The Hidden Life of Dogs - Softcover

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0547416857 ISBN 13: 9780547416854

Verlag: Mariner Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Long before the Dog Whisperer, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas revealed to readers the nature of pack dynamics, leading to a completely new understanding of dogs and their desires.

In this fascinating account, based on thirty years of living with and observing dogs, we meet Misha, a friend’s husky, whom Thomas followed on his daily rounds of more than 130 square miles, and who ultimately provided the simple and surprising answer to the question What do dogs want most? Not food, not sex, but other dogs. We also meet Maria, who adored Misha, bore his puppies, and clearly mourned when he moved away; the brave pug Bingo and his little wife, Violet; the dingo Viva; and the remaining dogs and pups that constitute the pack.

“Instead of training and obedience, [Thomas] offers as an alternative a world of ‘trust and mutual obligation’” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). When it was first published in hardcover, The Hidden Life of Dogs spent over a year on the New York Times Bestseller list. This Mariner paperback edition will include a new afterword by the author.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of the most widely read American anthropologists, ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS has observed dogs, cats, and elephants during her half-century-long career. Her many books include The Social Lives of Dogs, The Tribe of Tiger, and The Hidden Life of Deer.  She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

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The Hidden Life of Dogs

By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Copyright © 1993 Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-547-41685-4

CHAPTER 1

I began observing dogs by accident. While friends spent six months in Europe, I took care of their husky, Misha. An agreeable two-year-old Siberian with long, thin legs and short, thick hair, Misha could jump most fences and travel freely. He jumped our fence the day I took him in. A law requiring that dogs be leashed was in effect in our home city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also in most of the surrounding communities. As Misha violated the law I would receive complaints about him, and with the help of these complaints, some from more than six miles distant, I soon was able to establish that he had developed a home range of approximately 130 square miles. This proved to be merely a preliminary home range, which later he expanded considerably, but interestingly enough, even young Misha's first range was much larger than the ranges of homeless dogs reported in Baltimore by the behavioral scientist Alan Beck. Beck's urban strays had established tiny ranges of but 0.1 to 0.06 square mile. In contrast, Misha's range more closely resembled the 200- to 500-square-mile territories roamed by wolves, most notably the wolves reported by Adolph Murie in "The Wolves of Mount McKinley" and by L. David Mech in "The Wolves of Isle Royale." What was Misha doing?

Obviously, something unusual. Here was a dog who, despite his youth, could navigate flawlessly, finding his way to and from all corners of the city by day and by night. Here was a dog who could evade dangerous traffic and escape the dog officers and the dognappers who at the time supplied the flourishing laboratories of Cambridge with experimental animals. Here was a dog who never fell through the ice on the Charles River, a dog who never touched the poison baits set out by certain citizens for raccoons and other trash-marauders, a dog who never was mauled by other dogs. Misha always came back from his journeys feeling fine, ready for a light meal and a rest before going out again. How did he do it?

For a while I looked for the answer in journals and books, availing myself of the fine libraries at Harvard and reading everything I could about dogs to see if somewhere the light of science had penetrated this corner of dark. But I found nothing. Despite a vast array of publications on dogs, virtually nobody, neither scientist nor layman, had ever bothered to ask what dogs do when left to themselves. The few studies of free-ranging dogs concerned feral dogs, abandoned or homeless dogs. Alone in hostile settings, these forsaken creatures were surely under terrible stress. After all, they were not living under conditions that were natural to them, any more than are wild animals in captivity, imprisoned in laboratories and zoos. How might dogs conduct themselves if left undisturbed in normal circumstances? No one, apparently, had ever asked.

At first, that science had ignored the question seemed amazing. But was it really? We tend to study animals for what they can teach us about ourselves or for facts that we can turn to our advantage. Most of us have little interest in the aspects of their lives that do not involve us. But dogs? Dogs do involve us. They have shared our lives for twenty thousand years. How then had we managed to learn so little about dogs that we could not answer the simplest question: what do they want?

Our ignorance becomes more blameworthy when we consider that no animal could be easier to study. Unlike wild animals, dogs are not afraid of us. To study them we need not invade their habitat or imprison them in ours — our world is their natural habitat and always was. Furthermore, because their wild ancestors were not dogs at all but wolves, dogs have never even existed as a wild species. As a result we have had the opportunity to observe dogs since dogs began, an opportunity that for the most part we have chosen to ignore. Hence, curled on the sofa beside me of an evening was a creature of mystery: an agreeable dog with a life of his own, a life that he had no wish to conceal and that he was managing with all the competence of a wild animal, not with any help from human beings but in spite of them.

One evening he got up and stretched, preparatory to voyaging. First he braced his hind legs and stretched backward, head bowed, rump high, to pull tight the muscles of his shoulders. Then he raised his head and dropped his hips to stretch his spine and hind legs, even clenching his hind feet into fists so that the stretch went into his toes. Ready at last, he moved calmly toward the door so that, as usual, I could open it for him. And then, as our eyes met, I had an inspiration. Misha himself would answer my questions. Right in front of me, a long-neglected gate to the animal kingdom seemed waiting to be opened. Misha held the key.

Who could resist the appeal of this notion? No money, no travel, no training, no special instruments were necessary to probe the mystery — one needed only a dog, a notebook, and a pencil. I didn't even regret my total lack of formal training to begin such a project. In fact, because no biologists had ever hinted that they knew or even wondered what ordinary dogs want, my ignorance seemed almost a qualification. Anyway, I didn't feel I'd be ignorant for long. Turning out the lights so that the neighbors wouldn't see me flout the dog laws, at least not in this instance, I opened the door a crack. Out slipped Misha, with me right behind him, and thus our project began.

Again and again we did this, at least two or three nights a week for almost two years, not stopping even after Misha's owners came home to claim him, because by then Misha liked the work we were doing together and wanted to keep at it. Coming to collect me was not difficult for him — his community did not then have a leash law, so of an evening, after his owners let him out, he'd jump their fence and make his way across two cities to find me. Usually he would arrive after dark. By the light on our front porch I'd see him standing in the street, looking up at our windows like a captain looking for a sailor. I would turn out the porch light and crack the door, and Misha would slip inside for a brief visit with my family and also with his, for by then he had married my daughter's husky, the beautiful Maria, and was teaching some of his skills to the four children he had fathered on her. But eventually he would stand poised to go out again, looking back over his shoulder to see which of us would travel with him. Maria always volunteered, and if I wasn't going myself I'd sometimes let her. It was her or me, though, never both of us; if Maria and Misha were together, they traveled fast and wouldn't wait for me. Sometimes I took Maria on a leash, which kept us all together, but mostly I simply went alone with Misha. One by one, dog secrets were revealed through a series of adventures, some of them dangerous, all of them interesting. Misha was Odysseus, and Cambridge was the wine-dark sea.

CHAPTER 2

The first question, perhaps the most important, perhaps even the most interesting, I was never able to answer. This was the question of Misha's navigational skills. To be sure, he had been traveling the streets of Cambridge long before I thought to go with him, and had probably memorized some landmarks. But sometimes he seemed to travel without the aid of landmarks, or at least not with the landmarks he had used to get where he was going, since once he had arrived at his destination, he might easily take another route home. Did heuse...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mariner Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0547416857
• ISBN 13: 9780547416854
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland