Why Dogs are loyal?
Darani Vasudevan
Preface, In the life of several people, dogs have become an integral part. We like them when they exhibit puppy like behaviour to get our attention, play like a gaming partner, react according to our mood and protect us like a guard. A canine companion that causes no harm; Have you ever wondered how can they be so loyal? This book is a discussion on how our dogs inherited loyalty within them. Hope you will enjoy reading!! - V. Darani M.Sc., M.Phil., SET
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“When a dog approaches a strange dog or man in a savage or hostile frame of mind, he walks upright and very stiffy; his head is slightly raised or not much lowered, the tail is held erect and quite rigid; the hairs bristle, especially along the neck and back, prickled. Suppose that the dog suddenly discovers that the man he is approaching is not a stranger but his master, his whole bearing is reversed. Instead of walking upright, the body sinks downwards or even crouches, and is thrown into flexuous movements, his tail instead of being held stiff and upright, is lowered and wagged from side to side, his hair instantly becomes smooth; his ears are depressed and drawn backwards, but not closely to the head, and his lips hang loosely. From the drawing
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back of the ears, the eyelids become elongated and the eyes no longer appear round and starring.� - Charles Darwin (The Expression of the emotions in man and animal) Tail wagging, licking, jumping in lap, puppy like behaviour and the excitement on faceevery dog owner is addicted to these. A dog is not just an animal; it becomes a part of the family in which it is domesticated. Somehow we share a bond with it - An expensive bond, which can never be expressed with words. We domesticate several animals, birds and fishes but they are not bonded with us like a dog does.
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A dog is a pure form of loyalty. But how did he gain the potential of being loyal to his master? How can he get emotionally attached with his master? These questions strike our mind at some point while playing with our dogs or patting them. Not only us even researchers are disturbed by these questions and they conducted several experiments to find answers. The very first simple theory they formulated was- we give our dog food and shelter and he in return show loyalty to us. This is a simple theory which admits that we provide the basic needs like food and shelter to dogs and they in return act as guards. This a sort of symbiotic relationship that exists between the dog and his master. But we feed and shelter several
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animals, birds and fishes but not all of them act loyal. This theory gives us one of the reasons for “Why dogs are loyal?” but doesn‟t give exact solution to “How dogs are loyal?” Researchers sought the help of evolution to find explanation or the root cause for the incorporation of loyalty in dogs. They found that the dogs evolved from a population of wolves that were domesticated somewhere before 20000 to 40000 years. Genetic studies indicated that the gray wolf is the closest living relatives of the present day dog and hence the researchers concluded that the gray wolves followed
the
commercial
path
to
domestication. But further studies proved that the gray wolves and dogs got diverged from an extinct wolf
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species before 15000- 40000 years. This discovery leads to an answer that the genetic divergence between dogs and wolves occurred between 15000 and 40000 years ago. Archaeological
discoveries
from
cave
paintings, artefacts, tomb paintings and texts revealed that since ancient times, people at all levels of society kept dogs as pets and as a member of their family. A cave painting dating back to the Bronze Age consists of an image that appears to be a hunter surrounded by a pack of dogs as his hunting companions. These made people conclude that dogs have been bred for thousands of years to work with humans and provide companionship. Archaeological evidence like buried dog bones near human settlements dates back to 13000
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years ago. Studies of the mitochondrial DNA of wolves and dogs revealed that the genes split about 13500 years ago. Researchers have found that dogs have served as loyal hunting companions to early humans which support this genetic result. Moreover, evolutionary history revealed that Canis lupus familiaris and Homo sapiens have evolved together and the link between these two exists for several years. Evolutionary studies also found a set of socialcognitive abilities in the domestic dogs which are not possessed by wolves. These skills resembled some of the social-cognitive skills of human children. This is a form of convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in
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different species which occurs when distinctly related species independently evolve similar solutions to the same problem. Dogs have evolved to be cognitively more similar to human than his closest relative (apes). Man provided food and shelter to his dog which in return acted as guard to him. Some believe that this reciprocal relationship remains in our dogâ€&#x;s genes and its loyalty is a by product of it. According to some others opinions, dogs are pack animals and hence loyalty is just a natural behaviour for them. Pack animals are social creatures that prefer the company of other animals. This behaviour is a form of survival mechanism in a pack. Packs succeed because the members of the group depend on one another to survive. A dog views his master as a
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member of the pack, so he thinks loyalty to his master will keep him alive. A dog trainer must assert himself as the „Alpha dog.â€&#x; If the dogs view him as the head of the pack, they will follow his lead. As a pack animal, a dog is much like a human. No man is an island and so the dog. As mentioned, loyalty in a pack is crucial. In order for a pack to survive in the wild, their members must work together to overcome dangers. Trusting and cooperating become a natural part of surviving. Researchers carried out a study on foxes to understand how the modern day dog descent from his canine relative. They found that when foxes were domesticated, their hormone level changed,
especially
their
adrenal
stress
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hormone levels. This reduction in stress hormone levels resulted in changing coat colour and pie baldness of the further filial generations.
