Post by Paul on Aug 28, 2011 17:18:46 GMT 9.5
Game over for Rover?
Why our modern way of life is making an enemy of man's best friend
By EDWARD STOURTON, Writer and Radio 4 broadcaster
We were once proud to be called ‘a nation of dog lovers’. Today, British life – in our cities especially – is shot through with ‘dogism’ We are asking dogs to make an unprecedented evolutionary leap to meet the new challenges they face. For centuries we have bred them to perform tasks that were necessary for human welfare - like chasing wild boar
The Googleplex, as the internet giant’s California headquarters is known, is so cutting-edge that you’re not allowed to call it an office; the ‘campus’ is dotted with eclectic statuary – a space rocket juts out at you by the top of a staircase – and juice bars abound.
There is a volleyball court for lunch breaks, and signs about the place bearing slogans like ‘You don’t have to wear a suit to be serious’.
But when I visited Google (for a Radio 4 documentary) I was struck, above all, by the dogs. The company has an open dog policy, and they are everywhere; working dogs and toys, sniffers and slobberers, the shabby and soigné, they snooze patiently under desks and in corners while their owners ‘write code’. The cheerful canine culture was a reassuring reminder that the clever young men and women Google employs are, in the end, as human as the rest of us.
The depth of the change in British attitudes to dogs was brought home to me when I took Kudu, our English springer spaniel, into our local post office in London
What a contrast it was to working life in London. Some years ago I smuggled my dog into a BBC office so that I could finish a script at the weekend; I was spotted by security on a CCTV camera and marched smartly out of the building. These days I wouldn’t dare contemplate such a thing. I have every sympathy for Matthew Offord, the Tory MP who challenged the parliamentary authorities when they banned him from bringing his Jack Russell puppy into his Commons office.
We have spent this summer’s holiday in a farmhouse in what the French call la France profonde, that deep, still reservoir of old-fashioned country life which has survived relatively unchanged by the modern world. It’s like stepping back into the Britain of the Fifties or Sixties, with a dog culture to match. Almost every household in the village has at least one dog as a pet, and many keep kennels of hunting dogs too.
While reading in the garden one Sunday I suddenly found myself engulfed by a heaving sea of blue-grey puppy flesh; a farmer who lives up the lane was taking his latest litter of Griffons Bleux for their afternoon stroll. He explained that he likes to keep a pack of about a dozen adults for boar-hunting, and another dozen of the local Ariegeois breed for hunting hares.
The idea of restricting dogs simply doesn’t occur to people. If you lunch in a restaurant, the dog sits under your table. When you shop in the weekly market, the dog comes too. If the village dogs wish to sleep in the middle of the street – and they frequently do – motorists are expected to respect their wishes (indeed, a dog seems to be about the only thing that will make a rural French driver modify his speed).
The depth of the change in British attitudes to dogs was brought home to me when I took Kudu, our English springer spaniel, into our local post office in London. Big city post offices are perhaps the last places in Britain where you can experience the sort of epic queues Russians used to endure under communism, and I was worried he might be pinched if I left him on the pavement. The manager bawled at me with astonishing ferocity. When I pointed out that there was nothing on the door to indicate that dogs were banned, he looked at me as if I was quite mad; once you could assume dogs were welcome in a shop unless a sign told you the contrary – now you have to assume the opposite.
The Romans used to crucify a dog annually – punishment for the failure of the city’s hounds to raise the alarm when the Capitol was attacked by Gauls in 390 BC. The Swiss put a dog on trial for robbery and murder with two men (its owner and his son) as recently as 1906; the men got life, but the dog was held to be the ringleader and was executed.
The trend towards an anti-dog society is very bad news for us
In some Asian cultures dog flesh is a delicacy. Not so long ago Brits despised examples of foreign barbarism like these, and were proud to be called ‘a nation of dog lovers’. Today, British life – in our cities especially – is shot through with ‘dogism’.
So it is welcome that a biologist from Bristol University, John Bradshaw, has produced a book with the defiant title In Defence Of Dogs.
Bradshaw believes that dogs are losing the kind of freedom they once had because ‘there is no doubt that tensions arise, both between dog and owner and between owner and non-owner, when dogs live in modern cities’.
He gloomily predicts that ‘as the globe becomes progressively more urbanised, such unease may spread’, and foresees a day when pet dogs could become ‘a barely tolerated minority interest’.
