June 2, 2021 • 51 mins
On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, I’m in pursuit of understanding my irrational connection to dogs. I’ll talk about Lewin Newcomb -- my grandfather -- and his internal hierarchy of important things (of which dogs ranked very close to the top). I’ll interview anthropologist David Ian Howe, who specializes in the dog/human relationship, and we’ll discuss dog domestication, the impact of human selection on dogs, and how canines have affected the trajectory of our civilization. We’ll also interview a dog trainer, Damon Bungard, about his dogs and the unique way he uses them. Lastly, we’ll go on a raccoon hunt with hounds as we explore our irrational connection to canines. Towards the end we’ll draw some conclusions on new ideologies that are trying to change the rules of how human use dogs.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, alright, River, we're gonna we're gonna turn these dogs
out by this pond. It's been raining, but I figured
by now the coons have had a little time to stir.
Let's just get him, all right, and you ready, Scooter,
You're ready for m ah, You're ready. We'll get him.
(00:24):
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we're going deep,
deep into human history to explore the impact of man's
best friend, the dog, on us. I'll interview some lads
that use their canines for some unique tasks, and I'll
interview anthropologists David ian Howe, who specializes in the dog
(00:48):
human relationship, and we're searching for answers because there are
some new ideologies trying to change the rules on how
humans use dogs and modern times. Then we'll go into
the night woods and listen to my dogs work as
we reflect on this question. Is partnering with dogs an
(01:11):
essential definer of our humanity? Do you ever think that
this is ridiculous and kind of irrational? How much how
much we love our dogs? Of course, that's rational, totally
what you think. So also convinced. You know, most people
are home watching Netflix right now. My name is Clay
(01:40):
Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll
explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places,
and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived
their lives close to the land. I like dogs, always have,
(02:06):
but not in the typical way you would expect a
person in to like a dog. I don't necessarily like
to pet dogs, and I don't think I utilize them
as emotional companions. But my connection to dogs is a
layer deeper. And I don't say that in an elitist
kind of way. I quite literally mean it's a layer
beyond the surface, because it doesn't make sense. I've always
(02:29):
felt my love for dogs was irrational and couldn't be explained.
You might have those same feelings echoing inside of you.
Many people do. My grandfather, Lewin Nukeam, was a bird
(02:49):
dog trainer to the core. He grew up in an
era when quail and the south were thriving. Every other
farmhouse you drove past might have a pair of liver
spotted pointers or an English center behind the house. He
understood dogs and how to partner with him, but what
was notable to me was the place of regard the
bird dogs held in his internal hierarchy of important things.
(03:13):
They were danging there at the top. If you look
at this from a completely rational perspective, you'd assume the
dogs must have provided some essential component of survival. But
he and my grandmother didn't live off qail meat without trying.
He built in me a love for country stores. High
is made from scratch at country diners, biscuits and gravy,
(03:36):
and homegrown sweet corn. But the most dominant feature that
he instilled in me, aside from components of my internal
character and faith, was his irrational, high ranking platform that
he placed his dogs on. There's something deeper to be
explored here. My friend Damon bun Gard has a unique
(04:05):
relationship with his dog, and together they accomplish a unique job.
Aside from the fact that I think Damon and his dog,
Yeager look like each other, both handsome fellows. Of course,
Damon has dedicated a good chunk of his life to
his dog, and I want to explore their partnership. Damon,
(04:33):
I've known you for a while and you are definitely
someone that has an irrational connection to your dog. I'm
confident of that after I've seen you interact with your dogs.
Tell me what kind of dogs that you have and
what you do with them. So I have what's called
a tackle, which is a dog that most people see
and just say what kind of mixes that? It's a
(04:55):
working wire haired docks And a lot of people are like, oh,
it's like a Schnauser, you know, of what kind of
terrier mixes that? And they're the wire hair version of
a docks And it's generally considered the wire hairs are
the most hunting and working oriented, probably from some old
terrier genetics that helped give them the wire coat. Tackles
are also very much you know, they're they're bred to
(05:18):
the international standard of the f CI one eight. I
believe it is standard for a working dog and the
description is working dog above and below ground. Most people
here in the United States don't think of a docks
And as a working dog, but that's what they were
bred to do in Europe. And the fact that the
breed standard is all around chest circumference, which is based
(05:39):
on animal holes, the size of a badger hole, the
size of a foxhole, the size of a rabbit hole.
They're tenacious hunters, they're very persistent dogs. They're very independent dogs.
In Europe, a lot of places require a dog for
big game recovery by law. So teckle yeager. He's registered
with the Dot your Tuckle Club and he's one of
(06:01):
the few true tackles in North America. So tell me
specifically what you do with him. So we track and
find wounded and lost big game for hunters, whether it's
a deer or other big game species, somebody shoots it,
loses it, can't find it, they track it for a while,
or there's no sign to track on, they call us.
We go out and on lead here in Tennessee when
(06:23):
most states and we find that animal. How often are
you successful at finding wounded game? And so these are
animals that the hunter has tried to find the animal
and has been unsuccessful. So they're calling you with the
hard ones, just with just an average, how how many
do you think you recover? I don't really get into
success rates, but on general, for the ones we do
(06:44):
take fifty to six. I say you leave with a
d percent confidence and knowing if it's alive or dead.
I am full faith that if it's dead, yeagger will
find it. Damon, is I hear you describe these dogs?
It's clear that the animal has been selectively bred for
a very long period of time to partner with humans
(07:06):
to complete a task that a human is incapable of
completing on their own, which is really the story of
the dogs. They're doing work for us. I want you
to describe for me your personal connection to this dog,
because I know these dogs live in your house. These
dogs are like they're important to you. Just talk to
me about your personal connection to your dog. A lot
(07:28):
of people approach working dogs and that's not being family members.
That's very much not Yeager's life. He's on the couch,
he's in the bed often. You know, when we travel,
do you ever have been around docksins? And just in general,
they're full of personality. People talk about personality and dogs
and that's a that's a human thing. We're projecting care
(07:49):
what you want. They have an attitude, they have a
lot of attitude. They're a little dogging with a lot
of attitude. So you you see that with him working
and he's a great tracking dog. He's also really good
at flushing birth. So he just loves to hunt. So
I love to hunt. So that's obviously a bond that
we share when when we're working together. Tracking is a
(08:11):
team effort. There are times where I mean, he just
blows my mind and what what he finds or how
he knows to go where he knows to go, I
would never know without his help. There's other times where
he needs my help. Damon. I know you know some
stuff about dog domestication, but let's just erase that, erase
that knowledge. Would you be surprised if you learned that
(08:35):
humans and dogs had been together for such a long
period of time that they had developed dependence upon one another?
And I think it's interesting to think too, that there
was a time when that connection was essential to human survival.
Today it's it's not quite that essential for most people.
You know, if you think about I mean, you're you
(08:58):
don't have this relationship with cattle like we eat cattle.
