Working Like a Dog: The Story of Working Dogs through History - Softcover

Gorrell, Gena K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887765890 ISBN 13: 9780887765896

Verlag: Tundra Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of The 2003 ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award

Included on VOYA’s ninth annual Nonfiction Honor List


Since the first hungry wolf bravely approached an ancient cooking fire and was rewarded with a scrap of meat, our lives and the lives of dogs have been interwoven. Dogs have worked for us as warriors with ammunition strapped to their bodies. Dogs have gone through snow, icy seas, and into the dangerous rubble of collapsed buildings to rescue us. Dogs, with their spectacular ability to detect odors, keep us safe by finding drugs and explosives. They lead us if we cannot see and react for us when we cannot hear. Most of all, they love us – and we love them.

This fascinating book by Norma Fleck Award-winner, Gena K. Gorrell, describes the dogs of history, the evolution of breeds for different purposes, and the training involved in preparing the modern-day heroes who find lost children, nab criminals, and point out contraband – heroes who just happen to be dogs.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gena K. Gorrell is a book editor and an award-winning writer of non-fiction for young people. Her third book, Heart and Soul: The Story of Florence Nightingale, won the Norma Fleck Award for Non-Fiction. In her spare time she is a first-aid instructor and a volunteer officer in the Toronto Police Marine Unit. She lives in Toronto with her husband and her dog.

Aus dem Klappentext

Winner of The 2003 ASPCA Henry Bergh Children s Book Award

Since the first hungry wolf bravely approached an ancient cooking fire and was rewarded with a scrap of meat, our lives and the lives of dogs have been interwoven. Dogs have worked for us as warriors with ammunition strapped to their bodies. Dogs have gone through snow, icy seas, and into the dangerous rubble of collapsed buildings to rescue us. Dogs, with their spectacular ability to detect odors, keep us safe by finding drugs and explosives. They lead us if we cannot see and react for us when we cannot hear. Most of all, they love us and we love them.

This fascinating book by Norma Fleck Award-winner, Gena K. Gorrell, describes the dogs of history, the evolution of breeds for different purposes, and the training involved in preparing the modern-day heroes who find lost children, nab criminals, and point out contraband heroes who just happen to be dogs.

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Chapter One

IN FROM THE COLD

From high on a hillside, brother and sister watch the valley below. The Tall Ones are down there, doing strange things, as usual. The youngsters are fearful of the Tall Ones, but they are hollow with hunger, and their mouths water at the smell of food wafting up from the valley.

“I’m going down there,” says the brother. “Come on.”

“But what if they…?” His sister sniffs the air once more and relents. Together the two wolf cubs pad warily down the hill, toward the cooking­fire of the Stone Age family below.

***

How long have dogs been part of our lives? How many centuries ago did the first dog sneak off with the family’s dinner (Who, me?) or snuggle into the family bedding (Aw, please. It’s cold out there)? We really ­don’t know.

The dog family is part of a larger animal family known as canids. The Latin name for the dog is Canis familiaris: “common canid” or – more appropriately – “household canid.” Most experts on canine paleontology – the study of how the canid family developed – agree that dogs are descended from early wolves, and that wolves first appeared at least a million years ago. At some point – perhaps twenty or thirty thousand years ago – some wolves began to live with people, and the extraordinary partnership of humans and canids began.

Maybe it all started as we fought over fresh meat. Or maybe motherless cubs were adopted by a kind­hearted family. Or maybe, in times of hardship, we worked out some kind of cooperation that helped us both. We’ll never be sure how wolves and humans overcame their mutual suspicion, but we can guess this much: we came together partly because of the similarities between us.

Like people, wolves are social animals: they live in groups, with leaders and followers, and they help each other find food and raise families. Like our early ancestors, they often hunt animals much larger than themselves, using teamwork and persistence. Like us, they are constantly communicating with each other, by voice and body language. A wolf that made its way into a human community would soon understand the status of the various family members – who was senior, who was junior – and would learn the meanings of many human sounds, signals, and postures.