We are asking dogs to make an unprecedented evolutionary leap to meet the new challenges they face. For centuries we have bred them to perform tasks that were necessary for human welfare – like chasing wild boar, herding sheep and putting up and retrieving game. Few dog owners still need those skills to put food on the table, but dogs still carry the genetic legacy, and it can make them unsuited to the urban environment in which so many of them now live.
The boar-hunting Griffon runs off in the park and is killed on the road, and the Border collie, frustrated without any sheep to herd, gets into trouble for herding children instead. Kudu shows his game-retrieving instincts by picking up shoes and offering them to you when you come through the front door (and usually, irritatingly, dropping them in some hidden spot in the garden).
I have taken Kudu shooting once. He spent the first drive with his head hidden between our hostess’s legs, but once he’d got over the noise he was wild with joy, and quickly came to understand what was required by watching the other dogs at work. But, urban dog that he is, when he found a dead pheasant he couldn’t work out how to pick it up, and spent several minutes studying it with a puzzled expression. We have done our best to make him at home in a big city environment (I think he now understands the principle of stopping before crossing the road), but we humans cannot expect his entire species to keep pace with the dizzying speed of change in our own society.
All of this is very bad news for dogs, and Bradshaw’s book is a plea for the tolerance and patience that will be needed from us if dogs are to remain ‘as significant a part of human life as they have been for the past ten millennia’.
The Dogs Trust has produced a Canine Charter for Human Health which includes among the rewards of dog ownership lower cholesterol and blood pressure and better recovery prospects after a heart attack
The trend towards an anti-dog society is also very bad news for us. To stay fit we’re supposed to take at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week; Kudu would happily hit that weekly target in a pre-breakfast walk every day. The health benefits of dog-owning in our increasingly obese society are huge, and oddly under-appreciated.
The Dogs Trust has produced a Canine Charter for Human Health which includes among the rewards of dog ownership lower cholesterol and blood pressure, a reduced chance of your child suffering from asthma, better recovery prospects after a heart attack, lower stress levels and a stronger immune system – all of this being supported by an array of impressive scientific research.
The social goods that dogs offer can be equally significant. It is a commonplace of city life in Britain – especially in the capital – that we never look strangers in the eye, much less initiate conversation. If you smile at someone on the Tube you are likely to be regarded as a weirdo; indeed, you will probably be suspected of paedophilia or worse.
But with a dog, everything changes. Dog walkers almost always smile and say good morning. We regard it as perfectly natural to chat with strangers as we walk. I have found myself swept from ‘what a handsome fellow he is’ to the grisly details of my new companion’s divorce within a matter of minutes.
The doggy ability to oil the wheels of social intercourse even has an application on the battlefield. My daughter’s boyfriend is a soldier, and while he was serving in a remote area of the Helmand desert in Afghanistan he found the unit’s sniffer dog an invaluable tool in winning local ‘hearts and minds’. Andrew reported that the dog helped break the ice; the Afghans had never seen anything quite like the relationship between a well-trained dog and its handlers.
The social goods that dogs can offer can be significant. Dog walkers almost always smile and say good morning. We regard it as perfectly natural to chat with strangers as we walk
Is Bradshaw’s vision of a near dog-less society unduly bleak? Could we perhaps develop new ways of making dogs useful to us? A few far-sighted researchers and dog lovers are trying to harness traditional dog skills to meet the needs of modern science.
At a small charity in Buckinghamshire I witnessed a formidably impressive display by a certain Jake, a cancer-sniffing spaniel. There was a contraption like a steel spider in the middle of the lab, and a urine sample was placed in a grip at the end of each leg. Jake’s task was to identify which one came from a cancer patient – which he did every time and at great speed.
The research is in its early stages, but if dogs can identify the precise smell associated with a particular cancer, we humans should be able to develop a mechanical way of detecting it. It could lead to more accurate and less invasive screening techniques for diseases like prostate cancer.
Even more impressive than Jake’s performance was that of his colleague Rory, a companion dog for a diabetes patient. He sat at his handler’s feet as she opened a jar with a sample from someone with a high blood-sugar level. He immediately put his feet on her shoulders and licked her face.
When she failed to respond he padded across the room and collected a medical bag, which he placed in her lap. It costs £10,000 to train a dog to Rory’s standard, but considering the vast sums the NHS spends on diabetes-related cases that figure doesn’t seem so bad.
The relationship between humans and dogs has lasted for so long because it has always been creative and dynamic, based on the usefulness of dogs as much as the affection they inspire. If scientific research like this takes off perhaps we will find – forgive the pun – that there’s life in the old dog yet.
