BY FRAN JEWELL
There is no way any modern-day domesticated dog could be feral. I hear this over and over again. The fact remains that dogs are 99.9 percent genetically the same as wolves.
We have defined dogs differently than wolves because, over thousands of years, humans selected the wolves that were the most social with humans to be our companions. Then, through that process, we chose specific traits from the wolves, such as their hunt drive, to create hunting dogs, or their prey drive, to create herding dogs, and so on. Now, we have begun to treat dogs like furry family members. We love our dogs boundlessly. And, in return, most dogs give us the unconditional love we all yearn for. The dogs’ companionship has enhanced our species with remarkable and many life-saving skills, improved our quality of life, and become intimately integrated into our society.
The one thing that we seem to forget is that dogs remain dogs. They are not furry humans and do not have the same social values we humans do. The most cherished of dogs are the ones that seem to have left their heritage behind and shifted to the human side in behavior.
The reality is, however, that all dogs, if left to their own devices, are going to relate to each other and to us from an instinctual place. They simply are not born with the social dynamics so important to our human society. They were born to discipline others that don’t conform to THEIR social hierarchy. Many (depending on breed) were born to chase, which can become chasing inappropriate objects like cars, cats, bikes, or other moving targets if they are not encouraged to chase the appropriate object like livestock. Some breeds will hunt and kill small living things, unless they are directed to hunt something else.
Dogs communicate to others just as dogs do, which is not necessarily as humans do, unless they are taught differently. The amazing thing is that almost ALL dogs can be taught to behave socially acceptably in the human world. Their strength is their ability to learn and work with humans. This is, indeed, what they were selected for from wolves way back when.
The sad thing is that more and more people are neglecting training and setting boundaries with their dogs to behave in a human socially acceptable manner. When too much freedom is given to most dogs, they will revert back to their genetic behaviors. They become independent. They begin to display food possession and territorial behavior. They begin to bite to get what they want or don’t want. Somewhere along the line many people believe that spoiling a dog is kind. The reality is that most dogs, when they are spoiled, will revert to more “feral” behaviors.
The hard thing for many of us to accept is the ancestry of the dog. We want to distance dogs from the wolf as much as possible. But, in our efforts to anthropomorphize the dog, we can actually encourage those feral behaviors to surface.
Training is such fun and a wonderful opportunity to see exactly who your individual dog is! It is amazing to see just what incredible things dogs are capable of when we do training with them, and it helps our dogs to be good citizens in our human society instead of nurturing their “inner wolf!”
Fran Jewell is an Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist, IAABC-certified dog behavior consultant, NADOI-certified instructor #1096 and the owner of Positive Puppy Dog Training, LLC, in Sun Valley. For more information, visit www.positivepuppy.com or call (208) 578-1565.