Free Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz Page B

and cooperative with others, but often solitary. They do not self-organize socially into packs with a single breeding pair. They don't build dens for the pups or provide food for them as wolves do. Free-ranging dogs may form a social ordering like other wild canids—but one organized by age more than by fights and strife. Neither hunts cooperatively: they scavenge or hunt small prey by themselves. Domestication changed them.
    Even when wolves have been socialized—raised from birth among humans instead of other wolves—they do not turn into dogs. They strike a middle ground in behavior. Socialized wolves are more interested in and attentive to humans than wild-born wolves. They follow human communicative gestures better than wild wolves. But they are not dogs in wolves' clothing. Dogs raised with a human caretaker prefer her company over that of other humans; wolves are less discriminating. Dogs far outpace hand-raised wolves in interpreting human cues. To see a wolf on a leash, sitting and lying down on request, one could be convinced there is little difference between the socialized wolf and dog. To see that wolf in the presence of a rabbit is to see how much difference there still is: the human is forgotten while the rabbit is relentlessly pursued. A dog near that same rabbit may patiently wait, gazing at his owner, to be permitted to run. Human companionship has become dogs' motivational meat.

MAKING YOUR DOG

    As you choose a new dog from among a litter or a loud shelter of baying mutts and bring him home, you begin to "make a dog" again, recapitulating the history of domestication of the species. With each interaction, with each day, you define—at once circumscribing and expanding—his world. In the first few weeks with you, the pup's world is, if not entirely a tabula rasa, awfully close to the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that a newborn baby experiences. No dog knows, on first turning his eyes on the person who peeks at him in his shelter cage, what the person expects of him. Many people's expectations, at least in this country, are fairly similar: be friendly, loyal, pettable; find me charming and lovable—but know that I am in charge; do not pee in the house; do not jump on guests; do not chew my dress shoes; do not get into the trash. Somehow, word hasn't gotten to the dogs. Each dog has to be taught this set of parameters for his life with people. The dog learns, through you, the kinds of things that are important to you—and that you want to be important to him. We are all domesticated, too: inculcated with our culture's mores, with how to be human, with how to behave with others. This is facilitated by language, but spoken language is not necessary to achieve it. Instead we need to be alert to what the dog is perceiving and to make our perceptions clear to him.
    The first-century Roman encyclopedist Pliny's prodigious Natural History includes a confident statement of fact about the birth of bears. The cubs, he wrote, "are a white and shapeless lump of flesh, little larger than mice, without eyes or hair and only the claws projecting. This lump the mother bears slowly lick into shape." The bear is born, he was suggesting, as nothing but pure undifferentiated matter, and, like a true empiricist, the mother bear makes her pup a bear by licking it. When we brought Pump into our home, I felt I was doing just this: I was licking her into shape. (And not just because there was a lot of licking between us—after all, it was exclusively she who was licking.) It was our way of interacting together that made her who she was, that makes dogs that most people want to live with: interested in our goings and comings, attentive to us, not overly intrusive, playful just at the right times. She interpreted the world through acting on it, by seeing others act, by being shown, and by acting with me on the world—promoted into being a good member of the family. And the more time we spent together, the more she became who