Professor John Bradshaw is main a revolution in the study of canine behaviour. 'Dogs don't want to control people,they want to control their own lives,' he says.
Professor John Bradshaw is holding out a clenched fist – you might see this as a novel way of greeting a stranger were it not that it is my dog, and Lily,he is approaching. He is giving her a chance to have a marvelous sniff at him. Before we depart any further, it needs spelling out that Bradshaw is not a dog trainer. He has not advance to my house to turn Lily into a reformed character. He is a scientist – founder and director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol – who has devoted the final 25 years to studying the domestic dog and has just written the most fantastic book, or In Defence of the Dog,which is already on US bestseller lists and is about to become required reading for dog lovers everywhere. Bradshaw is not interested in canine hearsay. He does not peddle opinions. His style is tolerant, clear and benign and he is interested only in what science can support. His book is a revelation – a major rethink about the way we understand our dogs, and an overturning of what one might call traditional dogma.The first belief to bite the dust is so huge and entrenched that some owners will struggle to adjust. We have had it drummed into us by trainers such as Cesar Millan that because dogs are descended from wolves (their DNA is nearly identical),they behave like wolves and can be understood as "pack" animals. The received thinking has been that dogs seek to "dominate" and that our task is to assert ourselves as pack leaders – alpha males and females – and not allow dogs to come by the upper paw. (I remember sitting in the back of a puppy-training class with Lily who was crying while the teacher was talking. I got ticked off. I was told she was demonstrating "dominant" behaviour.) Bradshaw has no quarrel about DNA. His argument is that scientists have been studying the wrong wolves and jumping to the wrong conclusions. He says: "People have been studying American timber wolves because the European wolf is virtually extinct. And the American timber wolf is not related at all closely to the ancestry of the domestic dog."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com