Gravity, a force in my household

Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of nature. He is also my dog. He has considerably shifted my view from looking at pets as a distraction to being a source of joy. More deeply, he has allowed me to closely witness ways of “being” in the world other than being human which gives me great pleasure as it expands my understanding. In a sense, he has become a fundamental force in my life even as I constantly have to make sure he does not chew any of my shoes.

I have known for a while now that dogs descended from wolves. Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) belong to the same species as wolves (Canis lupus). After they have been domesticated, they have evolved as a subspecies — Canus lupus familiaris. This means that if your Chihuahua ever comes across a wolf and they feel the “love drug” and act on it, they can have pups. So yes, before I even took Gravity in my care, I knew I was getting a wolf, genetically anyway. But what does that mean?

Celebrity dog trainers like Cesar Milan whom I admire for his dedication and experience, have, for the first few seasons of his show, used this scientific premise to guide the way dogs are trained. Since the popular belief was that wolves lived in packs, then there is always a competition as to who can dominate and dictate how the rest of the pack behaves. And it seemed so logical at first that because dogs were genetic wolves, they would still have it in them to dominate their pack, which now includes humans who handle them. But an anthro-zoologist (a scientist who studies human interaction with animals) who has 25 years of dog research behind him offers another explanation. His name is John Bradshaw and I listened to him in a podcast interview by The Guardian’s Alok Jha last Aug. 15. Bradshaw has just come out with a Penguin book called In Defense of Dogs: Why Dogs Need our Understanding (Allen Lane, 2011). He said that dogs do what they do not because they want to dominate but simply because they want control of their own lives.

So what happened to the inner wolf theory? Well, Bradshaw said that while dogs descended from the same wolf species, there were different kinds of wolves in terms of behavior. He is contending that the dogs we have now in our midst are descended from wolves who were fundamentally cooperative than dominant. If we go by the earliest archaeological evidence of dogs being buried with their masters, dogs as human companions have been with us for 15,000 years. This means we should now give a second look to the 21st century dogs we have in our midst and realize that they have performed functions that we have assigned to them so dutifully that even if those needs no longer exist now, they would still do it. Gravity, who is a Labrador, comes from a breed who were trained to carefully hold hunted birds or fish for their masters. So even if I do not hunt for anything, Gravity would still retrieve anything thrown his way and give it back to me. It is humans who dominate dogs and that is also how we have domesticated them. If you are still not convinced, you only need to look at the forms of this genetic wolf being propped by their human handles in baby strollers, dressed in pink clothes in Bonifacio High Street. Those dogs would probably ask their human handlers “why” if they knew how.

I am convinced of the evidence that dogs naturally form a bond with humans without the overarching desire to dominate. Bradshaw even acknowledged in a New York Times article that even Cesar Milan has begun to change his “dominating dog” premise in the current season of his show.

Bradshaw was also concerned that while we started breeding dogs for specific purposes about 10,000 years ago, that is, for fur, for meat and other aids in human survival, we now largely breed them for prestige and for dog shows — for how they look. Gravity can be classified a yellow Lab even if he looks white. One hundred years ago, Labs were just black until a mutation produced a yellow one and it was selected to produce more. So Gravity is a product of a human preference to have yellow-colored Labs. He said this is worrying in terms of the fate of individual dogs since the genetic pool for specific breeds have increasingly become smaller. A shrinking gene pool poses a big problem when it comes to correcting genetic defects. Bradshaw said that humans have bred dogs to have extreme “morphological” shapes which have resulted into really weird looks to amuse humans. For example, humans have bred dogs with shorter tails or coats even if tails and coats (the way they stand) is part of how dogs communicate with other dogs.

I talk to Gravity even if I know he does not understand most of what I say. As a human, I share about 25 percent similarity with his genes which means that we are galaxies away from each other in terms of our genetic relationship. Science has already conceded and is no longer squeamish to say that dogs do love their owners. We just have to be very careful in assigning the same range of emotions we feel as humans to our dogs because evidence has shown and as Cesar Milan has also pointed out, dogs live in the moment. They do not brood over what they have done or worry about the fate of their souls. They care about love, here and now, and not to mention chewable shoes. Knowing how the giving and receiving of human emotions could be so stressful, I give Gravity a high five to tell him how lucky he is.

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