When
the
researchers
subsequently bred more docile and tame animals, they noticed other changes like floppy ears, curly tails as well as changes in skull shape and size in the next generations. The researchers arrived at a conclusion that the behavioural
and
environmental
changes
affected the physical appearance of the dog ancestors. Ancient men encouraged breeding of more friendly dogs that worked well on the hunt and he either omitted or killed the fearful and aggressive ones. As the time progressed, selective breeding resulted in the production of more friendly and good dogs.
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Studies proved that over thousands of years dogs have developed small facial muscles so that they can make their eyes appear larger and their eyebrows expressive to promote a nurturing response in his master. This is termed as „Puppy face‟- raising eyebrows to make their eyes look larger and more infant like when looking into a human‟s eyes. We know that our dogs are emotionally bonded to us. They can pick up on our moods and can tell when we are sad and when we are angry. Their response to our state of mood is also accurate. Moreover we understand the mood of our dogs in a similar way. We can read their expressions and behaviours and can easily say whether they are scared, angry, upset or happy.
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Dogs respond to human emotions. Dogs can register our emotions by looking at our facial expressions. To study this, scientists conducted an experiment in which they showed the dogs, images of people or other dogs expressing anger,
fear,
happiness
sadness,
disgust,
surprise or neutral. Dogsâ€&#x; heartbeat increased when they saw the images of angry, fearful and happy people. They even took longer time to take food after seeing those images. The scientists believed that the dogs were stressed after seeing arousing emotions from humans or other dogs. The dogs also consistently turned their head to the left when they saw images of angry, fearful or happy people. When they faced surprised human expression, the dogs turned their heads to the right. This shows that
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the dogs use different sides of their brain to process different information. According
to
Marcello
Scniscalchi,
Department of Veterinary medicine, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy: “Clearly arousing negative emotions seem to be processed by the right hemisphere of a dog‟s brain and more positive emotions by the left side” In another experiment, a group of dogs were selected as samples and each dog was placed in front of two screens. One screen displayed the image of a happy person or a happy dog and the other screen displayed the image of a person or dog in anger. The images were then paired with a variety of sounds, some matching the expression in the image and others
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mismatched the image‟s expression. The sounds included a playful or aggressive bark for dogs and a phrase in an unfamiliar language in a happy or angry tone for people. When exposed to complementary images and sounds, the dogs looked at the screens for longer duration. This meant that dogs paid attention as if they recognized the emotions displayed by the image on the screen. “The dogs spent significantly longer looking at the facial expressions which matched the emotional state of the vocalization” When the sound doesn‟t match the facial expression, the dogs lost interest and they kept looking around the room instead of at the screen. The researchers found that when two images one with positive face and the other
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with negative face, were displayed on two different screens at the same time, the dogs looked longer to positive face when positive sound was played and looked longer at the negative face when negative sound was played. They also found that the dogs were better at recognizing emotions of their fellow species than those of humans. Dogâ€&#x;s ability to connect emotionally with humans and dogs is neither an instinct nor a learned behaviour, but rather a sign of cognitive ability. The dogs extracted the information from the sound then associated that with the image displayed on the screen. This
involves
very
complex
scientific
mechanisms. Hence scientists concluded that dogs
possess
a
system
of
internal
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categorization
of
emotional
states.
The
scientists also believe that the ability to combine emotional cues may be inherent to dogs. As a highly social species, detecting emotions in humans would have helped them in
their
domestication
by
people
over
generations. Dogâ€&#x;s intelligence or dogâ€&#x;s cognition is the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing and using in new situations information and conceptual skills. Dog uses the olfactory information (smell) as the main sense to recognize objects but it also uses other senses like vision, hearing, taste, touch and proprioception. Researchers have
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proved that dogs can sense earthâ€&#x;s magnetic field. In 2005, science direct had conducted an experiment on canine behaviour, where the researchers presented each dog with his ownerâ€&#x;s scent, scent of a stranger and the scent of food. Brain scans of the dogs were taken as they approached each scent. Since the sense of smell is vital to dogs, they reacted more strongly to the scent of their owners. The brain scans indicated that the part of the brain associated
with
enjoyment
and
positive
emotions lit up when they were given their ownerâ€&#x;s scent. The brain scans had patterns similar to the patterns observed in humans when they see or sense something which they love. This experiment proved that a dog can
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recognize its owner with his sense of smell as well as feel pleasure on sensing it. In another experiment of testing loyalty, a dog was allowed to watch a stranger be rude to his master. When the dog was allowed to interact with his master and the stranger, the dog actively snubbed the stranger. All these proved that a dog can recognize his master with the sense of smell. Dogs learn through simple reinforcement but also learn by watching humans and other dogs. When dogs are engaged in partnered play, they would adjust their behaviour to the attention state of their partner. Puppies learn behaviour quickly by following examples ser by experienced dogs. Studies found that dogs can react appropriately to