Why our modern way of life is making an enemy of man's best friend
By EDWARD STOURTON, Writer and Radio 4 broadcaster
We were once proud to be called ‘a nation of dog lovers’. Today, British life – in our cities especially – is shot through with ‘dogism’ We are asking dogs to make an unprecedented evolutionary leap to meet the new challenges they face. For centuries we have bred them to perform tasks that were necessary for human welfare - like chasing wild boar
The Googleplex, as the internet giant’s California headquarters is known, is so cutting-edge that you’re not allowed to call it an office; the ‘campus’ is dotted with eclectic statuary – a space rocket juts out at you by the top of a staircase – and juice bars abound.
There is a volleyball court for lunch breaks, and signs about the place bearing slogans like ‘You don’t have to wear a suit to be serious’.
But when I visited Google (for a Radio 4 documentary) I was struck, above all, by the dogs. The company has an open dog policy, and they are everywhere; working dogs and toys, sniffers and slobberers, the shabby and soigné, they snooze patiently under desks and in corners while their owners ‘write code’. The cheerful canine culture was a reassuring reminder that the clever young men and women Google employs are, in the end, as human as the rest of us.
The depth of the change in British attitudes to dogs was brought home to me when I took Kudu, our English springer spaniel, into our local post office in London
What a contrast it was to working life in London. Some years ago I smuggled my dog into a BBC office so that I could finish a script at the weekend; I was spotted by security on a CCTV camera and marched smartly out of the building. These days I wouldn’t dare contemplate such a thing. I have every sympathy for Matthew Offord, the Tory MP who challenged the parliamentary authorities when they banned him from bringing his Jack Russell puppy into his Commons office.
We have spent this summer’s holiday in a farmhouse in what the French call la France profonde, that deep, still reservoir of old-fashioned country life which has survived relatively unchanged by the modern world. It’s like stepping back into the Britain of the Fifties or Sixties, with a dog culture to match. Almost every household in the village has at least one dog as a pet, and many keep kennels of hunting dogs too.
While reading in the garden one Sunday I suddenly found myself engulfed by a heaving sea of blue-grey puppy flesh; a farmer who lives up the lane was taking his latest litter of Griffons Bleux for their afternoon stroll. He explained that he likes to keep a pack of about a dozen adults for boar-hunting, and another dozen of the local Ariegeois breed for hunting hares.
The idea of restricting dogs simply doesn’t occur to people. If you lunch in a restaurant, the dog sits under your table. When you shop in the weekly market, the dog comes too. If the village dogs wish to sleep in the middle of the street – and they frequently do – motorists are expected to respect their wishes (indeed, a dog seems to be about the only thing that will make a rural French driver modify his speed).
The depth of the change in British attitudes to dogs was brought home to me when I took Kudu, our English springer spaniel, into our local post office in London. Big city post offices are perhaps the last places in Britain where you can experience the sort of epic queues Russians used to endure under communism, and I was worried he might be pinched if I left him on the pavement. The manager bawled at me with astonishing ferocity. When I pointed out that there was nothing on the door to indicate that dogs were banned, he looked at me as if I was quite mad; once you could assume dogs were welcome in a shop unless a sign told you the contrary – now you have to assume the opposite.
The Romans used to crucify a dog annually – punishment for the failure of the city’s hounds to raise the alarm when the Capitol was attacked by Gauls in 390 BC. The Swiss put a dog on trial for robbery and murder with two men (its owner and his son) as recently as 1906; the men got life, but the dog was held to be the ringleader and was executed.
The trend towards an anti-dog society is very bad news for us
In some Asian cultures dog flesh is a delicacy. Not so long ago Brits despised examples of foreign barbarism like these, and were proud to be called ‘a nation of dog lovers’. Today, British life – in our cities especially – is shot through with ‘dogism’.
So it is welcome that a biologist from Bristol University, John Bradshaw, has produced a book with the defiant title In Defence Of Dogs.
Bradshaw believes that dogs are losing the kind of freedom they once had because ‘there is no doubt that tensions arise, both between dog and owner and between owner and non-owner, when dogs live in modern cities’.
He gloomily predicts that ‘as the globe becomes progressively more urbanised, such unease may spread’, and foresees a day when pet dogs could become ‘a barely tolerated minority interest’.
