Little dog

Man and dog first met in prehistoric times: cave-men realised that they could improve their quality of life together with this sophisticated, sociable hunter with a marked sense of defence of its territory, and the wolves understood that this strange two-legged (or almost so) animal could provide a certain amount of protection to the pack.

So it started out as a mutual assistance pact, and became a love story.  Almost always, at least...

For in those times, man and dog spoke more or less the same language, and understanding each other should not have been much problem.  Paradoxically (although not too much so) it became a problem as we humans evolved our communication skills. For as the human race evolved, on the one hand there was a sharp increase in our intellectual and logical proficiency, but on the other the loss of many animal prerogatives: our development of the use of the word brought about the almost total loss of other channels of communication like the sense of smell or our posture, which includes both actual movements and micro-movements.

These are extremely important in the interaction between animals, where a glance can take on different meanings just by its direction, where the flash of a tongue on the nose can say more than many words.

Both men and dogs are animals who live in packs, and thus they share the habit of following certain social codes with many communication rituals and a hierarchical structure.

The two codes are very similar, and this can lead to misunderstandings between the two races, for there are certain behavioural sequences which share the same form but turn out to have different meanings: the dog which stands on its hind legs to put its paws on our shoulders isn’t expressing fraternal love, it’s expressing its tendency to dominate us!

There are, of course, also shared codes, and it is these which have allowed our two races to live together ever since the age of the cave-man.

The pack-family
The pack-family is an interracial entity which shares communication codes and signals that help us live peacefully together, but which also forces us to consider that the onus is on the human to understand the subtle differences between the two codes of behaviour and to pay close attention to the consistency between verbal and non-verbal behaviour.

A further fundamental aspect of communication is that we must learn to project our actions in the right way into the cognitive world of the canine.  A smile, for example, is a gesture of friendship only among primates; for a canine it is an act of baring our teeth.

The concept of the pack-family implies that each partner has its own role, occupies a hierarchical position, and that there is interaction between them.  We should always remember that relations between our race and the canine race depend on the very fact that there is an intuitive communication between us.

However, the interracial nature of the group makes it slightly more difficult, and above all more complicated, to establish a reassuring hierarchy.  Many dog owners, for example, tend to consider their dogs as almost human, “like a child”, and this leads to an anthropomorphism which destabilises our poor friend.

A dog is actually incapable of abstract concepts, so that expressions like “jealousy” or “vendetta” have no meaning for him.  When for example a dog interposes between two people in an embrace, he is not showing jealousy but merely trying to express a hierarchical rank, to check the distances between members of the pack-family.  When we leave a dog alone and he destroys some item of ours, he is not taking revenge for being abandoned but simply calming his own anxiety through oral exploration of an object with a reassuring smell.

The respect of the hierarchy is thus of fundamental importance in creating channels of communication on which to base a peaceful, satisfactory coexistence both for us and for our dog.

Se we can sum up the social prerogatives that we can, and must, work on to help our puppy grow up tranquilly, to become a peaceable member of our pack-family:

Obviously we should enforce our leadership not only through bans but also through play and common activity, and the initiative for this must always come from us humans.

The dog who spends a lot of time with his “owner”, behaving well and following the rules, will be a happy and well-balanced dog most unlikely to have abnormal reactions to either himself or to others.

This is the importance of building the right human-canine relations, to let both sides live in a modern society without invading each other’s space and to enjoy happily the common spaces.