Co-Becoming: The Human-Dog Kinship

A brief look at the natural history of the human-dog kinship

The term kinship is defined as “a sharing of characteristics or origins.” This is particularly poignant when we think of humans and dogs. The human-dog entanglement goes right back to when dogs became dogs, approximately around 40,000 years ago[1,2].

The term kinship is defined as “a sharing of characteristics or origins.” This is particularly poignant when we think of humans and dogs. The human-dog entanglement goes right back to when dogs became dogs, approximately around 40,000 years ago[1,2].

But unlike the natural histories of other species that share space with humans, the story of the human-dog entanglement is a bit different. The emerging view of this entanglement is that it is not a result of active human interventional domestication[3,4]. It is one of “coevolution.” According to Paxton, the prehistoric human-home bases became an “ecological niche” in which humans and dogs aided in each other’s evolution[5]. Paxton says, “Part of what defines a human being is an association with dogs, and vice versa,” and argues that humans did not create dogs, but they just “became” in this new entanglement with humans, just as humans “became” with the help of dogs. A co-becoming, if you may. This becomes the foundation for our kinship. 

As we further explore the story of our kinship, the co-becoming takes centre stage, revealing an intriguing fallout – both species gain similar traits. Experts call this “convergent evolution.” In a paper titled “Human-like social skills in dogs?,”[6] the authors argue that the dog’s skill to read human social and communicative behaviour is flexible and possibly more human-like – than that of other animals more closely related to humans. These human-like aspects of dog communication serve a specific purpose – to aid human-dog collaborations[7]. This is part of what makes our entanglement special. But there’s more in the way of the fallout of the co-becoming. Dogs are known to form attachments with humans, similar to the attachments human infants form with adults[8]. This attachment is known to generate the very chemicals our brains produce when we see our infants[9,10]. The baby talk that emerges when we see our dogs can now be explained scientifically! But there’s more. Paxton argues that the very success of Homo sapiens as a species is owed, at least in part, to our furry friend. He explains that our capacity for large-scale collaboration is made possible through spoken communication. To develop the physical capabilities necessary for speech, we had to sacrifice our long snouts. As a result, we also lost our acute sense of smell. However, this role is taken over by dogs, which provides our species with a survival advantage over others, such as the Neanderthals. Thus, our two species have evolved into kin.

I once used to be an engineer-turned-dog-trainer. I’m neither now. But when I look back at dog training, the parallels with engineering hit me between my eyes. The training models are built on a way of defining animals in a machine-like fashion or what can be called “mechanomorphization.” We have the likes of Rene Descartes, Skinner and Watson to thank for this mechanomorphization of animals. Thankfully modern science no more justifies this view, although it is pervasive in our practices. However, it is important to remind ourselves that dogs are remarkable sentient beings that bond with us in the way infants bond with us, read us better than we understand ourselves and feel deeply.

The nature-culture binary now creates a liminal or in-between space that disenfranchises its occupants – the free-living dogs. They are not seen as “wild” and thus do not enjoy our blessing to live without being owned. They are not seen as “properly domesticated” either, since domesticated is defined as “tame and kept as a pet or on a farm or cultivated for food.” Free-living dogs thus fall in a liminal space, with no labels to explain and support their existence to us. This festers discomfort at the very notion of their existence, and thus, they become a “civic problem.”

This was not always the case in India. Free-living dogs did not bother Indians as much before the British Raj. Sure, they did not occupy divine status like some other animals were afforded. But as the story of the dog that accompanied the Pandavas on their final journey illustrates, free living dogs were not cause for much cognitive dissonance. This changed during the British Raj.

Nadal traces the attitudes towards free-living dogs in the East India Company and the British Raj thus:

“…rabies never represented as serious a public health threat as other diseases did, yet it carried a terrible social and metaphorical meaning as regards prevalent ideas of taming and control over animal lives … For a colonial power like Britain, [the presence of free-living dogs] was a constant reminder of one of its deepest fears, ‘the uncertain conquest of culture over nature’. In this mindset, whatever deviated from the standards of orderliness—culture’s tools in the mastery over the wildness of nature—was abhorred, blamed for moral contagion, and eventually considered an anti-social force.” Nadal says that free-living dogs “epitomized this threatening presence which cried out for regulation or destruction”[13].

Colonization is a garish display of what the sovereign owns – the people, the produce, the animals. “Everything one owns shall behave as instructed! The nature-culture divide shall be maintained, and those who do not heed will be brought to heel!” Yet, here is the little free living dog of India, one the British named the “Paraiah Dog”…defying their rules and threatening a mighty empire! Thus, we witness that dogs are not only similar to us in our emotions, social complexities and attachments but also in our resilience in the face of adversity. This exemplifies the very notion of kinship – “a sharing of characteristics or origins.”

Now, the animal mirror stands polished and ready for our examination. What does our treatment of our interspecies kin reveal to us? What does kinship really mean to us, and where are the boundaries we draw? What beliefs are those boundaries based on? Do our beliefs around human exceptionalism redefine kinship as it happens across species? What space can we create for “the other” in our minds, homes and societies? What are our moral obligations towards “the other”?

There are plenty more questions about where they come from. So, to me, dogs are the ambassadors from the animal realm. They come to us with wet snouts, wagging tails and that precious polished mirror. They give us the opportunity to not only experience profound interspecies kinship but also to develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and, thus experience a better relationship with ourselves and our natural world. Given the juncture we are at, how we utilize these opportunities may just define our future itself.

References

1. A 33,000-year-old incipient dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: evidence of the earliest domestication disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum by Ovodov and colleagues (2011).

2. Fossil dogs and wolves from Palaeolithic sites in Belgium, the Ukraine and Russia: osteometry, ancient DNA and stable isotopes by Germonpré and colleagues (2009).

3. The covenant of the wild: why animals chose domestication: with a new preface by Budiansky (1992).

4. Origins of the dog: the archaeological evidence. In ‘The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behavior and Interactions with People’ by Clutton-Brock (2016).

5. A case for a naturalistic perspective by Paxton (2000).

6. Human-like social skills in dogs? by Hare Tomasello (2005).

7. What does it take to become ‘best friends’? Evolutionary changes in canine social competence by Miklósi and Topál (2013).

8. Attachment behavior in dogs (Canis familiaris): a new application of Ainsworth’s (1969) Strange Situation Test by Topál and colleages (1998).

9. Attachment between humans and dogs by Nagasawa and colleagues (2009).

10. Dogs hijack the human bonding pathway by MacLean and Hare (2015).

11. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Haraway (1991).

12. Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, part I: a political physiology of dominance by Haraway (1978).

13. To kill or not to kill? Negotiating life, death, and One Health in the context of dog-mediated rabies control in colonial and independent India by Nadal (2019).