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human body language such as gesturing and pointing, and they also understand human voice commands. Dogs may be guided by cues indicating the direction of human‟s attention. For example, a reward was hidden in one of the two buckets. A person or owner indicated the location of the reward by tapping at the bucket, or pointing to the bucket or nodding at the bucket or simply looking at the bucket. The dogs followed these signals perfectly and chose the correct bucket. Studies found that dogs have episodic like memory. They can readily learn the names of objects and can retrieve an item from among many others when given its name. „Fast mapping‟ in human is the ability to form quick and rough hypothesis about the meaning of a
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new word after only a simple exposure. In 2004, a study with Rico (a Border collie dog) revealed that he can fast map which is comparable to that of a 3 year old human. Studies also exposed that dogs can feel complex
emotions
like
jealousy
and
anticipation. Frans de Waal, an ethologist did an experiment on guilt reaction exhibited by dogs. He conducted his experiment on a female Siberian husky. The dog had the habit of shredding newspapers, and when the owner returned home and scolded her for shredding the papers, the dog acted guilty. But when the owner herself shredded the papers without dogâ€&#x;s knowledge, the dog acted guilty as if she did the mess. Through this experiment, De Waal
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concluded that the dogs did not display true guilt as human but simply the anticipation of reprimand. Just like humans and other animals, the characters expressed by dogs are determined by genes incorporated in their DNA. Hence a group of scientists headed by Von Holdt decided to find the genes responsible for loyalty in dogs. Observations showed that many
dogs
maintain
their
puppy
like
enthusiasm for social interaction throughout their life; whereas wolves lose this character as they age and exhibit more mature behaviours. Behavioural variations are associated with genetic variations. Von Holdt mapped the entire genome of 225 gray wolves and 912 dogs from 85 breeds in the year 2010. A few
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genes stood out as different between dogs and wolves. She along with her colleagues decided to examine the social behaviour of a group of dogs and a group of wolves and then analyze the variations in the DNA. For this they selected 18 dogs and 10 gray wolves. They socialized these animals with humans after which they begin their work with a series of behavioural tests. When the dogs were given a puzzle box with a sausage hidden inside, only two of the 18 were able to open the box whether or not a human was present. Wolves on the other hand, performed much better, eight of the 10 opened the box when a human was present and nine of them opened the box when they are left alone.
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Dogs in the presence of humans, they spent 20% of the time looking at the person and only 10% of the time looking at the box. The wolves spent nearly 100% of the time looking at the box whether or not a human was present. Dogs are not good at independent problem solving like wolves and they get distracted a lot by social stimulation. In the sociability test, a person (stranger to the dog and wolves) sat passively in the chair, not making eye contact with the animal or speaking to the animal. In the second round, the stranger actively engaged with the animal. Then the two phases were repeated with the caretaker. In the presence of the familiar human (caretaker), dogs spent a median of 93% of the time near people while wolves
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spent only 36% of theirs. In the presence of stranger, dogs struck around 53% of the time whereas wolves struck around 28% of the time. The crew decided to analyse the blood samples of wolves and dogs for pointing out the distinguished portion of DNA that impart different characters between the two. They collected blood samples from 16 dogs and 8 wolves and analyzed a larger chunk of DNA on chromosome 6. A few genes stood out as different
between
dogs
and
wolves
as
expected. The predominant among them was WBS gene (WBSCR17). They identified mutations in 3 genes called GTF2I, GTF2IRDI and WBSCR17. These genes are shown to cause an increased social behaviour in mice when incorporated into them. These are
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collectively termed as „Dog genes‟ and are responsible for hypersocial behaviour. These genes made dogs open to domestication. According to Von Holdt, “We found that these mutations were frequent in many populations and breeds, possibly suggestive
of
their
role
in
personality
variation” (In the case of humans when WBS gene is deleted
from
one
of
the
two
paired
chromosomes, it can lead to a condition called Williams-Beuren syndrome which involves stunted social development and overly-friendly behaviour, not unlike the traits. This syndrome is caused by a genetic abnormality, specifically a deletion of about 27 genes from the long arm of one of the two chromosome 7S. People with
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this syndrome are highly verbal relative to their IQ and are often very sociable). A dog understands human and that is the unique nature of the dog. What we assume as loyalty is the „dog‟s innate need‟ to work with us. Humans and dogs have spent days together since historic era. Hence the unique symbiotic relationship they have for years helped both each to accept the other as a part of their natural life. Dog‟s „pack animal nature‟ made it easy for the dog to get attaches with his master and develop strong bond with him or her. Whatever the reason may be, when we are away our dog misses us; when we arrive, he greets us. Whether he really understands our presence or absence is associated with science
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but he behaves as if we are important to him that makes us to appreciate his bond and love. Dogs
are
naturally
and
unconditionally
affectionate; like to be close with people and are
thus
loyal
friends
and
constant
companions. We may encounter dogs that fight or attack people those may have been conditioned by their master to behave in such a way. A
dogâ€&#x;s
companionship
offers
real
physiological benefits to us especially when we are stressed. A dog forms a great and loyal companion to his master and especially old people, troubled teens, disabled and foster children cherish the company of dogs in their life.
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Friendship between dogs and humans started thousands of years ago and the unconditional love between the two continues till date without any complication.