You don't have this relationship with chickens or with lizards,
or it's like this is a really special bond that
humans have with this one species. So I guess I
guess it was more of a statement than the question.
But I guess my question is would that surprise you?
(09:20):
If you could remove yourself, you'd be like, no, this
dog and me were just made for each other because
I will say, you kind of look like your dog,
and he's a handsome dog. He's a handsome dog. I mean,
it's all in the beard. Yes, certainly, certainly as a
student of biology, and you can get in symbiotic relationships
(09:40):
and have we over time selectively even as humans evolved
and have has DNA in us that favors to prinionship
of dogs become more prevalent because they helped us get
more food and therefore that that gene bread more you
know you can get. You can get deep right into
into theory. It's where we're going on this podcast. David
(10:07):
Howe is an anthropologist who studies the dog human relationship.
I'm slightly nervous talking with him because I fear that
he might not confirm my bias. I hope he tells
me that my love of hunting dogs is deeply human
and highly relevant to modern society, and that his words
feed the narrative that's been crafted inside of me. But
(10:28):
I need to get to the bottom of this. Hunting
with dogs has become an issue of controversy in modern times,
and I'm interested to see what he has to say. So, David,
I am trying to understand and resolve a question that
I've had for a long time, and that is I'm
(10:52):
trying to understand my irrational connection to dogs and the
irrational connection of dogs that I see all throughout society,
from pet owners to working dogs to hunting dogs. And
it's always struck me as just odd how much we
like our dogs. And then now that I'm beginning to
(11:15):
learn more about it, searching a little bit deeper, I'm
trying to understand it. Why do we love dogs so much?
I wish I had like a one word answer for it,
other than that we just love them. But dogs have
been around for at least twenty thousand years or so,
probably further than that, so they've just kind of co
adapted with human life for the longest time. And why
(11:38):
they're around. So let's go all the way back to
the beginning. When do we believe that dogs were first domesticated?
So this gets pushed back depending on which paper comes
out or like, you know, what school of thought you're with,
but the general consensus currently is twenty thousand years. Is
like the genetic signatures for a dog. Here, the gene
(12:02):
signature is about what you think it might be. It's
a group of genes or a single gene that displays
a unique characteristic only for that species. So if we
compare that to modern you know, dog genomes and how
other DNA looks, you can see that these remains that
are found twenty thousand years ago are dogs, but there
(12:23):
could be stuff before that that, you know, is the
in between a wolf and a dog kind of thing,
because you can't just turn a wolf into a dog overnight, right, right,
So where is the oldest known site where we believe
that dogs were with humans and these dogs were domesticated
That It's hard to say because there's just so many
(12:44):
dog remains that get found and wolf remains that it's
you can't really say, Okay, is this a wolf or
as a dog? If you find a wolf skull in
a cave with human occupation, it could be a dog.
At that point. The best indicator that I go with
is certainly, by a fourteen thousand years we see a
like human and dog like burial, like where they're buried together.
(13:07):
So at that point we can say, even if it
was just a wolf like that relationship had formed. What
part of the world did is that particular fourteen thousand
year old site in Yeah, that is in bond Overcastle, Germany.
That was the first dog human burials, the oldest known
dog human burials that we see. Correct, That one is
(13:28):
kind of contested because it could be a wolf. Still
it's just a pup, so it's hard to tell. But
either way, it's a canied burial with a human. But
then in ten thousand years ago there's one in Israel.
It's up by the Sea of Galilee and it's a
Natufian site, so the first people to start, you know,
farming and doing agriculture. And there's a middle aged woman
buried with a puppy and her hands like resting on
(13:50):
the puppy. So that's that's definitive to understand dogs like
so in one we just have dogs of all sizes, shape,
some colors that do all kinds of stuff, all dogs
domesticated from the one wild canon that we can trace
(14:10):
it back to, which is the wolf. Is that correct? Yeah,
it depends on your school of thought. We find new
stuff all the time and keep dating it and keep
checking the DNA, and it's a it's a wacky picture.
Some people think it is a gray wolf that we
know today that they have descended from or it's an
(14:31):
extinct group of wolves that is no longer around, and
that dogs are that like ecological adaptation of those wolves
living with humans and they just kind of died out.
But the main thing is that it did come from
a wolf creature. The genesis of the hundreds of dog
(14:51):
breeds we have today came from the Victorian era in
Britain when dog shows became popular. The United Kennel Club
or the UK Seeker we recognizes over three hundred different
breeds of dogs. What brings us all together is understanding
that these aren't different species, they are all the same species.
The imprint of artificial or human influence selection is notable.
(15:15):
It's hard to fathom that the genetic coating of a
single species that looks very much the same wolves has
such genetic scripting that in its genes you could get
a pug and a golden Retriever out of the same stuff. Amazing. Hey,
did you know that originally all gray wolves were gray?
(15:37):
A black wolf is the influence of domestic dogs hybridizing
back into wolf populations. Naturally, there were only gray wolves.
Put that in your pipe and smoking. So to understand
our connection to dogs, I think we gotta go way back,
way back and understand how dogs were domesticated. I know
(16:00):
there's multiple ideas, multiple theories. In the beauty of anthropology.
When we're so certain about so many things, is that
there's some stuff that's so deep in history that we
are uncertain. I love that. But there are definitely some
some theories of dog domestication, and you don't have to
(16:23):
think too hard to perceive how it might have happened.
But can you describe for me your number one theory,
the theory that you like the best of how dogs
originally became domesticated. Yeah, I can definitely do that. It's
kind of involves two theories, but I can kind of
merge it into one. Uh. And that is the idea
(16:45):
that wolves and humans are like kind of similar animals,
not in the sense that you know, wolves aren't primates,
but that wolves and humans have a similar social structure.
We both cooperatively hunt, we talked to each other, and
we like work together to achieved goals. So humans entering Eurasia,
out of Africa or wherever we're seeing wolves, you know,
(17:07):
behave the way that they do, and we probably took
note of that and learned, Okay, this is how you
efficiently hunt bison. This is how you efficiently hunt you know,
red deer or whatever, or reindeer is what we both
ate a lot of and noticed how that worked. And
it's pretty metal, is the way I would describe it.
In the beginning of that like relationship forming humans. Let's
say live in an open air camp like in the
(17:28):
Czech Republic somewhere, and maybe in a man with hot structure,
and they're cooking food out in the open. Wolves are
going to smell that, and they're gonna be like, okay, well,
why would I bother hunting if I can just go
sneak up on this camp at night and steal their food.
So if we look at dogs today, we know they
just there's junkyard dogs, there's dump dogs. They just scavenge food.
(17:51):
And pet dogs do it too, But people would have
noticed that those dogs were doing that, or wolves, I
should say, and then take a note of it. So
eventually they could have been them more or you know,
after generations of that happening, they could be like, Okay,
these ones aren't gonna hurt us, They're just hungry, and
that relationship starts forming that way. So what happened they
(18:11):
over time, there was benefit to the wolves that weren't
as afraid of humans, because there would have been some
diversity in a wolf pack. I mean, just like there's
diversity in all the same species, there's gonna be animals
that are more leary and others that aren't. So perhaps
some of these wolves started gaining biological advantage by being
(18:33):
less weary of humans because they're eating out of their camp.
