GETTING A DOG

      WHEN I WAS in my thirties, I dreamed of getting a dog. At the time I wasn’t home enough to care for a dog properly, so I dreamed of the dog I would get when my lifestyle changed. We would take long walks together through the countryside, and then I’d curl up on the settee with my dog and a good book.

      I decided early on that my ideal dog would be like Diefenbaker in the TV show Due South, which was popular in the UK where I was living. On TV, Dief was a beautiful half-wolf, half-sled-dog who was loyal, independent, and deaf (or maybe only when he didn’t want to hear?). Over the years, Diefenbaker was played by six different Siberian Huskies. I did some research on the breed: “Not for first-time dog owners,” I kept reading, “escape artists,” “independent,” and “difficult.” Not to mention the shedding. Although some of this information was off-putting, I figured I could cope.

      Of course, I didn’t get Diefenbaker; he only existed on TV. I was incredibly lucky to get Ghost instead. And I was not unusual in being influenced by TV and in thinking so much about the dog’s appearance rather than other factors. It turns out many people are like this—and unfortunately this is often to the detriment of dogs. What I know now is that if we want a happy dog, there are many factors to take into account when choosing what kind of dog and where to get them. But many people are influenced by biology or fashion.

       BIOLOGY AND LOVING DOGS

      WE KNOW DOGS are the descendants of wolves, but in the process of domestication they have changed in appearance. Now, whatever your preference for looks, there is a breed to fit (even if the original purpose of the breed was for work). Some of the physical features of dogs are puppy-like rather than wolf-like, which may tap into our natural desire to help baby-like creatures. Is it just an accident that dogs evolved these different features, and does it affect the way we feel about them?

      The Russian fox experiment is a pioneering experiment into the process of domestication that began in what was then the Soviet Union and continues today.¹ Geneticist Dmitri Belyaev had an idea that selecting animals for tameness would also lead to hormonal and other changes. He began a program to breed silver foxes. Only the tamest of each generation were selected for breeding, and crucially, nothing else was changed, so this was a test purely of genetics and not of handling or other factors. A second line of foxes was bred by choosing the most aggressive animals. During the first seven or eight months until they reached sexual maturity, the foxes were tested to see how they responded to the experimenters. Then, a choice was made as to which ones would be bred for the next generation.

      Over time, as the foxes became more tame, other changes also happened. Prof. Lee Dugatkin, evolutionary biologist and co-author with Lyudmila Trut of a book about the study, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution, told me about the changes: “The only thing [the scientists] ever do to determine who is going to be the parents of the next generation in the experiment is test them on their behavior towards humans. That’s it, that’s the only thing they ever select on. But what’s happened over the generations is that lots of other changes have occurred besides getting calmer and tamer animals. Early on, for example, some of the first changes were that the animals had curlier, bushier tails, the sort of tails that you imagine when you think of a dog wagging their tail because they’re excited to see you. Some of the animals began to show droopier, floppier ears. In addition, they began to see a much more mutt-like kind of mottled fur color.” There were also differences in stress hormones that showed the foxes were less stressed.

      It is possible that some of the features we see in dogs are also by-products of domestication. However, another possibility is that along the way, we have sometimes selected for some of these features. To test this idea, scientists looked at one of the baby-like features in many dogs, the eyes. The study, published in PLOS ONE, looked at a facial expression by which dogs raise the inside of the eyebrow, making the eyes look bigger.² The researchers enlisted the help of four dog rehoming centers, and filmed the dogs for two minutes with an experimenter standing by the kennel. They counted how many times the dogs made this expression during that time. Then they waited to see how long it took for the dogs to be adopted. The results showed that dogs who made this eyebrow movement five times within the two-minute period were adopted in fifty days, compared with thirty-five days if they did it ten times, and twenty-eight days if they did it fifteen times. It seems the baby-like eyebrow movement results in people being more drawn to those dogs. This was the first time scientists demonstrated a link between the baby-like features of a dog and people’s active selection of a dog.

       HOW FASHION AFFECTS THE DOGS WE CHOOSE

      BIOLOGY IS ONLY part of the story. Fashion affects breed popularity too. Featuring a particular breed of dog in the movies can increase its popularity for up to ten years afterward, according to a study in PLOS ONE that looked at dog-related movies from 1927 to 2004 and corresponding Kennel Club registrations.³ The release of films such as 101 Dalmatians and The Shaggy Dog were followed by huge increases in the popularity of Dalmatians and Old English Sheepdogs, respectively. And the “movie effect” still holds even if the breed had been decreasing in general