Love, laughter and lifelong memories: 19 amazing facts every dog-lover needs to know
It’s possible to have a lot of dogs over a long adult life and know even less about them at the end of it than when you started. They’re all so different, almost like people. So, don’t take this as a dog blueprint or, heaven forfend, a guide book – more a series of facts that will make you a better, more delighted companion.
They have magic eyebrows
Or rather, as Jules Howard, a zoologist and the author of Wonderdog, says: “Think about the eyebrow as being composed of different sets of muscles. In dogs, one of those muscles is super pumped – much, much bigger than in any other mammal.” This has the strength to lift up in a “really beautiful way”, Howard says. In the 10,000 to 15,000 years of human-canine interaction, “dogs have evolved a muscle that we recognise as love, or dedication, or ‘babyness’. It’s an evolution of a childlike face. It’s kind of creepy that it works.”
It has most likely taken two to tango
The origin story of the domestic dog used to be that humankind, recognising the alert and protective capabilities of the wolf, simply tamed it. Then came the revisionist idea: that they recognised our resource wealth – we are always amassing food, making it nice, then throwing some of it away – and essentially tamed us, by being cute (see the eyebrows).
There is no “good art that tells the domestication story”, Howard says, which appears to have happened in Europe and east Asia simultaneously. The canine palaeontologist Darcy Morey blew a hole in the artificial versus natural selection dichotomy (artificial selection would be us breeding dogs for traits, natural would be them adapting to us), arguing for “coevolution”, driven by what the philosopher Donna Haraway calls “a nasty developmental infection called love”.
Dogs are blessed with social genes
“Williams-Beuren is a rare syndrome in one in 18,000 people that makes them super social,” Howard says. “If you look at that collection of genes in mammals, you see DNA insertions in dogs that you don’t see in wolves. The more mutations they have, the more social they are. Throughout the whole of the dog family, we see lots of insertions in these genes.”
Having said that, dogs’ personality traits map very closely to humans’
Stanley Coren, a psychologist and the author of The Intelligence of Dogs, evaluated more than 1,000 dogs, and found the Ocean traits we use to characterise people – openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (although we no longer use “neuroticism”, preferring a stability-to-instability scale) – map precisely on to dogs.
“Some dogs will go from being perfectly quiet and happy to growling and snapping, and that’s very similar to the human dimension of stability