After much deliberation and reading about possible havoc and chaos that might be wrought on our stable home, I have just acquired a thirteen-week-old puppy. She is, what you would call in Ireland, a ‘dote’. On the one and a half hour drive home in the heat of the car on a summer’s day she panted and dozed soundly in my arms. It turns out she wasn’t just dozy from the warmth of the car, she actually is very placid. In twenty-four hours she has barely whimpered, which is a shame, because I had hoped to have her speaking in full sentences by now…

More realistically, however, having a puppy has got me thinking a bit about animal culture. I haven’t owned a dog before, I only ever had rabbits as a child, but the world of dogs is a breed unto its own. I went hunting in the local charity shop for some books about dog-care and discovered a book called ‘Knitting for Dogs’. Perhaps disappointingly it did not confirm my intuitive hypothesis that animals have some kind of culture which allows them to use tools or to teach each other things. There were no pictures of Chihuahuas in the book busily knitting scarves to sell at Christmas craft fairs, no step-by-step instructions on how to get your mutt’s tiny paws to clutch a knitting needle, but it got me considering one side of the animal culture coin. The whole human culture which surrounds dogs through dog shows, dog training, dog shops and dog books like ‘Marley and Me’. After the recent film version with Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson there were four copies of this doggy book in the charity shop, with a big endearing picture of a labrador puppy on the front. I bought one, (of course!), wanting to indoctrinate myself into the passions and discourse of the dog world.

There are so many aspects of human culture which are projected onto dogs as we get them to ‘hi-five’ us, ‘sing’ for YouTube (or howl in pain at our dreadful taste and volume of loud music) as they do here or less credibly but more amusingly here or wear smart knitted woollen jackets. That’s what ‘Knitting for Dogs’ was about.

‘Cute’ as the Yorkshire terrier on the front was, I don’t think it is my puppy’s style. Sure, I’ll tell you once I’ve taught her to speak and she’s let me know herself.

I brought young pup for her first trip to the vet the other day and was plunged into a wholly unfamiliar world of pets and people. When I arrived it was quite empty. I had tucked pup into a black holdall on top of a blanket and carried her the ten minute walk to the vets with her head peeping out the top. At the counter I spoke to the nurse and she took my name in a calm business-like way, but then she spotted pup and fell into raptures. Pup was showered with strokes and smiles and praise, but took it all very calmly. I sat down with her on my knee, then a vet came out, in full vet gear as you would expect. My only parallel experiences were of doctors’ surgeries, so it was funny to see this professional middle-aged gent also going all gooey over the small furry head on my lap, stroking her and praising her good looks. Of course, I started to feel a curious maternal pride, particularly as she was taking this all in so calmly and contentedly, but I can’t say it didn’t all feel a bit surreal. Then the other dogs started arriving. A huge loping dog, I’m not sure what breed, but his name was ‘Beau’, he arrived and landed his two great paws on top of my lap to give pup a good sniff.

The lady with the cat in a crate next to me gasped. I swept Beau away and off he went to his owner’s call. The lady with the cat was called in to one of the vet’s and Beau’s owner got chatting to me. She too thought Pup was lovely ‘oh, they’re lovely when they’re like that’ as if prophesying future doom. At least pup’s a Miniature Schnauzer so shouldn’t be growing as lumbering as Beau, who was maybe a pointer/springer spaniel. His owner chattered on,

‘I had a dog for seventeen years, buried him last year and another for seventeen years…They’re very good here, but it’s a hell of a way off. Had to walk from near George’s Street…oh yes, I had a budgie too, but he was a fierce choruser..’

‘a what?’

‘a choruser’

‘oh, right’

Budgie and Beau?

‘don’t know where he got it from…the postman doesn’t like Beau, I have to keep him in. There’s children on our street throw stones at him. Awful cruel. Some people just don’t like dogs.’

By then about four or five more people had arrived with varying sizes and breeds of dog and as if to confirm Beau’s owner’s point, a woman walked in with a cat in a crate, made herself known to the nurse then looked around at the empty seats between the dog owners in distaste before saying ‘must be a dog day’ and finding an isolated seat away from the muttley crew.

Pup was called in for her going over and stood still on the table with her heart-racing while eyes, ears, nose, heart, lungs, skin, backside and weight were checked. Then without either of us noticing, the vet swiftly vaccinated her and we were ready for off. All in all a very good trip. On the way out, the nurse declared that she was ready to steal pup and do time for her, so before she could carry out her threat, we quickly headed out into the sunshine, nose bobbing out of the bag and off we went home.

