The Soul of a Dog
The emergence of biologically modern humans, as best we can determine from DNA studies and the fossil record, occurred some 300,000 years ago. Cultural artifacts, tools and art, developed perhaps 60,000 years ago. Yet for the majority of our time on this planet, Homo sapiens differed little from other complex primates, small in numbers, modestly shaping our local environment. All that changed roughly 30,000 years ago, when our species formed an alliance, a symbiosis, with another well-adapted predator, the grey wolf. Thus was birthed the dog, and the miracle of domestication. Before we herded sheep, before we rode horses, before the agricultural revolution, human beings loved and raised and lived with dogs. I used to like to think that domestication of the dog was the one unalloyed good that humanity had managed to accomplish. Yet more recent studies indicate that we didn’t tame them; they chose to interact with us. Certain wolves soon discovered that following bands of hunter-gatherer...