Epigenetics, Culture, and Behavior
Content Warning: talk of pet death
I was visiting a client’s house, and they have an outdoor cat. I filled up her food dish and gave her some scratches. When I turned to leave, the cat stayed right by the house. She didn’t try to follow me to my car. “Wow! I wonder how they trained her to do that?” I giggled to myself and realized that the owners did not train her. They barely train the dog they hire me to care for in their absence. Then I remembered that they used to have many more outdoor cats, too. After chatting with the owner, I found that they did not train this cat; all the cats that followed people to their cars have unfortunately been squished.
This is sad and super upsetting, but it reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about lately.
Many of the young families I work with are feeling a bit of despair when it comes to their dogs. They got married, they bought a house, they may or may not have children, and now they’re getting their first dog as an adult, and it is hard. It is so much harder than they thought it would be. They call me because it doesn’t feel as easy as it was when they were growing up with the family dog, and they feel like they must be doing something wrong.
The first question I like to ask - are we remembering that family dog of our childhood through an accurate lens? There’s a big difference between having a dog as a child (or as a teenager) and having a dog as an adult. As children, we didn't necessarily see or understand all of the work and all of the problems that come with having a dog. As an adult, you are responsible for that dog. When the dog chews something up, that’s your hard-earned money they’ve destroyed. If the dog runs away, it’s your effort and energy going in to collecting the dog. If the dog bites someone, that is your financial, legal, and potentially criminal liability. Dogs doing Bad Dog Things are not just an annoyance anymore; they’re a real problem!
Let’s head back to the cat from our earlier example. It looks like a well-trained cat, but the owners didn’t do anything to train this cat. This cat just naturally likes to stick by the house. The other cats – the ones that didn’t have this natural inclination to stay by the house - they’ve all been squished. Those more curious and bold cats are not around anymore. We only see the cats that just hang out by the house. You don’t see or even know about the ones that have perished.
Behavior like boldness/pushiness has a genetic component. If this cat - the one that stays by the house - has the ability to breed, they’re going to produce more animals that have a personality that makes them stay by the house too. Not all of their kittens will be homebodies, but more will be, compared to the original population. If the bolder ones (meaning the ones that follow people to cars) are removed from the population (squished), the population becomes less bold over the generations, and more likely to just hang out by the house. This makes training those animals to stay by the house (if you have to do any training at all) pretty darn easy.
Our tolerance for - and understanding of - certain behaviors in dogs has changed. Simply put, we are keeping more dogs alive than ever before. Standards for our dogs and for ourselves have also changed. Just a couple decades ago, cities didn’t really have leash laws. Lots and lots and lots of dogs were just loose, hanging out in neighborhoods, running around, breeding, sometimes fighting, eating trash, getting hit by cars, chasing school children, etc. Dogs would go home at night to spend the evening with their families (unless they didn’t come home). In some ways, that was better for dogs’ mental health. They got to be real dogs. But it is certainly more dangerous for their physical health, and ours. To be clear, I am not advocating for the eradication of leash laws. I am not advocating for letting our dogs run wild. I am saying that dogs are different now. Their world is different now. Our standards are different now.
When I was a child, we were taught to refrain from interacting with the dogs while they were eating. We were taught not to wake the dog up when it’s sleeping. We were taught not to take the dog’s bone away. We were taught not to tease the dog. Dogs were put behind gates, in other rooms, or in kennels to prevent conflict with small children when active supervision was lacking. The kids were protected from the dogs as much as the dogs were protected from the kids. It was just accepted that the smaller children didn’t have the skills to make good decisions around the dogs, and if the adults weren’t in the mood to actively supervise, they knew the benefits of letting the small children interact with the dogs was just not worth the risk.
As dogs have become more like family members (I personally am one of those people that feel my dogs are my family), some line-blurring occurs. Dog owners deeply love their dogs. Dog owners often love their dogs like they love their children. If you feel similarly about your child as your dog, you might start to think about them in the same way. You might think that they should be able to interact together the way siblings do: all the time, with basically no boundaries. And that’s really hard for most dogs. It’s too hard for most dogs.
I love that people are thinking about their dogs as family members and treating them with the kindness and love and respect that we give to family members. And we need to keep in mind the needs and preferences of each one of our family members, including the dogs. If, for example, you have an autistic child and allistic (not autistic) child, those kids have different needs. If we’re thinking about dogs like they are children, we might want to start thinking about them as if they’re maybe autistic or something similar. My point is dogs have different needs and preferences than human children do.
Note: I’m speaking as a person with autism and this analogy makes sense to me. I am absolutely not saying that autistic children are animals.
I know I have a tendency to meander in my writing, so I am going to circle back to the main point of this article. Many dogs’ needs were better met in decades gone by, because they weren’t confined by leashes and fences and walls. They were able to go out, make their own decisions, and move in the ways they wanted to move. They got to eat garbage and kill squirrels, and really be a dog. More of them died from preventable disease and injury. It was absolutely more dangerous, but dogs were able to meet their own enrichment needs. They were more emotionally and mentally fulfilled. This meant that the humans weren’t responsible for entertaining their dogs, and the dogs were more manageable in the house (if they went into the house). Dogs that couldn’t stay out of real trouble and those that hurt people while roaming were swiftly and permanently dealt with, so there were not as many truly dangerous dogs back then. We are keeping more dogs alive these days. The dogs that tended to chase cars a few decades ago would get hit by cars and die more often, because we didn’t put as much money or effort into keeping them alive. The car-chasers were just not there anymore. It felt like the dogs were well-trained (at least around cars), but more likely, it was just the genetic predisposition in the population of dogs. And if we bring reproduction into the conversation, we get the evolutionary and epigenetic layer to it. The dogs that don’t get hit by cars survive long enough to produce more offspring than the ones that do get hit by cars. In this way, we end up with a population of dogs that are more cautious around vehicles.
If it feels harder to own a dog than you remember it being, you’re not crazy. What you’re experiencing is real. Owning a dog today is different than it was 30 years ago. In some ways, it is harder, and in others – like finding educated dog walkers and trainers - it might be easier.
If you feel like you need help, you’re not alone, and there is qualified help out there. You can find certified professional dog trainers using the following tools:
https://www.ccpdt.org/dog-owners/certified-dog-trainer-directory/
https://iaabc.org/en/certs/members