The paragon of animals
On dogs, selection, and creation
I’ve seen a sentiment expressed frequently in memes to the effect that dogs are proof of God’s love for humans. This makes sense, because dogs are awesome. For instance, look at this very good girl (cat shown for scale):
Anyone who has loved, and been loved by, a dog will attest to their near-infinite capacity for love. Cynics (a word which, ironically, comes from a Greek word for "dog") will argue that what dogs have for us is not actually love, but an evolved talent for making us love them, for their own benefit: Dogs are astute mimics of human children, who we evolved to care for, and so we are easily misdirected into caring for them. To those people, I say: You seem sad. You should get a dog.
But of course, God did not make dogs to love humans. Humans did that.
While it’s not clear exactly how dogs became domesticated from wolves, it is clear that wolves —> dogs were the first animal humans domesticated, at least 15,000 and perhaps as many as 50,000 years ago. We started to domesticate dogs long before we even considered domesticating livestock that would produce food for us. We started to domesticate dogs so long ago that there may have been other species of humans still extant at the time. It’s often speculated that dogs were first domesticated to help humans with hunting, and it’s certainly true that some of the earliest dog breeds are excellent hunters, and that dogs are used for hunting today. But that’s not the main reason we have pet dogs—and certainly, at this point, almost all domestic dogs would starve to death if they suddenly had to hunt their own food.
Wolves, on the other hand, are excellent hunters—so much so that humans have hunted them to extinction or near-extinction in many areas to stop wolf predation on livestock. Historically, wolves killed humans with some regularity, and occasionally still kill humans today. The bad blood between humans and wolves haunts our culture, from Little Red Riding Hood’s fake grandmother to Wednesday Addams’ friend Enid. Wolves are terrifying and majestic. I can see how ancient people could understand wolves as monsters or gods, but but I cannot see why humans would choose wolves, of all things, to be our first attempt at domestication.
C.S. Lewis thought that animals don’t have selves or souls, a view consistent with traditional Christian theology and at odds with the lived experience of everyone who has loved a dog. However, a dog owner himself, and feeling this conflict, he posited that perhaps tame animals could develop a self in relation to humans. He writes in The Problem of Pain:
If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration. …. Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of man and the animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a man as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The 'real' or 'natural' animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. But a Christian must not think so. Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal - the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so.
So, the same guy who lionized Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia for not being tame is here describing a wolf as less “natural” than a asthmatic pug with hip dysplasia. But I think C.S. Lewis is still pointing to an important idea: Our domestic animals are who we make them to be.
Since we first domesticated dogs, we’ve selectively bred them towards all sorts of purposes, from saving people from drowning to running on a treadmill to turn a roasting cut of meat. We have made dogs after our own image.
Sometimes that image has been ghoulish. Dogs have been bred specifically for bloodsports, killing humans, or killing other animals including other dogs, while humans watch and cheer them on. Through selective breeding, but also through abuse, gladiator dog breeds can hang on to their violent tendencies, making them disproportionately likely to maul humans. In the United States, about 50 people die from dog maulings every year.
Often, that image has been utilitarian, breeding dogs towards some task we need them to do. For the past few decades, the most popular pet dog in North America has been one of the many breeds that was made to fetch birds that humans had killed for food. Obedient and loyal, these retrievers were bred to happily hand over valuable food to humans in exchange for pats.
Sometimes, that image seems entirely frivolous, turning the descendant of a 20-kilogram top predator into a tiny floof you can fit in a handbag. The tiny floofs are the longest-lived of the domestic dogs, routinely living up to 20 years—5 to 10 years longer than the wolves who their ancestors were.
In the second chapter of Genesis, God gives to Adam the task of naming all the animals. Naming something is not the same thing as creating it, but it has a similar power: The name of a thing reveals how we perceive it, which of its traits we’ll emphasize the most in the future, and which we’ll ignore. With dogs, humans’ act of creation through selection has gone further, splintering the category of “wolf” into Great Danes and Teacup Poodles. Despite their phenotypic differences, all these dog breeds are remarkably genetically similar—as they also are to wild wolves, with whom modern dog breeds are nearly 99% genetically identical. The capacity to be a massive killer or a tiny puffball was always there; humans just had to patiently select for those traits, to give them a name.
Once upon a time, a vicious wolf preyed upon the people and the livestock of the Italian village of Gubbio. The wolf killed the good shepherd and his good sheepdog, and went on to kill the soldiers who had been sent to slay him. So Francis of Assisi, the future patron saint of animals, was called in to help. Francis found the wolf, and brokered a peace between the people of Gubbio and the wolf. The people of Gubbio would provide the wolf with enough food to survive, and the wolf would defend the village. Or at least that is how the story goes.
In the story, St. Francis calls the wolf by name: Brother Wolf.
My dog’s name is Riley. In my translation, that means “the goodest, bestest sweet girl.” She is the product of tens of thousands of years of selection on a genetic background that had both the potential for tremendous love and for tremendous violence. In the story, Francis converts the wolf by naming him. Dog evolution took longer, but was still a human choice: we made dogs who helped us find food, who guarded our sheep, and who killed for our entertainment. But mainly what our pet dogs do today is love us. For us to have an animal that exemplifies unconditional love, all we had to do was select for that, and then be patient. We have dogs who love us, because we chose love.