And then the humans started to take note of this,
and like they just kind of started getting closer and closer.
And then do you think a human caught a wolf pup?
Do you think they tamed a grown one? I mean,
like I know, there's probably there's multiple domestication acts happening
(18:53):
all across the planet, probably at the same time. I mean,
it wasn't just one initial act of domestication, am I right? Sure? Yeah,
And that that's kind of where it turns into the
different theories. So the base one is that for me,
like that clearly we see it happened now, definitely happened then.
But then from there it determines like did people take
(19:14):
active note and then kill the aggressive wolves and say,
like just leave the ones that are nice? Did they
then start adopting their pups and raising them because they
were like, oh what if we just raised it from
a puppy all day, It's whole life. Um. And then
there's the other one where this was happening. And then
while wolves and humans were hunting, they would have come
into contact with each other and the same thing kind
(19:35):
of happened. So instead of scavenging at their camp, humans
are like beating wolves to their kill. Are waiting for
wolves to kill something, and then they kill the aggressive
ones and all other ones go away. Hey, I got
a story to tell you, David. It's entirely possible for
a hunter gatherer to catch a canine wild pup. I
know this because I've done it. One of my favorite
(19:56):
stories my boys were young, they were like four and
six years old. We were out scouting for deer here
in Arkansas, and I walked out in the woods on
just a little jaunt. I left him kind of by
the four wheeler, and I said, hey, I'll be back
in five minutes. I went for a little walk and
(20:16):
jumped up. I don't know what they were doing, but
it was three coyote pups that looked like nine week
old puppies, you know, they probably weighed eight or nine
pounds maybe, and they took off running. Well, I just
by instinct just started chasing them. I ended up catching
(20:37):
one of those suckers. To make a long story short,
I was chasing him, and uh, you know, they just
split off one by one. I was chasing three, and
then one would split off, and then I was chasing two,
and then one split off, and then I picked one
to keep chasing. And I was running and I remember
I started running down this drainage. This Kyle was hopping
from rock to rock, and I fell man my and
(21:00):
got in front of my feet and I took a
spill harder than I've ever taken a spill. As I'm falling,
I'm trying to figure out what bone I'm gonna break.
I hit the ground. But what I was most disappointed
about was I knew that Kyle was getting away from me. Well,
when I hit the ground and realized I wasn't hurt,
I lifted up my head and that Kyle Pup had
(21:22):
laid up in a ball about four ft in front
of me. I guess he saw me like coming over
him and his instinct was to fall up. Well, he
sees me raise up my head and look at him,
and he takes off running again. So I jump up
and take off running, and he darts in a hole
and I flip over this rock on top of the hole,
and he's bawled up right there, and I just reached
(21:44):
out and grab him by the nape of the neck
and picked him up, took him home. We tried to
tame him. He kept biting me. I kept him for
about four weeks and never could tame him. But if
I had really wanted to tame him, I could have.
I was just afraid he was gonna hurt one of
my is, so I turned the sucker loose. I hope
this story somehow aide you in your studies of dogs
(22:07):
and humans. For sure it does, because one of my
like weirdest or not weirdest, I would say, but one
of the biggest hangups I had with the like it's
called the Pinocchio hypothesis, is adopted because you're trying to
make it into a real boy or real wolf or whatever,
real dog. I guess I should say. I always wondered
do people just stick their hands in wolf dens and
(22:29):
risk getting their fingers bit off? Or how does that work.
So there's a there's a theory of domestication called the
Pinocchio theory. Yeah, so either the mother died and they
adopt the pups or they just intentionally said, I'm gonna
make a dog today and like when you know, we're
gonna keep it as a pet kind of thing. Yeah,
now that I know this theory, I'm a firm believer
(22:49):
in it. Serious, I think. I mean, because people that
are on the landscape, a lot that are in the woods,
a lot which obviously hunter gathers. I mean, over sure,
anywhere else to go do you encounter dens and groundborough
Den's like a wolf would have, are very visible as
opposed to other types of animals that would have kind
(23:12):
of vegetation nests as den's you know that are camouflage,
Like a hole in the ground is not camouflage, and
you know, so I can see and in in prehistoric
hunters also killed animals from their dens on purpose because
it was a good ambush spot. I bet somebody like
(23:33):
saw a fresh wolf did went over there with their
spear or their adleaddle or their rock or whatever they
had killed a wolf. And then I was like, dang,
I hear some puffs whimper and reached in there and
pulled out a few bottom home, threw them to their
ten year old son and said, hey, let's feed that
thing tam it. We've just created a whole new theory. David,
(23:54):
there you go that that's cool. I don't get to
like work with modern hunters too often, so it's always
nice to hear of these stories. So the similarities between
wolves and humans is fascinating. If a wolf that hunts
in the pack, he's got to be tuned into the
nuance and obviously primarily nonverbal nuance of the pack numbers,
(24:15):
because they have this hierarchy and significant social structure inside
their their pack that enables them the hunt. They have
alpha male, they have total hierarchy. So that enabled wolves
to move into a very similar hierarchy that humans had,
and they would have been able to pick up on
(24:35):
nonverbal cues like when a human was upset with them,
when a human was happy with them. They would have
been able to perceive danger that like this human wants
to harm me, or this human doesn't, so talk about
that a little bit. How did our similarities bring us together?
The biggest one that I've learned recently is that wolves
(24:57):
kind of have a more monogamous lifestyle then other animals do.
And it's not that they mate for life with one person.
They just they rear they're young together. And even if
humans in the past we're swapping, you know, babysitting duty
between the different people. The point is we put a
significant amount of time into raising our young, and wolves
do the same thing. All species adapt a strategy for
(25:23):
rearing young. Some have lots of offspring and give little
to no parental input, like a fish land thousands of eggs.
In the biology world, this is termed our selection or
an R adapted species. Remember that the R stands for
reproduction and lots of reproduction. Other species put significant inputs
(25:44):
and smaller numbers of offspring, like an elephant, which it's
calf stays with the mother for three to five years.
This is called K selection, and K refers to carrying capacity.
Even though those are two cs, not sure the connection.
Humans and wool are both K adapted species, meaning that
we put a lot of parental input into our offspring.
(26:11):
A wolf pup would respond pretty well to how humans
obviously were to raise it, and that's why dogs we
kind of see puppies like babies to us. Now, Uh,
there's like that hierarchy that they're used to, and they
feed off of social cues. So if you watched wolves
hunt or wolves eat, one always eats first. Some have
(26:32):
to stay back and wait till later. That's something humans
could replicate in the past, or just all sorts of
little things like that, and like eye contact as well,
like you could just be like no and directly raise
your voice and do it and it we might stay
back kind of thing, you know. I guess the other
thing too, is that they have built into the structure
of their biology a desire to submit to something like
(26:55):
there is a there's a boss, and so I mean
in the dog human relationship, the human is always the boss,
you know. Yeah. Um. And I know there's a lot
of like debate with like dog training methods, if that's
like the way to go about it and stuff like that,
but I genuinely think it helped humans and dogs like
co exist together in the past, whether or not it's
(27:15):
a good training method or not. You know, talk to
me about dog eyes. So dogs have what's called or
all domestic animals have what's called NAT and neatny is
just accentuated juvenile features. So if you look at a
baby chimp, we're gonna go, oh wow, it's cute. If
(27:37):
you look at a baby chipmunk, you can say, oh wow,
that's cute. But to keep something juvenile and like behaving
not aggressively, uh, when you keep selecting for that trait,
it's gonna end up looking like that. Obviously, the ancestors
of cows are gone, but their horns have shrunk. A
bunch sheep is move on, and then the ibex is
(27:59):
the goat, all their horns have shrunk. So when you
do that with dogs, they're kind of snout kind of
shrinks a little bit. Their teeth get a little smaller,
and their whole body gets a little smaller, and they
stay cuter and their eyes have gotten bigger. So what
that does is we're accentuating is like you and I
are looking at each other right now, and we have
this like white sclera in our eyes. We're among the
(28:20):
only animals to have that that's accentuated as much as
it is. And then we've brought that out in dogs
so that we can both make eye contact each other
and read emotions. So what you're playing is like most
animals have eyes that are completely colored, Like you look
at the eye of the deer and it's like exactly brown,
So you can't pick up nuances of eye movement with
(28:43):
the white in our eyes. Were able to communicate more
clearly with our eyes. Is that is that what you're describing? Correct? Yeah,
and that's incredible. It is pretty cool. Chimps have it,
Gorillas have it um and not all the time. Their
iris kind of takes up most of their eye. Like
if you look like a deer or a horse like
you just said, because there is white, but it's it's
(29:03):
underneath the eyelids. You don't see it, like like what
a horse or a mule. Yeah, we've selected for that
puppy dog trait and the puppy dog. We didn't do
that intentionally though, I don't. I don't think so, because
somebody and like you know, the Mesolithic in a cave
wasn't like I'm gonna make these thing's eyes bigger. But
it just kind of happens over time because you're selecting
for that that juvenile behavior. So like if if you
(29:26):
had a litter of pups, you had six pups and
there were two of them that you felt a stronger
connection to and probably the person didn't even realize why
they had a stronger connection to this dog. They could
just communicate with this dog better, they had visual things
that they liked about the dog better. They would lean
(29:48):
towards nurturing that dog, and the survival of that dog
would be much more sure. Is that right? So? I
mean just like they would just over time, overdoing that
for a thousand generations of dogs, you begin to see
what at one time was nuanced become like a dominant trait,
which would be like wide around the eyes and eyes
(30:08):
that looked human exactly. Yeah, you're just accentuating that. That
is man, Yeah, it is. And have you heard of
the Siberian fox experiment at all? I have, but let's
talk about it. So the Siberian fox experiment was started
by Dmitri bla Yayev. He's a Soviet geneticist and he
(30:29):
wanted to breed Russian silver foxes and make them a
little more docile so they were easier to get their
furs from. I think one story said he was it
was for the Soviet army. I think another he just
was doing research, But it doesn't matter. The point is
he was breeding the foxes to get them to be
easier to you know, a fur farm. And that's kind
of where the debate comes if it's a good or
(30:50):
bad thing to do it from the beginning, But the
point is he would stick his hand in the cage
with a glove on and see which foxes were aggressive,
and if they bit the glove or hissed him, he
considered them aggressive. And if he put his hand in
there and they just kind of coward or didn't really
react to it negatively, he would call them a you know,
domestic or good. And he kept breeding those with each
(31:12):
other and breeding the aggressive ones with each other, and
the aggressive ones became very aggressive and had this crazy
adrenaline response, but the ones that weren't aggressive ended up
getting floppy ears, their tails started the wag, they had
spotted coats, and they had increased eye contact with people.
So in a sense, he made a domestic fox, which
is why there's a big movement of buying those now.
(31:35):
But the point with that would be that you know,
he did it very quickly in fifteen generations. I think
it's thirteen or fifteen. You can make something domestic really quickly,
and you can it definitely changes its features. So they
had the bigger eyes, they had all that kind of
So there's something genetically with it. Whether people in the
past were doing that from the get go and did
it in fifteen generations, I doubt it probably took thousands
(31:58):
of years. But the point, as you can get a
dog to understand this more, you'll need to understand domestication syndrome,
which is well accepted in the biology world, and it
describes how domestic animals look and act different than their
wild counterparts in consistent ways. And domesticated mammals it consistently
(32:19):
produces smaller brains, depigmentation or variance in color, and increased
tameness as a result of hormone changes that influence how
the animals respond to fear and stress. Oddly, in many animals,
including dogs, domestication usually produces floppy ears. The effects of
(32:41):
human selection bias on what once a wild animal was
is fascinating. Think of this way, a prehistoric human who
would have been basically just like us in consciousness, emotions,
and his drive for a better life bred as dogs
in a similar way. Say to like a squirrel dog breeder,
(33:02):
He'd say, I like the way that that one does
its job, so I think I'll breed him to that
one that does this good job too. Earnie On it
probably wasn't that straightforward, but simply the dogs that did
the work more naturally were the ones that got fed,
were nurtured and survived, so they naturally bread do that
(33:24):
for a long period of time, and you get this
human selection bias coming up very strongly in these dogs.
The one thing that has been constant and the human
archaeological record is that where you find humans, you find dogs.
(33:45):
And we have had this animal with us side by side,
and scientists would call it coevolution. We have certainly changed
dogs from wolves to what we see today and all
the specific breeds of dogs. The question that I have
that is not answered for me yet is how have
(34:08):
dogs changed us? And how much do dogs in our
use and working with dogs actually define our humanity? And
I want I want to hear your thoughts on that,
because what we're seeing in some parts of where the
dog and human world overlap is we're trying to write
(34:30):
a new set of rules for how humans can use dogs.
And I want to hear your commentary on that. How
have dogs changed us? Yeah? Are you familiar with the
term behavioral ecology, describe that for me sure. So it
is the idea that organisms operate in a way to
get the most bang for their buck. In a sense,
(34:52):
you want to spend the least amount of calories to
get the most amount of calories back. So obviously hunting
with at ladles and chasing some thing is a lot
more calorie expensive than it is to shoot some of
the rival from further away. That being said, human behavioral
ecology is part of the archaeology that I study. You
can look at sites and how they form based on this,
(35:13):
and you can try to piece together what humans were doing,
like why they have so much food here there? With
that dogs having them with you, you would think, why
would a hunter gatherer want to waste their time feeding
another organism? Why spend this time doing that? For hundreds
of thousands of years, we don't see dogs, and then
all of a sudden, these things start appearing at sites,
(35:36):
and it would just make no sense to like feed
something extra. So there's a benefit that we get from them.