While our similarities may have helped bring us together, our differences have made our partnership even more valuable. We humans have sharp eyesight and excellent color vision, and the way our eyes are positioned on our head gives us a good sense of distance; wolves have keen night vision, and phenomenal powers of hearing and smell. We have the brains for imaginative long­range planning; the wolf has the muscles for speed and power. We have agile hands that are free to make and brandish weapons; the wolf grows fearsome weapons on jaws and feet. Together, what a team we make!

***

From Wolf to Dog

How did those early wolves turn into the immense range of dogs we have today, from miniature poodle to Great Dane? The process probably started when people were first settling into permanent communities. It’s likely that some wolves learned to hang around these settlements, stealing meat and scavenging scraps of garbage. As one litter after another was born on the edge of human society, probably only a few wolves were fearless enough to be comfortable so close to people, while the others retreated to the wild.

Did humans capture some of the wolf cubs and make them part of the family? Did a few wolves become so confident around people that they moved into the settlement of their own free will? However it happened, a number of these wolves who didn’t mind people eventually started living inside the community and raising cubs there. Year after year, as generations of cubs grew up, the young wolves who were shy of people left the settlement and moved to the wild. The ones who were aggressive toward people were killed or driven away. Only a handful of the animals – those who were not too timid and not too aggressive – remained.

As these few wolves interbred among themselves, and passed their genes on to cubs and grandcubs, the generations came to look less and less like their cousins in the wild. Before long – perhaps within one human lifetime – these animals had an appearance and behavior that we today would recognize as doglike.

Why did they change so much? Many explanations have been suggested for how each separate change – in size, color, teeth, and so on – may have helped them fit better into human society. But the answer may be even simpler. When genetic information (DNA) is passed from parents to children, certain characteristics that appear to be unrelated are in fact linked together – that is, a child who inherits one characteristic is likely to inherit the linked ones as well. (For example, some breeds of dog have a genetic link between deafness and white hair; the white puppies in a litter are more likely to be deaf.) It’s possible that when the temperament of the village wolves was evolving to be more domesticated, a number of other characteristics (size, color, teeth, etc.) were evolving too, because they happened to be genetically linked to temperament.

***

The Wolf That Wasn’t

Meanwhile, in the isolated continent of Australia, marsupials were evolving. Marsupials are a kind of mammal, but unlike most mammals, they are born very tiny and they develop further in the mother’s pouch. (Kangaroos and koalas are marsupials.) In time, Australia’s marsupials had much the same variety as the mammals elsewhere – there were big ones, small ones, grazing ones, preying ones – so it’s not surprising that one of them, the thylacine, looked and acted very much like a wolf.

Thylacines seem to have been successful hunters until a few thousand years ago, when disaster struck: some primitive dogs arrived in Australia, probably brought by seafarers trading with the Aboriginals who lived there. The dogs multiplied and many became feral (wild), competing for the same prey as the thylacines. The dogs won the contest, and their descendants in Australia today are the wolflike canids known as dingoes.

Some dingoes live with Aboriginal families, but many remain feral; they nest in burrows or hollow tree trunks, and tend to howl rather than bark. Like wolves, they have only one litter of pups a year, while most breeds of dog can have two. Even the dingoes who live around people stay fairly independent, and it’s almost impossible to train them. Did the dingo never quite become domesticated? Or did it evolve into a dog and then, in Australia’s barren outback, start turning wolflike again?

As for the thylacine, it became extinct in Australia. A small population survived for a while in Tasmania, an island south of Australia that remained dog­free for many years. Indeed, there are still rumors of a few wild thylacines lurking in the Tasmanian wilderness. But the last known thylacine died in a zoo in 1936.

***

Settling the Great Dog Fight

There is still a lot of argument about the origins of today’s dogs. Since different kinds of wolves lived in different parts of the world, some people think that a number of human communities developed partnerships with whatever wolves happened to be nearby, and that those various wolves evolved into dogs of one sort or another. Others believe that certain breeds developed not from wolves but from jackals (who are smaller than wolves and live in hotter countries) or other canids. Yet others are convinced that the dog species evolved without human...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tundra Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0887765890
• ISBN 13: 9780887765896
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar