

freedom from the stories we tell about them, from all the expectations that come with those stories. If we start with that freedom we might come up with some very different answers as to what's good for a dog or what makes a good relationship.

which for some dogs will be no relationship whatsoever. Finally, you live with Monk, a black labrador, and together there's the two of you, who led an optional module on thinking animals when you were when you were working at Goldsmiths. Tell me about Monk's involvement in your work and how you could be sure he wanted to be involved

Given all that you've said. It's a great question. So let me just answer it m at a really basic, the most basic level first, which is that if he didn't want to come to work he'd tell me. Mae'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hynny'n gwneud hyn. And I'd just drop him back at home. And students love that because I go to work, where's Monk? He didn't feel like coming to work today. It's a this feeling that everyone can identify with.

students had to watch a video on dog consent before they join the class. The video basically shows them how to be able to identify whether a dog mind's being touched or not. Because I think there's a kind of quite widespread idea that a dog is for touching. So it's a kind of the first lesson of the course. The dog is not there for you, the dog has an opinion, and in this context that opinion has to be prioritized.

Turning back to you, Chris, turning back to you for a final thought. I mean you you've got a dog. Your dog's called Cassie. It's a Bedlington Whippet Cross. Her life might have been rather different. had she been born in nineteenth century Britain. And the one question that your book doesn't set out to answer is whether dogs prefer the life they have now over that they had in previous areas where they had to work.

but also, if you like, had the freedom to be dogs. I mean would Cass have been better off then or now? To take Cassie, so she is um a lurcher. If she'd been a a working dog in the nineteenth century, she probably would have been a working for a a poacher, so she'd have been a hunting dog, tracking game, rabbits in forests. She'd have had much more freedom and autonomy.

she would have perhaps met other dogs in a less controlled way than she does w when we meet dogs in the park. She might have had a puppies because she wouldn't have been a muted. She would have had perhaps tastier foods, maybe scraps from the table or or meat rather than dried dog food that she gets most of the time now. But her life might have been shorter, she might have had poorer health, more injuries that weren't treated.

It's a tough question, but I'm gonna say probably that she would prefer life today, but that might say more about me and my uh and my thoughts rather than it does for Cassie. Chris Pearson and Marion Motamedi Fraser, thank you very much. This is the last programme in the current series of Thinking Aloud. We're gonna be back at the beginning of the new year. Until then a mild rebuff to those who find, well, too much philosophical merit.

in their dog's demeanour. It comes from Merrill Marco. I sometimes look into the face of my dog and see a wistful sadness, an existential angst. When all he's actually doing is slowly scanning the ceiling for flies. That was a Thinking Aloud podcast from BBC Radio four. You'll find a treasure trove of other Thinking Aloud programmes on BBC Sounds. At the BBC, we have to be able to do that. See clearer.

Through frontline reporting, global stories, and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to bbc.com, giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts. The BBC News Channel streaming live twenty-four-seven, plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. Subscribe to trusted independent journalism and storytelling from the BBC. Find out more at BBC.com slash join.