And since dogs can kind of just eat the scraps
that we have, you don't have to feed them excessive
amounts of food. Or they'll just eat our refuse around
the site. We can spend less effort hunting because you
have the extra set of eyes, the extra set of ears,
and their nose, and they can do a lot of
(35:57):
the work for us, so they get a lot our
calories back for us than we have to give to them.
So it's definitely increased our population in a sense. That's
increased there like hunting ability, and it's increased our our
range because not only do you have something that can
help you hunt more efficiently, you also have something that
when you tie it up outside your camp at night,
(36:17):
you're not gonna get lions, you're not gonna get panthers,
you're not gonna get Hyena's coming to mess with you
at night. You've made its safe. Yeah, And I would
say agriculture has been the most significant change in our
our technological history, uh, you know, because you can mass
produce and you can make cities and things like that.
But before that, right before it came dogs, and I
(36:38):
think that definitely helped get us to that point. Here's
an interesting thought. Have you ever taken note of how
ill equipped humans seem to be in the natural world.
We don't have thick hair, big claws or teeth. We
don't have a great sense of smell, we can't run
very fast, and we're weak compared to other animals are
(36:59):
side eyes. However, we're the most biologically successful mammal in
this epic of planet Earth. Do we owe a big
part of our current existence to dogs? Everywhere that we're weak,
they're strong. If you look at human existence as a whole,
every section of that existence is critical to the next.
(37:21):
And there was a time when we were quite literally
going one on one with nature. We were at the
mercy of giant, fast predators, extreme temperatures, and we lived
off the land. The last three hundred years of human existence,
where we've had modern conveniences is a new human experience
comparable to a single page in a book. Is thick
(37:43):
is a jacked up mudding truck in Mississippi. My point
is this, we survived and thrived in our hunter gathered
past in a big part because of dogs, not just
any dogs, but hunting dogs. The story of the dog
(38:04):
is synonymous with the story of mankind. And that really
brings me to like why I wanted to talk to you, Because,
like I said earlier, some people and ideas and philosophies
currently today are kind of trying to change the rules
about how humans used dogs, specifically inside of using hunting dogs,
(38:29):
which is the very foundation of the reason we even
have domestic dogs to begin with, the only reason you
have a chihuahua, the only reason you have a German
Shepherd in your backyard is because of hunting. And then
now in hunting space, the most persecuted hunting in North
America is big game hunting with dogs, particularly bears, mountain lions,
(38:53):
and and there's lots of different reasons why people see that.
They think it's a relic of the past. They think
it's bar barrack. Some people would say that it's not
relevant to modern times. What are your thoughts on that.
I think we have dogs for this reason, that's what
they're good at. And obviously, like you're a bear hunter,
(39:14):
you have dogs that are very good at hunting bear.
I'd imagine I talked to someone else recently about that
same thing, and you're right, Like a German shepherd is
a guard dog, and it's a it's a shepherd, and
like it can do that behavior as a pet in
a way, like that's not its only job, but it
can do it a two hours, just a toy dog essentially.
But then you have dogs like coon hounds and other hounds,
(39:38):
and you know, like hunting dogs that are designed and
bred for that, and it's doing them a disservice to
not do that behavior, and that's where you get aggression issues,
and that's where you get dogs that are always in shelters.
I agree, I think there should be a way for
dogs to do that kind of thing, and hopefully ethically.
But if they if a bear hunting dog that bear
(40:00):
hunting in an ethical manner, you know what I feel
like is happening, Like at the very core of the
argument that dogs should no longer be used for hunting
in the way that they have for the last and
let's be generous and say fourteen thousand years humans have
used dogs for hunting, maybe twenty, I would make an
(40:23):
argument that to take that away from from me and
my children would be to strip away a part of
our history that's potentially even coded into our d n
A because we have been with dogs for so long,
just like we've changed them, there's kind of incalculable ways
(40:44):
that they have changed us in this connection. I read
where they've done studies on dogs and humans that when
a human engages with a dog, there's oxytocin that is released,
which is a chemical the brain that humans crave and love.
We don't even most people aren't even aware of it.
We crave it and love it, and it gives us
(41:05):
a sensation of safety and pleasure. And the same chemical
is released in a dog when a human engages with
it and pets it. And so it's like this ancient,
irrational connection. And two, simply for the sake of whatever
(41:26):
reason that people would have to say, that's no longer relevant.
I feel like it's stripping away a part of our
humanity and I'm not cool that. David. Yeah, I grew
up in the Greater New York area and didn't live
out West, didn't get to experience the wilderness in a way.
So I grew up watching stuff like this and being like,
(41:47):
why would they do that? Like that, don't do that
to the animal, Like would hurt it? The cougar is
gonna die scared, the bear is gonna die terrified, you know.
But I moved out West for grad school, ended up
hunting pronghorn. My friends got to gut it with still tools.
That was really fun, and I got to see some
dogs hunt at one point. I've never done it myself,
but you're right in a sense, and like especially studying
(42:10):
this at the same time, I was just fascinated by
it because what I'm studying in the past is people
hunting with dogs. That's just the gist of it. And
I can't understand that unless I watch dogs hunt now,
or at least learn about it from people like you.
And I agree. I think it's a practice that should
be kept because it is an integral part of our
(42:30):
relationship um And obviously dogs sniffing dogs being centuries dogs
that can stay, why couldn't that stay? And I would
make the argument too that the quality of life that
my squirrel dogs have and my coon dogs have, I
would say, is probably far above the quality of life
that a dog has that lives indoors, that is never
(42:56):
allowed to free range across the landscape, dog that has
been genetically altered from its original state in such a
way that it can't really function. Like a lot of
those specific breeds that we have today would not have
survived in the wild there they were bred to be
(43:16):
for an aesthetic or for a certain, very highly specific job.
And hunting dogs are much more in tune with their
original design than just like your lap dog. I mean,
because you know, like my hounds, they're far from a wolf,
but they're way closer to a wolf than a chihuahua.
(43:39):
So that's where I have a problem with someone that
has a chihuahua telling me not to bear hunt with
my dogs. A philosophical problem with that idea. You know,
I do have empathy for people that may not understand
hunting with dogs. So it's it's not people that were against,
it's it's it's really lack of information, lack of understanding.
(44:02):
Because for someone that doesn't have any information that sees
some portrayal of a bunch of hillbillies turn and loose
their dogs to go kill a bear, that is very
very easy to portray in a negative way to someone
without information. Hill Billy bros. I've got to clarify that
(44:23):
the word hill billy is a term of endearment to
me and not a jab carry on. It takes a
lot of steps of information and pursuit of understanding the
position of the human that's doing that to actually come
to a place where you could go from zero understanding
to enough understanding to go, Yeah, I get it, Yeah,
(44:46):
I get why they do that. So we are up
against a big mountain that is hard to climb. Because
it's really easy to put up a billboard in any
place and say one liner, you know, this is a
bad thing. It's much harder to portray something as deeply human.
