Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution

by Lorna Coppinger and Raymond Coppinger

Book Overview

Biologists, breeders and trainers, and champion sled dog racers, Raymond and Lorna Coppinger have more than four decades of experience with literally thousands of dogs. Offering a scientifically informed perspective on canines and their relations with humans, the Coppingers take a close look at eight different types of dogs--household, village, livestock guarding, herding, sled-pulling, pointing, retrieving, and hound. They argue that dogs did not...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226115631
• ISBN13: 9780226115634
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Illuminating long overdue look at dogs and humans

I am 10 year volunteer hearing dog trainer, now up to about 18 dogs... This is one of the few books to dare discuss the crisis in unmanaged dog breeding and the total collapse of healthy working dogs into genetic garbage. this book was very unpopular with some of my colleagues because it punctured their breed-oriented obsessions (many are side-breeders). Yet with our dogs we have learned time and time again the mixed breeds fit best with their new owners, and have the fewest veterinary problems. We have obtained dogs from knowledgeable and careful breeders, but regretably those breeders are getting rarer every day, and now most dogs come from shelters. Our failure rate on the shelter dogs is so much lower then when we focussed on seeking breeder sourced dogs. True, this book is overwrought at times, but I think it is an important contribution to the dog book library that says some new and interesting things when so many books just parrot the standard, warped AKC line. Its time for a new breed standards group that focuses on healthy dogs...

A jewel -- with a few flaws

The authors are trained ethologists with a life-long interest in dogs. Their views are also shaped by visiting and studying dogs in many parts of the world. That's further enriched by their experience in training and working with many different types of dogs -- in particular, herding dogs and herd guard dogs, sled dogs, and village dogs.Ethology is a branch of biology that studies animal behavior. It emphasizes evolutionary principles in behavior, often identifying continuity and change in patterns from studying closely related species. It also emphasizes studying the behavior in the natural context or setting. (Comparative psychology, by contrast, had grown to primarily favor the laboratory method and setting -- until the revolution of ethology and Eckhard Hess's work shook it up.) This book is a work for the serious student of canine behavior but written in a style that's readable by anyone with an interest in a scientific approach to and understanding of dogs. It greatly expands (and makes far more readable) the material in the Coppinger & Schneider chapter in "The Domestic Dog", James Serpell (Ed.) published six years earlier, but it also extends it into other areas. Its most important thesis is that dogs probably derived from wolf-like animals which hung around mesolithic villages and were scavengers, quite similar to "village dogs" in many parts of the world. They were not wolves, captured as puppies and then tamed. Wolves do NOT ever become tame or trainable. I found their argument on these point to be extremely convincing.The serious student of dogs will also find their ethological observations and comparisons of dogs valuable. Despite its great worth and contribution, the book is not without some petty flaws. I'd have liked more discussion on how the sequence of actions, like beads on a string, of orient/ eye-stalk/ chase/ grab-bite/ kill-bite/ dissect/ consume becomes fragmented so that some elements disappear while others remain. And how the differences arise for different dog "types". As ethologists, they know that there are many different behavior sequences in a species of which the predatory game killing pattern is only one. What about various social behaviors? Play behavior? Reproductive behavior? Adult attitude toward puppies? I became frustrated at the authors' lapses in consideration for their readers in their word usage, "transhumance" being one example. They used it several times before it was ever defined. It means the shepherds or drovers making seasonal migrations with their flocks in the Mediterranean region. Either explain it sooner or, even better, use terms familiar to English speaking readers. (On a websearch for "transhumance," the first 30 hits were all French except one, translated into English, from a Swedish university. The authors' descriptions of genetic processes are neither models of exposition or of clarity. E.g., I think once a claim was made that a behavior cannot be genetically controlled because there a

