As I have mentioned on Retrieverman, I absolutely love this book. It is the best book I’ve ever read on dogs, and I also love it that the main dog subjects in the book are breeds with which I have some familiarity– Labs, goldens, and border collies. The author’s dog is a stray retriever of one of the following permuations: Lab/golden cross, Lab/redbone hound cross, or golden/redbone hound cross (which is what I think he was).
“Merle” was discovered on the San Juan River in Utah. He was a feral dog that lived on the game he killed and what food he could cajole out of tourists. When he discovers the author’s rafting party, he decides that he wants to stay with the author. He almost says to the author “You need a dog, and I’m it.”
The dog is taken to the author’s residence in the wilds of Wyoming. The small of Kelly allows the dogs to roam off-leash, provided they learn to leave livestock alone.
Because of this freedom, the dogs are given a lot of opportunities to socialize with each other and with people. Further, the dogs develop an understanding of the natural world around them, which is very useful for a nature writer.
The author is brought to many interesting insights because of Merle. He notices that Merle tends to sniff the front tracks of the pronghorn more intensely than the hind tracks. When the author shoots a pronghorn, he sniffs the front hooves and back hooves to see if he can discern a difference in their odors. He discovers that the front hooves smell more strongly of sage than the back ones.
Later, while on a long hike in the mountains, Merle stops and looks into a stand of pines. When the author stops and does looks in the same direction that Merle does, he sees a grizzly bear lumbering out of the trees.
Because Merle grew up in such a rich environment and then was allowed to use his intelligence and instincts as a “free-thinking dog,” that Merle develops very good manners with people. His innate people reading skills, which all dogs possess, have been heightened because of his freedom.
Merle’s intelligence begins to reach another level, though, and this finding is one of the most controversial in the book. Merle is taken to the chiropracter regularly. The chiropracter has a full-length mirror that covers an entire wall. One day, the author sees Merle look at the mirror and then look back at him. Then the dog drops to the floor and begins doing behaviors that look like he can tell that the mirror is his reflection, wriggling his paws from side to side and rolling over. He does this with his eyes focused on the mirror. Now, dogs have never officially passed the mirror test for self awareness, but if this finding were true, then we can say that dogs are self-aware.
Today we think dogs ought to be under our control all the time. They must obey us at all times, or they will become “dominant.” Either that, or we believe that they are stupid animals that are controlled entirely by conditioned responses. Thus, we keep them under our controll all the time in order to better control their environments. Both of these theories are depriving dogs of their innate natures, which partially that of the wolf and partially that of a very strongly humanized animal.
I wish we all could live in places where we could give our dogs some modicum of freedom and allow them to interact with their own kind and us in more natural ways. But lacking such liberal dog laws in most areas, we need to ensure that off-leash areas still exist. Because of all the animals we live with, the dog is one of the most complex. New research is showing how much domestication has turned the dog’s mind into something more like of people. They have evolved advanced cognitive abilities that we have not seen any other non-human species, including the great apes. It is only now that we have really started to appreciate how amazingly intelligent dogs are. It is time that we kept them with a deep appreciation for this intelligence.
