Below, Jay Ingram shares five key insights from his new book, The Science of Pets.
Jay has hosted two national science programs in Canada, Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio and Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada. He is the author of twenty books and spent a decade chairing the Science Communications Program at the Banff Centre. Among his many honors, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and is a Member of the Order of Canada.
What’s the big idea?
Humans adore their pets—but that love makes us lousy observers. Science is the best way to uncover the true stories of those animals that we eagerly welcome into our lives.
1. Who are you going to believe?
You can never think about a pet without, at the same time, taking its human into account. An animal without a human is not a pet. An animal with a human has most of its story told by that human. Unfortunately, we pet-keeping humans are just about 100 percent incapable of maintaining an objective view of our pet, with the result that a huge amount of misinformation floods the pet-verse.
That’s why the science of pets is so important. The scientist, as an observer, has no personal interest in the pet being studied and is only concerned with gathering data that withstands the critiques of other scientists. In fact, a substantial amount of pet science is focused on the human half of the equation, underlining the influence of their role. And a substantial portion of that work reveals that we confabulate, infer, and generally activate our imaginations and desires to create stories about our pets. Rarely do they represent what science would reveal.
2. We are the only pet keepers.
We are the only species on Earth that keeps pets. Yes, there are many online videos showing charming partnerships between horses and puppies, or cats cuddling sheep, and the like. But these encounters don’t happen in the natural world. Nor could they, because the individuals making up these unusual pairs would never encounter one other without human interference.
“The uniqueness of humans as having pets is pretty much unchallenged.”
These pairings are seen in zoos and animal shelters, raising serious doubts about whether there is anything fundamental, usual, or commonplace about these relationships. While there are sporadic records of two different species hanging out with each other in the natural world, these occurrences are so rare, and the nature of the association between the two animals so hard to define—is that adoption, kidnapping, pet keeping?—that the uniqueness of humans as having pets is pretty much unchallenged.
3. Who let the dogs out?
Dogs evolved from wolves, but how? There’s no ambiguity about the ancestry of the domestic dog. It shares 99.9 percent of its genes with wolves. Wolves are fierce predators, potentially dangerous to humans, but also smart enough (when familiar with humans) to do their best to avoid us. How would these two species start to bond?
There are two leading theories. One argues that wolves took the initiative after learning that traveling bands of humans leave behind a wide variety of trash, some of it edible. Then, they gradually gathered their courage to approach those humans closer and closer so that they could have more rapid access to any “snacks” left behind. The humans might have realized that having the other apex predator hanging around had its benefits. Wolves have exquisitely powerful senses and understand the behavior of prey, the same prey humans would be hunting. In this way, the two species may have learned to accommodate each other.
“The humans might have realized that having the other apex predator hanging around had its benefits.”
An alternate theory is that humans took the initiative by raiding wolf dens, bringing newborn pups back to camp, and raising them. Having newborns only a few days or weeks old made the process of domestication much easier and quicker. Is one of these two theories correct? Or neither? Is there a third possibility? We may never know.
4. We don’t own cats. We’re just borrowing them.
The history of the cat is nothing like the history of the dog. It’s much more straightforward. A comparison of the two sheds light on the behavioral differences we see today, several thousand years after they were both domesticated.
Wolves are pack animals, and so are dogs. Dogs attach themselves to a leader, which most often is the human closest to them. Cats, on the other hand, need no particular attachment to flourish, and haven’t done so since they began their somewhat loose companionship with humans.
Cat domestication was simple. Humans began to farm and accumulate large stores of grain. Grain attracts mice and other rodents. Rodents attracted the local species of wildcat. The farmers were happy and the cats were happy. The rodents less so. Farmers tolerated cats and vice versa. And although there have been dramatic advances in the comfort of the relationship between human and cat, it’s still true that if you open the door, the cat might bolt and not be seen for a couple of weeks.
Two paths to domesticity. Two very different pets.
5. It’s a pet world.
Dogs and cats reign supreme in the world of pets. They are more numerous by millions and millions than any other pet. But this fact, though undeniable, paints an inaccurate picture of pet keeping.
“The one universal is that humans seek the company of other animals.”
Wherever there are humans, there are pets. While the popularity of dogs and cats cannot be disregarded, in most parts of the world, the pets of choice are animals that live locally: monkeys in the Amazon, weasels in Siberia, eels in Polynesia. The one universal is that humans seek the company of other animals.
But why? The great biologist E. O. Wilson popularized the notion of biophilia, the attraction, perhaps innate, of humans to other species. Wilson believed it was universal, and there are observations from psychology that seem to support that idea. For instance, in a rapidly shifting visual scene where objects appear and disappear, the objects that are tracked most efficiently by humans represent living things. Some of that acutely tuned perception would have an obvious survival advantage, but survival or not, it shows our brains are tuned to those other species.
And thanks to Konrad Lorenz, it’s well known that humans respond to the cuteness not just of human babies, but also of babies of other species. These and other yet-to-be-identified mental tendencies support the very human habit of taking a pet.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
