Furry good news: Professor John Bradshaw engages in a tug-of-war with Kate Kellaway's dog Lily. Photograph: Karen Robinson Karen Robinson/Karen Robinson
Professor
John Bradshaw is holding out a clenched fist – you might see this as a novel
way of greeting a stranger were it not that it is my dog, Lily, he is
approaching. He is giving her a chance to have a good sniff at him. Before we
go any further, it needs spelling out that Bradshaw is not a dog trainer. He
has not come to my house to turn Lily into a reformed character. He is a
scientist – founder and director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol – who has devoted
the last 25 years to studying the domestic dog and has just written the most
fantastic book, In Defence of the Dog, which is already on US bestseller
lists and is about to become required reading for dog lovers everywhere.
Bradshaw is not interested in canine hearsay. He does not peddle opinions. His
style is tolerant, clear and benign and he is interested only in what science
can support. His book is a revelation – a major rethink about the way we
understand our dogs, an overturning of what one might call traditional dogma.
The
first idea to bite the dust is so huge and entrenched that some owners will
struggle to adjust. We have had it drummed into us by trainers such as Cesar
Millan that because dogs are descended from wolves (their DNA is almost
identical), they behave like wolves and can be understood as "pack"
animals. The received thinking has been that dogs seek to "dominate"
and that our task is to assert ourselves as pack leaders – alpha males and
females – and not allow dogs to get the upper paw. (I remember sitting in the
back of a puppy-training class with Lily who was crying while the teacher was
talking. I got ticked off. I was told she was demonstrating
"dominant" behaviour.) Bradshaw has no quarrel about DNA. His
argument is that scientists have been studying the wrong wolves and jumping to
the wrong conclusions. He says: "People have been studying American timber
wolves because the European wolf is virtually extinct. And the American timber
wolf is not related at all closely to the ancestry of the domestic dog."
Bradshaw's
hypothesis is that domestic dogs were descended from more sociable wolves but
that "whatever the ancestor of the dog was like, we don't have it
today". The wolves alive now are unreliable specimens, necessarily rough
diamonds, who have been able to "survive the onslaught we have given
them". And here is the rub: new research – including work with Indian
village dogs – shows that dogs "do not set up wolf-type packs. They don't
organise themselves in the way wolves do". Dogs are
not striving, in other words, for household domination. Bradshaw believes our
relationship with dogs has been sadly distorted. He writes: "The most
pervasive and pernicious idea informing modern dog training techniques is that
the dog is driven to set up a dominance hierarchy wherever it finds
itself." He explains that apparently dominant dogs are usually
"anxious" rather than "ambitious". He says: "They
don't want to control people, they want to control their own lives. It is what
we are all aiming for – to keep control of our own lives. It is a fundamental
biological urge."
But
Bradshaw is far from suggesting we slacken in our efforts to train our dogs (it
is the more brutal training methods he would like to banish). But I wonder how
Cesar Millan and his followers will respond to these findings. Millan,
America's internationally influential "dog whisperer" has made a
television career explaining dog psychology in terms of wolf lore. Bradshaw
says: "I am reluctant to demonise Millan, he has come under a lot of
pressure." On a recent tour of the UK, Millan was told his methods were
close to breaching Defra guidelines (which forbid harsh training). "He is
a smart guy and sees which way the wind is blowing. He is now embracing
reward-based methods. All that stuff he spouted about wolves was not based on
science." Besides, as Bradshaw observes, there are more
"hardcore" trainers out there – such as the massively influential Monks
of New Skete in the United States who "sound as if they ought to be the
gentlest people in the world" but base their bogus, punitive methods on
wolf biology: they urge owners to shake their dogs "because this is what
wolf mothers do to keep their cubs in line".
Bradshaw
favours humane, reward-based training. The latest science shows that dogs learn
to "please their owners". It is wonderful to hear this: he makes one
feel fantastically upbeat about being a dog owner (and it is a relief to drop
all thoughts of a primitive power struggle).
Bradshaw
first went to the dogs – in the best sense – because of his interest in
"the science of smell. I used to study ants, wasps, moths… then I thought:
why not broaden this out?"