Also a very huge component of scientific wildlife management that
(45:10):
actually helps the species that we're hunting thrive. I mean,
that's that's the biggest thing, David, of our position as
hunters is. Yeah, we're not just wanting to have fun
with our dogs. That's part of it, and yes, that
is why we do it. But it's a beautiful stone
that kills two birds with one chunk because we get
to have this amazing interaction with our animals and a
(45:32):
lifestyle that's built around them, and we also get to
be key contributors to the success of the species that
we're hunting. I mean, that's why North American hunting is
just like this beautiful thing, and it has been portrayed
in such a way that many people wouldn't describe it
or understand it that way. And and dogs are one
(45:55):
of the most contentious parts of it. And so I
hope that are standing. Kind of the deep human history
with dogs, the original way that we used them, the
original design of how we use them, can help people
bridge the gap between that and now when they see
me with my coon dogs and squirrel dogs and bear dogs.
(46:18):
Because I think it's an awesome thing. I think it
it makes me more human to turn loose my dogs
in the woods and interact with them. I'm raccoon hunting
with my daughter River using our American plot hounds. We
free cast the dogs into the darkness, meaning we've just
(46:41):
turned them loose with GPS collars on so we can
keep track of them, and they've gone out and found
the fresh scent of a raccoon. Hopefully they'll trail the
scent of the critter until it runs up a treat
where they'll tree it, meaning they'll bark at the base
of the tree and wait for us to come to them.
(47:01):
Following hounds that you've trained is a rare human pleasure,
tickling ancient mechanisms inside of me that are beyond reason,
and our hunting serves an important role in wildlife management.
We're in for a treat, all right, River, you're right dogs,
(47:27):
All right, River, We're gonna we're gonna turn these dogs
out by this pond. It's been raining, but I figured
by now the coons have had a little time to stir.
Let's just get him, all right, and you ready, Scooter,
you're ready? Firm? Ah, you're ready. We'll get him. Did firm?
(47:52):
Just part? I do? True? It sounds like it. It
sounds like it. Man, it's about to rain. Are they
are they moving? Let's just walk out here? Are they moving? Man?
(48:19):
If they treat one tonight, I'm gonna be pretty proud
of not ideal conditions? Yeah, oh yeah, good lords. Talk
to him now, talk to I don't know we're gonna
find him in this mess, but I think he's in here.
What do you think? It's amazing what these dogs can do.
(48:46):
We have never had any clue that coon was around here.
Talk to him, talk to him. Yeah, River, I've been
dragging you around since you could walk. Coon hunting ever
think that this is ridiculous and kind of irrational? How
much we love our dogs? Of course not, It's totally right,
(49:08):
totally what you think? So so convinced. You know, most
people are home watching Netflix right now, and we're out
here wandering around the ticks and chiggers and getting wet
the river. What do you what do you like about
this coon hun I like, like all of it. I
like it's the only I think it's the only t
(49:30):
typeting we do that's at night, and so it's cool
to be out here at night. And then, I mean,
it was so fun training these dogs. I mean I
remember when we were I was like twelve years old
and training Fern, and it was like the coolest thing
in the world. And it's so cool now that she'll go,
she'll go trained by yourself, and that we taught her
how to do that. So it's awesome to see see that.
And then it's also the only kind of hand you
(49:51):
can talk through. So you can't have to sit still.
You don't have to. You can people. Yeah, you can
bring you bring your friends, and bring your dogs. If
your dogs are your friends, and your dogs are your
best friends, good boys, by good, all right, he's in
(50:13):
the whole way. I'm gonna find him. We're gonna find him.
Let's go home. My grandfather's bird dogs have long since passed,
but his love of working and hunting dogs is strongly
alive inside of me today and every time I turn
(50:36):
loose my coon hounds, or I see my squirrel dogs
elated to tree. A squirrel sense exactly what he did
and what ancient humans of the past did too, A
deep and hard to explain fascination and partnering with the
dog to do work and acquire wild protein. I'm confident
(50:57):
that our connection to dogs and specific lead to hunting dogs,
is an important cog in the robust definition of what
it means to be human. You can follow my guests
David ian How at David ian How dot com. You
(51:18):
can also follow him on YouTube and Instagram at Ethno
Sinology that's e t h n O se y n
O l o g y ethno sinology, which is the
study of dogs and humans. Check out David I and
How
Yeah, alright, River, we're gonna we're gonna turn these dogs
out by this pond. It's been raining, but I figured
by now the coons have had a little time to stir.
Let's just get him, all right, and you ready, Scooter,
You're ready for m ah, You're ready. We'll get him.
(00:24):
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we're going deep,
deep into human history to explore the impact of man's
best friend, the dog, on us. I'll interview some lads
that use their canines for some unique tasks, and I'll
interview anthropologists David ian Howe, who specializes in the dog
(00:48):
human relationship, and we're searching for answers because there are
some new ideologies trying to change the rules on how
humans use dogs and modern times. Then we'll go into
the night woods and listen to my dogs work as
we reflect on this question. Is partnering with dogs an
(01:11):
essential definer of our humanity? Do you ever think that
this is ridiculous and kind of irrational? How much how
much we love our dogs? Of course, that's rational, totally
what you think. So also convinced. You know, most people
are home watching Netflix right now. My name is Clay
(01:40):
Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll
explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places,
and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived
their lives close to the land. I like dogs, always have,
(02:06):
but not in the typical way you would expect a
person in to like a dog. I don't necessarily like
to pet dogs, and I don't think I utilize them
as emotional companions. But my connection to dogs is a
layer deeper. And I don't say that in an elitist
kind of way. I quite literally mean it's a layer
beyond the surface, because it doesn't make sense. I've always
(02:29):
felt my love for dogs was irrational and couldn't be explained.
You might have those same feelings echoing inside of you.
Many people do. My grandfather, Lewin Nukeam, was a bird
(02:49):
dog trainer to the core. He grew up in an
era when quail and the south were thriving. Every other
farmhouse you drove past might have a pair of liver
spotted pointers or an English center behind the house. He
understood dogs and how to partner with him, but what
was notable to me was the place of regard the
bird dogs held in his internal hierarchy of important things.
(03:13):
They were danging there at the top. If you look
at this from a completely rational perspective, you'd assume the
dogs must have provided some essential component of survival. But
he and my grandmother didn't live off qail meat without trying.
He built in me a love for country stores. High
is made from scratch at country diners, biscuits and gravy,
(03:36):
and homegrown sweet corn. But the most dominant feature that
he instilled in me, aside from components of my internal
character and faith, was his irrational, high ranking platform that
he placed his dogs on. There's something deeper to be
explored here. My friend Damon bun Gard has a unique
(04:05):
relationship with his dog, and together they accomplish a unique job.
