The dog days of science

"Dogs decoded" is a documentary about man's best friend. It raises some awkward questions about the scientific view of dogs. Have scientists really regarded dogs as drooling, fawning, moronic creatures with a silly penchant for canned food and bone-shaped biscuits, until fairly recently? No dog-owner doubts that their companions are intelligent, can feel human emotions or communicate through different kinds of barking. Yet, judging by "Dogs decoded", official science *did* doubt it until recently. However, it seems these "dog days" of science are finally over, as new experiments confirm what the rest of humanity has always known: Canis familiaris simply has no match.

It turns out that dogs are the only creature apart from humans who understand the meaning of pointing. Not even chimps get it. Researchers have located a Border Collie with a 300-word vocabulary and a modicum of abstract thinking. Dogs can "read" emotions in human faces in a way strikingly similar to how humans "read" each other. Millennia of selective breeding have fixed the dog's specific traits in the genome.

A somewhat absurd experiment in Hungary proves (for those who doubted) that wolfs can't be turned into dogs by socialization. Wolf pups bred under circumstances identical to those of dog pups nevertheless turn into wolves. Indeed, after four months, they had become so dangerous that the experiment had to be terminated! No surprise there. Another quaint experiment, this time at a fur farm in Siberia, shows that foxes can be domesticated. Interestingly, they even *look* more like dogs as they became more tame. The juvenile look presumably triggers the right emotional responses in humans.

A cynical scientist on the show, who presumably still doesn't like doggies, suggests that the dog might be a kind of "parasite", since humans supposedly prefer dogs to children. Perhaps this man should get out more? He might want to spend some time with people who have both dogs and kids, with dogs that are useful (say hunting dogs), or contemplate the fact that the human population seems to double every 40 year or so. It seems the "parasite" has been singularly unsuccessful in checking the growth of Homo sapiens...

Most scientists interviewed on "Dogs decoded" take the more reasonable approach that human civilization as we know it wouldn't be possible without domesticated dogs. For instance, dogs that shepherd or guard livestock were crucial for civilization at a certain point of its development.

I'm not sure how to rate this peculiar program, but in the end, I'll give it four stars.