When he started out, a quarter of a century
ago, he was in an unglamorous minority. Now canine science is a "huge
industry – with 200-300 people working worldwide". The reasons for this
include the sequencing of the canine genome, the rise in animal welfare
science, increased interest from vets wanting to specialise in dog behaviour
and primatologists who can no longer afford to study chimpanzees. But the most
remarkable reason, Bradshaw explains, is that since 9/11 there has been a huge
increase in the use of sniffer dogs. Dogs are now used not only for narcotics
but to help epileptics (able to alert them when they are on the edge of a
seizure) and to sniff out everything from bedbugs to shark's fins and even
certain kinds of cancer. Bradshaw, in his book, follows the dog's nose
brilliantly (it was intriguing to learn that while dogs love to sniff other
dogs they "do not much like being sniffed themselves"). He urges us
to show "manners" and be aware of our dog's sense of smell. And his
championing of a dog's right to be a dog is attractive. But I had been hoping
he might have a solution to what happens when the sense of smell gets out of
hand: Lily, whenever there is a roast in the oven, is overcome with greed and
longing – and barks. On this matter, he says only: "Ignore her." (I
suspect him of being on her side.)
For
anyone interested in dog emotion, In Defence of Dogs is also a
sentimental – and surprising – education. The first shocker is this: dogs do
not experience guilt. So the look Lily gives us when discovered illegally on
the sofa (creeping off, flashing the whites of her eyes) is not guilt? Bradshaw
explains she may know to associate that basking on the sofa leads to owner
disapproval but that is not the same as feeling guilt, or as having the mental
equipment to differentiate between right and wrong. Less surprising is
Bradshaw's sense that dogs may be capable of jealousy (when I give my husband a
hug, Lily wants to be part of the action). But dog jealousy is not of the
all-consuming, Othello sort: "They may be able to feel jealousy in the
moment but don't obsess about it or trawl Facebook for evidence."
Bradshaw's
most incredible – and gratifying – assertion is that dogs are more interested
in people than in other dogs. This is not soppy wishful thinking but the result
of studying "co-evolution, the two species evolving towards each
other". We forget that the play between species, enjoyed by dogs and
humans, is very rare. The family feeling that wolves display has been replaced
in dogs by "an intense need to bond with people". Bradshaw says that
from the moment puppies open their eyes, they start to bond with people
"completely, spontaneously and as hard as they can".
He
writes about love (science plays safe and calls it "attachment") but
in answer to the question: does your dog love you? replies: 'Of course!"
The positive hormone, oxytocin, is triggered by love: "Dogs experience a
surge of oxytocin during friendly interactions with people." And, he
explains, "Dogs really do miss their owners when separated from
them." Of an estimated eight million dogs in the UK, it is thought that
more than half a million are suffering from separation stress. The closest
Bradshaw comes to being interventionist is on this subject (he quotes
excellent, easy instructions on how to train a dog not to feel separation
anxiety).
Bradshaw
is determined to make "It's a dog's life" into a positive statement.
We talk about the future – and his sense that there is an urgent need to reform
pedigree breeding if dogs are to have a healthy future. We talk about the past
– and the dogs from his own life: Ginger (a cairn terrier belonging to his
grandfather); Alexis (a lab/Jack Russell cross – "a roamer"); Ivan (a
lab/airedale – "a squirrel chaser"); Bruno (a purebred lab –
"not all that bright but he loved us dearly… he did not know how to retrieve")
and about his present labrador, Murphy, a field dog. We talk, too, about how
good dogs are at reading our body language – and he makes one determined to
read theirs correctly (he is a close student of every twitch of ear and tail).
I ask about his title: do dogs really need defending? "They need defending
from people who persist in the old methods and don't take any notice of
science."
Before
he leaves, Bradshaw and I have a tug of war with Lily in which (you have to be
a dog owner to understand how cutting-edge this is) she is repeatedly allowed
to win. She trashes a toy duck and shreds a rope. It is a great and victorious
afternoon – as far as she is concerned. Here's Bradshaw on tug-of-war research:
"Dogs were allowed to win tug-of-war games played with a person, over and
over again; understandably, this made the dog more keen to play with people
than when they were forced to lose every time, but there were no signs
indicating that any dog became 'dominant' as a result." He is good news for
owners and – there is no doubt about it – Professor John Bradshaw is a dog's
best friend.
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