Aside from the fact that I think Damon and his dog,
Yeager look like each other, both handsome fellows. Of course,
Damon has dedicated a good chunk of his life to
his dog, and I want to explore their partnership. Damon,
(04:33):
I've known you for a while and you are definitely
someone that has an irrational connection to your dog. I'm
confident of that after I've seen you interact with your dogs.
Tell me what kind of dogs that you have and
what you do with them. So I have what's called
a tackle, which is a dog that most people see
and just say what kind of mixes that? It's a
(04:55):
working wire haired docks And a lot of people are like, oh,
it's like a Schnauser, you know, of what kind of
terrier mixes that? And they're the wire hair version of
a docks And it's generally considered the wire hairs are
the most hunting and working oriented, probably from some old
terrier genetics that helped give them the wire coat. Tackles
are also very much you know, they're they're bred to
(05:18):
the international standard of the f CI one eight. I
believe it is standard for a working dog and the
description is working dog above and below ground. Most people
here in the United States don't think of a docks
And as a working dog, but that's what they were
bred to do in Europe. And the fact that the
breed standard is all around chest circumference, which is based
(05:39):
on animal holes, the size of a badger hole, the
size of a foxhole, the size of a rabbit hole.
They're tenacious hunters, they're very persistent dogs. They're very independent dogs.
In Europe, a lot of places require a dog for
big game recovery by law. So teckle yeager. He's registered
with the Dot your Tuckle Club and he's one of
(06:01):
the few true tackles in North America. So tell me
specifically what you do with him. So we track and
find wounded and lost big game for hunters, whether it's
a deer or other big game species, somebody shoots it,
loses it, can't find it, they track it for a while,
or there's no sign to track on, they call us.
We go out and on lead here in Tennessee when
(06:23):
most states and we find that animal. How often are
you successful at finding wounded game? And so these are
animals that the hunter has tried to find the animal
and has been unsuccessful. So they're calling you with the
hard ones, just with just an average, how how many
do you think you recover? I don't really get into
success rates, but on general, for the ones we do
(06:44):
take fifty to six. I say you leave with a
d percent confidence and knowing if it's alive or dead.
I am full faith that if it's dead, yeagger will
find it. Damon, is I hear you describe these dogs?
It's clear that the animal has been selectively bred for
a very long period of time to partner with humans
(07:06):
to complete a task that a human is incapable of
completing on their own, which is really the story of
the dogs. They're doing work for us. I want you
to describe for me your personal connection to this dog,
because I know these dogs live in your house. These
dogs are like they're important to you. Just talk to
me about your personal connection to your dog. A lot
(07:28):
of people approach working dogs and that's not being family members.
That's very much not Yeager's life. He's on the couch,
he's in the bed often. You know, when we travel,
do you ever have been around docksins? And just in general,
they're full of personality. People talk about personality and dogs
and that's a that's a human thing. We're projecting care
(07:49):
what you want. They have an attitude, they have a
lot of attitude. They're a little dogging with a lot
of attitude. So you you see that with him working
and he's a great tracking dog. He's also really good
at flushing birth. So he just loves to hunt. So
I love to hunt. So that's obviously a bond that
we share when when we're working together. Tracking is a
(08:11):
team effort. There are times where I mean, he just
blows my mind and what what he finds or how
he knows to go where he knows to go, I
would never know without his help. There's other times where
he needs my help. Damon. I know you know some
stuff about dog domestication, but let's just erase that, erase
that knowledge. Would you be surprised if you learned that
(08:35):
humans and dogs had been together for such a long
period of time that they had developed dependence upon one another?
And I think it's interesting to think too, that there
was a time when that connection was essential to human survival.
Today it's it's not quite that essential for most people.
You know, if you think about I mean, you're you
(08:58):
don't have this relationship with cattle like we eat cattle.
You don't have this relationship with chickens or with lizards,
or it's like this is a really special bond that
humans have with this one species. So I guess I
guess it was more of a statement than the question.
But I guess my question is would that surprise you?
(09:20):
If you could remove yourself, you'd be like, no, this
dog and me were just made for each other because
I will say, you kind of look like your dog,
and he's a handsome dog. He's a handsome dog. I mean,
it's all in the beard. Yes, certainly, certainly as a
student of biology, and you can get in symbiotic relationships
(09:40):
and have we over time selectively even as humans evolved
and have has DNA in us that favors to prinionship
of dogs become more prevalent because they helped us get
more food and therefore that that gene bread more you
know you can get. You can get deep right into
into theory. It's where we're going on this podcast. David
(10:07):
Howe is an anthropologist who studies the dog human relationship.
I'm slightly nervous talking with him because I fear that
he might not confirm my bias. I hope he tells
me that my love of hunting dogs is deeply human
and highly relevant to modern society, and that his words
feed the narrative that's been crafted inside of me. But
(10:28):
I need to get to the bottom of this. Hunting
with dogs has become an issue of controversy in modern times,
and I'm interested to see what he has to say. So, David,
I am trying to understand and resolve a question that
I've had for a long time, and that is I'm
(10:52):
trying to understand my irrational connection to dogs and the
irrational connection of dogs that I see all throughout society,
from pet owners to working dogs to hunting dogs. And
it's always struck me as just odd how much we
like our dogs. And then now that I'm beginning to
(11:15):
learn more about it, searching a little bit deeper, I'm
trying to understand it. Why do we love dogs so much?
I wish I had like a one word answer for it,
other than that we just love them. But dogs have
been around for at least twenty thousand years or so,
probably further than that, so they've just kind of co
adapted with human life for the longest time. And why
(11:38):
they're around. So let's go all the way back to
the beginning. When do we believe that dogs were first domesticated?
So this gets pushed back depending on which paper comes
out or like, you know, what school of thought you're with,
but the general consensus currently is twenty thousand years. Is
like the genetic signatures for a dog. Here, the gene
(12:02):
signature is about what you think it might be. It's
a group of genes or a single gene that displays
a unique characteristic only for that species. So if we
compare that to modern you know, dog genomes and how
other DNA looks, you can see that these remains that
are found twenty thousand years ago are dogs, but there
(12:23):
could be stuff before that that, you know, is the
in between a wolf and a dog kind of thing,
because you can't just turn a wolf into a dog overnight, right, right,
So where is the oldest known site where we believe
that dogs were with humans and these dogs were domesticated
That It's hard to say because there's just so many
(12:44):
dog remains that get found and wolf remains that it's
you can't really say, Okay, is this a wolf or
as a dog? If you find a wolf skull in
a cave with human occupation, it could be a dog.
At that point. The best indicator that I go with
is certainly, by a fourteen thousand years we see a
like human and dog like burial, like where they're buried together.
(13:07):
So at that point we can say, even if it
was just a wolf like that relationship had formed. What
part of the world did is that particular fourteen thousand
year old site in Yeah, that is in bond Overcastle, Germany.
That was the first dog human burials, the oldest known
dog human burials that we see. Correct, That one is
(13:28):
kind of contested because it could be a wolf. Still
it's just a pup, so it's hard to tell. But
either way, it's a canied burial with a human. But
then in ten thousand years ago there's one in Israel.