I didn’t want to start anthropomorphising the dog, but it’s much harder not too than you might think. Of course, like any biased mother, I will say that it’s because she is so clever and seems to understand things I say that she can be confused with other human companions. I find myself saying things soppy things like ‘good girl’ rather than ‘good dog’, but it’s so easy to start imagining you can see beyond the furry ears and nippy teeth to a human-like personality beneath. In the last two days since I began this blog post she has more or less learnt to ‘fetch’ and ‘come’ and even made huge progress towards house-training, so much so that I wonder if she wasn’t house-trained before she arrived and just messing up our place out of nerves and to mark her turf. Still, after many early mornings (e.g. 5.20am yesterday) of waking up to find a pile of mess to mop and clean (with non-ammonia based products), and many repeated trips outside with urine soaked and poop-filled kitchen paper and newspaper to plonk down where her toilet was to be, so she would get the sight and scent, she now more often than not wanders outside herself and this morning there were no canine presents for me in the kitchen. She had waited all night. Amazing! I’m like a parent who can’t stop telling everyone about the colour of what they’ve found in their child’s nappy….yes, it seems the doggy discourse is filtering in.

Now, I must say, it’s been a couple of days now and she has begun to show another side to herself. It’s not all quiet sitting and lying and petting and stroking. The other day she suddenly perked up in the afternoon with such ferocious energy, that I was reminded of the Hound of the Baskervilles – a big raging ball of fur and teeth.

I began to wonder if she hadn’t been sedated before being handed over to us, then she ran outside in a frenzy and started nibbling the lavender again. That’s it, I thought, we have a drug addict on our hands. More lavender please! Now, it seems it’s all just part of her natural cycle of sleep and wakefulness. Today, she was even yapping away quite a bit. She’s definitely growing in confidence. But then, we went out for a bit of a walk in the bag and I think that might have terrified her, because she’s all mellow downstairs again and I’ve had a chance to write this post.  Inducing submission through fear…hm, not sure that’s the training method I was planning to use.

The Hound of the Baskerville’s episode reminded me that there was a very interesting BBC Horizon documentary recently ‘The Secret Life of the Dog’ (you can find it here in six parts on YouTube)  which looked at recent research into the connections between humans and dogs and their ancestral wolve’s essential role in the development of human civilization, through their help in hunting. At one point (part 4/6) they show experiments into the nature/nurture debate about canine companions in which Hungarian researchers had tried to rear and tame wolves (who are 99.8% genetically identical with dogs), as if they were dogs from birth.

Yawning or Biting?

In the end, they had to abandon the experiment as the wolves grew increasingly uncooperative, aggressive and wild, threatening their ‘owners’, raiding the fridge and ignoring commands to stop. Even pup at thirteen weeks old will look up if I tell her ‘no’, get your nose out of the fridge. If the dog was originally a socialised wolf, it seems the sociable traits they exhibit have been bred into their nature over thousands of generations. That 0.2% really counts. Another experiment begun in 1959 in Siberia seems to corroborate this (part 4-5/6). This one involved selectively breeding silver foxes by marrying up those in the 1% who showed neither fear nor aggression in the presence of human beings. Only the tamest foxes from each generation were bred for the next generation. By the eighth generation the foxes were actively seeking contact with humans and showing them affection.

Another group were selectively bred for aggressive behaviour with the result that the researchers ended up with cages full of snarling and gnashing hounds. Even when they cross-fostered the cubs, paring aggressive cubs with tame mothers, the mother’s behaviour had little influence. They even transplanted ‘aggressive’ embryos into tame mothers with the same result. The cubs were still aggressive! I find this quite staggering, both the lengths to which the experiment were taken and the end result. Perhaps we should take more note when thinking about our sometimes obsessive focus on human education and sometimes making mothers feel excessively responsible for how their behaviour might impact on their child. I’ve often heard it said that human mothers with just one or maybe two children tend to think it’s all more about nurture whereas mothers with larger families see a bigger role for nature. How else could you explain the gregarious noisy child growing up in the same family with the quiet geeky one in the corner, and the other one who always runs away or is particularly bright or particularly stupid, loves maths, hates maths, loves sport….and on and on.

Now we are back to parallels with human beings, the documentary also shows that my maternal feelings for pup are not as mad as general human culture would think, they are perfectly understood by anyone who has owned a dog and verified by experiments which reveal that both owner and dog release the ‘bonding’ hormone oxytocin when they are cuddling, stroking, petting and licking to levels which border on those released when a mother breastfeeds her child! As the woman with the chorusing budgie said to me of dogs ‘you get awful wrapped up in them’.

Indeed, I’m so wrapped up in pup that I am afraid my human companions will abandon me for all my wittering on about her. I have also devoted far more words to her and her kind in this post than I imagined, covering just one side of the animal culture coin – the way in which we have enculturated them. What I am also curious about now, is how animals might have developed cultures and communication systems of their own. I might ask Flipper about that one. To be continued….!