Neanderthals didn’t live with puppies. But Homo sapiens has been doing that for thousands of years. The guarding that wolves and dogs provided for early humans probably contributed to why we thrived and Neanderthals ultimately did not. In “Animals in Translation,” from 2005, the scientist Temple Grandin presents this argument, and also points out that many ways in which Homo sapiens differ from other primates are curiously doggish. Like dogs, we come to hunt in packs and have same-sex friendships. Grandin explained that as dogs became domesticated, their brains shrank. But it wasn’t just the dog’s brain that was altered. Around the time the fossil record shows Homo sapiens giving dogs (or possibly wolves) formal burials, our brains are shrinking. Is it because dogs can do the sniffing and guarding work for us? And can we plan for them? While there is much debate about how, when, and why this all happened, in many ways we have domesticated dogs, they can also domesticate us.
Alexandra Horowitz, chief scientist at Barnard College’s Dog Cognition Lab, has conducted a longitudinal observational study of the first year of life of members of Canis lupus familiaris. In other words, like many others, Horowitz has pandemic puppies. And he was very attentive to the puppy, whom he and his family named Quiddity, or Quid, meaning “essence.” He says this in “The Year of the Puppy,” a book with a very interesting cover.
Since Horowitz has two dogs, a cat, and a son, his motivation to get a puppy is quite convincingly presented as being in the service of science. Horowitz has written several popular books about dogs and dog science: “Our Dogs, Ourselves,” “Being a Dog,” and “Inside a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know.” In his new book, Horowitz’s goal is to think and write about dogs in a different way than the usual pet-related fare about how to teach a puppy not to annoy kids and not increase your household paper towel budget. Instead, he aims to try to better understand the young dog, from Day One to day three hundred and sixty-five, as a being in transformation. She wants to write about puppies developmentally.
Horowitz contacted a woman who fostered a rescue dog who was pregnant. She met the dog’s mother. She visited the pups shortly after they were born. And he continued to visit, witnessing the puppy transform from a blind creature piled for warmth—dogpiling—to a walking, playing, individual being. Along the way, he rotates the reader in research. Did you know that, according to one study, puppies are cutest at eight weeks of age? Did you know that around this time mothers, who have been doting since birth, can begin to find their children annoying? It is then that pups may be better at learning skills from other dogs, or even humans—more dogs than their moms. Even free-ranging dogs tend to drift away from their mothers. Puppies form more long-lasting bonds with their siblings.
All this makes man feel O.K. about having taken a puppy from its mother. I myself took puppies — two, actually — from their mothers during the pandemic. I chirruped a series of reassuring bits from Horowitz’s book for my partner.
“Mm-hmm. Are you sure it’s not bullshit?” he asked.
“He runs a dog cognition lab!”
He sighed. But then he showed me a Twitter post in which the dog is offered a treat sliced into uneven parts: the dog snatches a large part; we then see that Aisyah took it to the baby creature that was previously offscreen. cute! I can confirm that living with a puppy seems to shrink the brain.
There are some strange, fun, early-weeks-of-puppy-life facts that can interest brains of any size. Puppies whose mothers lie down more often to let them nurse may be worse dogs at dog training than their peers who have to do the more labor-intensive vertical nursing style. Puppies that have more maternal contact early in life become more “exploratory” dogs, Horowitz writes, and “more engaged with people and objects.” Somewhere, the ghost of Donald Winnicott nodded in agreement.
The most compelling puppy research in the book comes from work done by the United States military, in what is commonly known as the Super Dog program. This involves a sort of puppy calisthenics program. From day three to sixteen of a puppy’s life, humans hold the puppy in five different poses, for three to five seconds at a time. This is a position beyond what a dog mother can provide. That hope makes for a better working dog: one that isn’t easily surprised. This is now the accepted way to raise puppies that can grow up to be more relaxed dogs.
This same early intervention in a puppy’s life is what makes some dogs “natural” shepherds. Dogs that protect sheep, cattle, or other animals do not have to be born with that skill. Instead, they are moved, at about nine weeks of age, from the litter of birth into the living space with the future species of companionship. A puppy raised among sheep will think of the sheep as a normal social companion—and will protect the sheep. He won’t consider himself a sheep, but “will act like a dog whose friends are all sheep,” Horowitz wrote. She shared examples of chihuahuas raised among cats; eventually, they exhibit some seemingly cat-like behavior.
In as many ways as we have domesticated dogs, they have also perhaps domesticated us.
This apparent exchange of alliances is less artificial than it sounds. A study that looked at free-ranging mother dogs showed that puppies often have allomothers-females who provide care but who are not their biological mothers. In this way, puppies are not like ducks and geese who famously imprint on who or what they see at first, even in the bushy-bearded winner of the Nobel Prize eventually named Konrad Lorenz.
A side effect of reading Horowitz’s puppy book is that you can start looking for opportunities to use some puppy-science vocabulary in casual conversation. You probably already know that the hair on a dog’s beard, eyebrows, ears, and tail is called “equipment.” But did you know that the interesting way that very young puppies find their way by hugging any surface is called “thigmotaxis”? (This is how they find a point, among their siblings, near their mother’s body.) Or that human babies and puppies share the quality of being “altricial,” that is, they can’t take care of themselves when they are very young? I’ve never witnessed “flehmening” (“a spectacular, often scary facial expression that animals use to bring hormones—pheromones—to a special vomeronasal organ under their nose and above the roof of their mouth to inhale”), but I feel like I do. has been expelled in a way that could have been flehmen-like.
Once puppies enter adolescence, the amount of scientific research that reveals funny facts about them declines. We don’t really have good words for teenage puppies. From the “puppy” cliff we stumbled straight into the “dog”. There is not much research on the adolescent stage of dogs. Although we know that there is a sharp increase in dogs being surrendered when they become teenagers. And one study concluded that dogs who spent more time in kennels in early life tended to fail guide-dog training more often than those who spent less time there, and that the longer they stayed in kennels the higher the incidence of failure. These dogs fail because they are more afraid of new situations and new people.
Horowitz describes a moment in Quid’s teenage rebellion. He called out Quid’s name, and Quid rolled his eyes and walked in the opposite direction, visibly protesting. He picked up a stick that was too big for him to handle. This apparent act of rebellion—as opposed to her innocent destruction of a Sharpie pen when she was just a pup—is. The power realm of young dogs is so small. For the most part, Horowitz avoids puppy training or other advice. She is of the opinion that we should think about how to be better pet parents instead of just about how to make our pets better. Puppies, and young dogs, need a rich environment: they need to run, they need to walk, they need to play. To get a sense of how much ground our pets will most likely want to travel, given their druthers, consider a study of Italian wolves that showed they walked up to thirty-eight kilometers a night. Other studies have shown that Cape Cod coyotes walk up to thirty-one kilometers in one night.
A minor subplot of Horowitz’s book is how the other pets and humans—and he—react to Quid’s presence. Several times, she refers to the feeling that she still doesn’t love Quid. At first, I read this as the writer’s need to find an angle. But, in the end, I started to see it as more sincere. During the year, one of her dogs, Finnegan, grew weak. The script notes that both dogs she had when she adopted Quid, Finnegan and Upton, have since died, aged just four weeks. The idea that “Year of the puppy” is primarily a science project is a psychological screen; it is about the need for domestication throughout. ♦