Prepare to be annoyed and fascinated

This book blew me away with its insights and made me want to throw it across the room many times. It is simply the best evolutionary and biological look at dogs around, while at the same time is seriously marred by the authors' excursions out of science into a weird pseudo-ethical debate about "what's REALLY best for dogs." As the owner of a young Great Pyrenees (now 20 months) brought home at 5-1/2 weeks as a pet out of a litter of working livestock guardian dogs, I was fascinated by the Coppingers' description of the "predatory sequence." I could suddenly understand the behaviors I'd observed at the dog park, the startling differences between my dog and the border collies there. The very idea that there are literally millions of the type of dog I own--a breed that seems unusual if not rare in the U.S.--out there in central Asia even today migrating with herds of sheep as they have done for millenia...this just gives me chills. As humans we like to tell ourselves stories about our breeds: how they developed, why they have this or that characteristic that was "bred into them" for some special purpose. And yet the story the Coppingers tell about the livestock guardian "breeds" rings so true in a historical, scientific and geographical context that it is awe-inspiring. All of this part of the book is well-argued and based on convincing evidence. While I do agree that human breeding of dogs according to strict, but essentially fanciful, "breed-types" should be subject to serious ethical discussion, I wish the Coppingers had simply made their effective points about the underlying nature of breeds and left it at that. The cloudy discussion of whether or not people's present-day association with dogs is really "bad" in some esoteric way for dogs just doesn't come across as convincing in this book. Their ideas, which are not very precise, seem to be based on biological definitions of "evolutionary success" that are in themselves just human words and concepts with no more functional weight than an AKC breed definition. This is an area where the Coppingers seem to have abandoned their incisive real-world observations and fallen for their own "scientific" jargon. Do we want to know if the human-dog association is bad for dogs? That's like asking the question, Is marriage bad for people? Obviously for some dogs it is wonderful, for others it is a disaster, for others it is irrelevant. Dogs hardly seem to be going extinct--what more can they ask from an evolutionary perspective?

A fascinating look at dogs

This book is a fascinating examination of the familiar dog by a professor of biology, who is also a former sled dog racing champion and dog trainer, and his wife, who is also an expert at the raising and training of dogs. Studying where dogs came from, what they are and where they are going, the authors reach some startling conclusions. They reject that idea that Mesolithic hunters stole wolf puppies to originally domesticate dogs, instead following the flow of adaptation to suggest that the path of domestication leads through the Neolithic garbage dump!After that, the role and attributes of modern dogs are examined. Finally, the explosion of genetic "diseases" among purebred dogs is examined, and its causes laid bare.This is a fascinating look at dogs. Much that I have noticed about the dogs in my life has been explained to me, and a great deal of food for thought given. I highly recommend this book; it will answer many questions, including some you never thought to ask.

Influential new book on dog behavior

This new book on the origins and behavior of dogs by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger is the most influential look at the nature of dogs in several decades, and it promises to be controversial.For example, the book is going to make some dog trainers get their hackles up. Trainers who base their methods on the concept that a dog is just a wolf in civilized clothing will be especially upset, because the Coppingers say that is simply wrong. They admit that there is "no appreciable differences" in the genetics of coyotes, dogs, jackels and wolves, and that these species can interbreed. Still, they say, "dogs have diverged, changed, transmutated from their wolflike ancestors." Thus, training programs that say the owner/trainer should be the "alpha wolf" and the dog a subordinate member of the pack is wrong, because dogs are not wolves. The brains of dogs are different from the brains of wolves, just as the brains of humans are different from the brains of chimpanzees, a close relative, they argue. Dogs don't think and react to signals as wolves do.The authors also suggest the idea that humans captured wild wolf pups and domesticated them may well be wrong. Their alternative theory on how dogs became tame has important implications for how we understand our best friends.This is not a recipe book for dog training, nor is it an easy "10 tips for a well behaved dog." Some sections are rather technical. But overall, the book is easy to comprehend. It may very well set the stage for renewed and lively discussions on approaches to dog training in the 21st century. For dog breeders, trainers and serious dog lovers, this book is absolutely must reading.