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Browsing articles in Mark Derr
Blog: Guest Posts
“Do As I Do” scores high
A rambunctious five-year-old Labrador Retriever who until a few months ago knew not a word of any language, obeyed no command, charged around the house or zipped through any hole in the fence before one could utter the name he didn’t seem to recognize has become my 91-year-old mother’s great and constant companion. He sits or lies by her when she is sitting or lying down. He moves with her when...
Blog: Guest Posts
A fine memoir of a road trip with dogs to the World Sheepdog Trials
Not far into Mr. and Mrs. Dog, Donald McCaig says of himself and his talented “Blockhead” of a Border Collie, Luke, the male of the title: “I’ve never done as well with Luke as a better handler might have, but Luke adores me. When I go out at 2 a.m. to check lambing ewes, Luke comes too. When I wake with the night sweats, Luke wakes. He thinks I am a better man than I am. If I sold him, his...
Blog: Guest Posts
The more I consider the continuing debate over the “time” and “place” for the transformation of wolf into dog, the more I become convinced that the puzzle remains unsolved because of human devotion to a simplistic, clever-sounding idea that never made sense in the first place. As first put forth by Raymond Coppinger, that idea was that wolves feeding on the garbage piles of quasi-permanent...
Blog: Guest Posts
I had watched the dog origin wars as a chronicler of the dog-human relationship for several decades when in 2009 I was approached a young editor The Overlook Press about writing a book on the origins of the dog. I readily agreed, and the result was How the Dog Became the Dog.
Pondering the conflicting dates, places, and theories associated with the emergence of the dog, I concluded that as soon...
Dog Culture: Science & History
Celebrating the bicentennial of the father of evolution
Early in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin uncorks a passage to illustrate the capacity of dogs to love that is guaranteed to break the heart of all but the most unfeeling cad, and one that should hang over the door of every laboratory engaged in experiments with animals. “In the agony of death a dog has been known to caress his master,” he says, “and everyone...
Dog Culture: Science & History
A female Boxer provides the DNA for the first complete sequence of the dog genome—what will it mean to the health of man and dog?
“The dog is everywhere what society makes him,” wrote Charles Dudley Warner in the January 1896 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Elaine Ostrander and Heidi Parker update that message in the November 2005 issue of the online journal, Public Library of Science—Genetics: “The domestication of the dog from its wolf ancestors is perhaps the most complex genetic experiment in history, and...
Dog Culture: Science & History
How a special little dog made America’s house his home
Arguably the most important dog in World War II never saw combat; in fact, he was one of the breeds deemed unfit for duty by virtue of his stubby legs and long coat. But he was also of a breed that had been considered suitable for a gentleman to keep in town since the mid-19th century, and in President Roosevelt he met the perfect human companion.
Roosevelt’s cousin, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley,...
Dog Culture: Science & History
A domestication that went both ways
That the dog is descended from the wolf—or more precisely, the wolf who stayed—is by now an accepted fact of evolution and history. But that fact is about all that is agreed to among the people who attempt to answer fundamental questions about the origins of the dog—specifically, the who, where, when, how and why of domestication.
Dates range from the dog’s earliest appearance in the...
Dog Culture: Reviews
New World Library, 248 pp., 2007; $23.95
During a long research trip in the middle of the final decade of the last millennium, I was talking with a wildlife biologist about coyotes and dogs when Marc Bekoff’s name popped up, logically enough, since over the past quarter of a century, he already had contributed significantly to the understanding of both.
“I’ve seen him at meetings,” the biologist said. “He’s a bit out there on the animal...
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