We are asking dogs to make an unprecedented evolutionary leap to meet the new challenges they face. For centuries we have bred them to perform tasks that were necessary for human welfare – like chasing wild boar, herding sheep and putting up and retrieving game. Few dog owners still need those skills to put food on the table, but dogs still carry the genetic legacy, and it can make them unsuited to the urban environment in which so many of them now live.
The boar-hunting Griffon runs off in the park and is killed on the road, and the Border collie, frustrated without any sheep to herd, gets into trouble for herding children instead. Kudu shows his game-retrieving instincts by picking up shoes and offering them to you when you come through the front door (and usually, irritatingly, dropping them in some hidden spot in the garden).
I have taken Kudu shooting once. He spent the first drive with his head hidden between our hostess’s legs, but once he’d got over the noise he was wild with joy, and quickly came to understand what was required by watching the other dogs at work. But, urban dog that he is, when he found a dead pheasant he couldn’t work out how to pick it up, and spent several minutes studying it with a puzzled expression. We have done our best to make him at home in a big city environment (I think he now understands the principle of stopping before crossing the road), but we humans cannot expect his entire species to keep pace with the dizzying speed of change in our own society.
All of this is very bad news for dogs, and Bradshaw’s book is a plea for the tolerance and patience that will be needed from us if dogs are to remain ‘as significant a part of human life as they have been for the past ten millennia’.
The Dogs Trust has produced a Canine Charter for Human Health which includes among the rewards of dog ownership lower cholesterol and blood pressure and better recovery prospects after a heart attack
The trend towards an anti-dog society is also very bad news for us. To stay fit we’re supposed to take at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week; Kudu would happily hit that weekly target in a pre-breakfast walk every day. The health benefits of dog-owning in our increasingly obese society are huge, and oddly under-appreciated.
The Dogs Trust has produced a Canine Charter for Human Health which includes among the rewards of dog ownership lower cholesterol and blood pressure, a reduced chance of your child suffering from asthma, better recovery prospects after a heart attack, lower stress levels and a stronger immune system – all of this being supported by an array of impressive scientific research.
The social goods that dogs offer can be equally significant. It is a commonplace of city life in Britain – especially in the capital – that we never look strangers in the eye, much less initiate conversation. If you smile at someone on the Tube you are likely to be regarded as a weirdo; indeed, you will probably be suspected of paedophilia or worse.
But with a dog, everything changes. Dog walkers almost always smile and say good morning. We regard it as perfectly natural to chat with strangers as we walk. I have found myself swept from ‘what a handsome fellow he is’ to the grisly details of my new companion’s divorce within a matter of minutes.
The doggy ability to oil the wheels of social intercourse even has an application on the battlefield. My daughter’s boyfriend is a soldier, and while he was serving in a remote area of the Helmand desert in Afghanistan he found the unit’s sniffer dog an invaluable tool in winning local ‘hearts and minds’. Andrew reported that the dog helped break the ice; the Afghans had never seen anything quite like the relationship between a well-trained dog and its handlers.
The social goods that dogs can offer can be significant. Dog walkers almost always smile and say good morning. We regard it as perfectly natural to chat with strangers as we walk
Is Bradshaw’s vision of a near dog-less society unduly bleak? Could we perhaps develop new ways of making dogs useful to us? A few far-sighted researchers and dog lovers are trying to harness traditional dog skills to meet the needs of modern science.
At a small charity in Buckinghamshire I witnessed a formidably impressive display by a certain Jake, a cancer-sniffing spaniel. There was a contraption like a steel spider in the middle of the lab, and a urine sample was placed in a grip at the end of each leg. Jake’s task was to identify which one came from a cancer patient – which he did every time and at great speed.
The research is in its early stages, but if dogs can identify the precise smell associated with a particular cancer, we humans should be able to develop a mechanical way of detecting it. It could lead to more accurate and less invasive screening techniques for diseases like prostate cancer.
Even more impressive than Jake’s performance was that of his colleague Rory, a companion dog for a diabetes patient. He sat at his handler’s feet as she opened a jar with a sample from someone with a high blood-sugar level. He immediately put his feet on her shoulders and licked her face.
When she failed to respond he padded across the room and collected a medical bag, which he placed in her lap. It costs £10,000 to train a dog to Rory’s standard, but considering the vast sums the NHS spends on diabetes-related cases that figure doesn’t seem so bad.
The relationship between humans and dogs has lasted for so long because it has always been creative and dynamic, based on the usefulness of dogs as much as the affection they inspire. If scientific research like this takes off perhaps we will find – forgive the pun – that there’s life in the old dog yet.