It's up by the Sea of Galilee and it's a
Natufian site, so the first people to start, you know,
farming and doing agriculture. And there's a middle aged woman
buried with a puppy and her hands like resting on
(13:50):
the puppy. So that's that's definitive to understand dogs like
so in one we just have dogs of all sizes, shape,
some colors that do all kinds of stuff, all dogs
domesticated from the one wild canon that we can trace
(14:10):
it back to, which is the wolf. Is that correct? Yeah,
it depends on your school of thought. We find new
stuff all the time and keep dating it and keep
checking the DNA, and it's a it's a wacky picture.
Some people think it is a gray wolf that we
know today that they have descended from or it's an
(14:31):
extinct group of wolves that is no longer around, and
that dogs are that like ecological adaptation of those wolves
living with humans and they just kind of died out.
But the main thing is that it did come from
a wolf creature. The genesis of the hundreds of dog
(14:51):
breeds we have today came from the Victorian era in
Britain when dog shows became popular. The United Kennel Club
or the UK Seeker we recognizes over three hundred different
breeds of dogs. What brings us all together is understanding
that these aren't different species, they are all the same species.
The imprint of artificial or human influence selection is notable.
(15:15):
It's hard to fathom that the genetic coating of a
single species that looks very much the same wolves has
such genetic scripting that in its genes you could get
a pug and a golden Retriever out of the same stuff. Amazing. Hey,
did you know that originally all gray wolves were gray?
(15:37):
A black wolf is the influence of domestic dogs hybridizing
back into wolf populations. Naturally, there were only gray wolves.
Put that in your pipe and smoking. So to understand
our connection to dogs, I think we gotta go way back,
way back and understand how dogs were domesticated. I know
(16:00):
there's multiple ideas, multiple theories. In the beauty of anthropology.
When we're so certain about so many things, is that
there's some stuff that's so deep in history that we
are uncertain. I love that. But there are definitely some
some theories of dog domestication, and you don't have to
(16:23):
think too hard to perceive how it might have happened.
But can you describe for me your number one theory,
the theory that you like the best of how dogs
originally became domesticated. Yeah, I can definitely do that. It's
kind of involves two theories, but I can kind of
merge it into one. Uh. And that is the idea
(16:45):
that wolves and humans are like kind of similar animals,
not in the sense that you know, wolves aren't primates,
but that wolves and humans have a similar social structure.
We both cooperatively hunt, we talked to each other, and
we like work together to achieved goals. So humans entering Eurasia,
out of Africa or wherever we're seeing wolves, you know,
(17:07):
behave the way that they do, and we probably took
note of that and learned, Okay, this is how you
efficiently hunt bison. This is how you efficiently hunt you know,
red deer or whatever, or reindeer is what we both
ate a lot of and noticed how that worked. And
it's pretty metal, is the way I would describe it.
In the beginning of that like relationship forming humans. Let's
say live in an open air camp like in the
(17:28):
Czech Republic somewhere, and maybe in a man with hot structure,
and they're cooking food out in the open. Wolves are
going to smell that, and they're gonna be like, okay, well,
why would I bother hunting if I can just go
sneak up on this camp at night and steal their food.
So if we look at dogs today, we know they
just there's junkyard dogs, there's dump dogs. They just scavenge food.
(17:51):
And pet dogs do it too, But people would have
noticed that those dogs were doing that, or wolves, I
should say, and then take a note of it. So
eventually they could have been them more or you know,
after generations of that happening, they could be like, Okay,
these ones aren't gonna hurt us, They're just hungry, and
that relationship starts forming that way. So what happened they
(18:11):
over time, there was benefit to the wolves that weren't
as afraid of humans, because there would have been some
diversity in a wolf pack. I mean, just like there's
diversity in all the same species, there's gonna be animals
that are more leary and others that aren't. So perhaps
some of these wolves started gaining biological advantage by being
(18:33):
less weary of humans because they're eating out of their camp.
And then the humans started to take note of this,
and like they just kind of started getting closer and closer.
And then do you think a human caught a wolf pup?
Do you think they tamed a grown one? I mean,
like I know, there's probably there's multiple domestication acts happening
(18:53):
all across the planet, probably at the same time. I mean,
it wasn't just one initial act of domestication, am I right? Sure? Yeah,
And that that's kind of where it turns into the
different theories. So the base one is that for me,
like that clearly we see it happened now, definitely happened then.
But then from there it determines like did people take
(19:14):
active note and then kill the aggressive wolves and say,
like just leave the ones that are nice? Did they
then start adopting their pups and raising them because they
were like, oh what if we just raised it from
a puppy all day, It's whole life. Um. And then
there's the other one where this was happening. And then
while wolves and humans were hunting, they would have come
into contact with each other and the same thing kind
(19:35):
of happened. So instead of scavenging at their camp, humans
are like beating wolves to their kill. Are waiting for
wolves to kill something, and then they kill the aggressive
ones and all other ones go away. Hey, I got
a story to tell you, David. It's entirely possible for
a hunter gatherer to catch a canine wild pup. I
know this because I've done it. One of my favorite
(19:56):
stories my boys were young, they were like four and
six years old. We were out scouting for deer here
in Arkansas, and I walked out in the woods on
just a little jaunt. I left him kind of by
the four wheeler, and I said, hey, I'll be back
in five minutes. I went for a little walk and
(20:16):
jumped up. I don't know what they were doing, but
it was three coyote pups that looked like nine week
old puppies, you know, they probably weighed eight or nine
pounds maybe, and they took off running. Well, I just
by instinct just started chasing them. I ended up catching
(20:37):
one of those suckers. To make a long story short,
I was chasing him, and uh, you know, they just
split off one by one. I was chasing three, and
then one would split off, and then I was chasing two,
and then one split off, and then I picked one
to keep chasing. And I was running and I remember
I started running down this drainage. This Kyle was hopping
from rock to rock, and I fell man my and
(21:00):
got in front of my feet and I took a
spill harder than I've ever taken a spill. As I'm falling,
I'm trying to figure out what bone I'm gonna break.
I hit the ground. But what I was most disappointed
about was I knew that Kyle was getting away from me. Well,
when I hit the ground and realized I wasn't hurt,
I lifted up my head and that Kyle Pup had
(21:22):
laid up in a ball about four ft in front
of me. I guess he saw me like coming over
him and his instinct was to fall up. Well, he
sees me raise up my head and look at him,
and he takes off running again. So I jump up
and take off running, and he darts in a hole
and I flip over this rock on top of the hole,
and he's bawled up right there, and I just reached
(21:44):
out and grab him by the nape of the neck
and picked him up, took him home. We tried to
tame him. He kept biting me. I kept him for
about four weeks and never could tame him. But if
I had really wanted to tame him, I could have.
I was just afraid he was gonna hurt one of
my is, so I turned the sucker loose. I hope
this story somehow aide you in your studies of dogs
(22:07):
and humans. For sure it does, because one of my
like weirdest or not weirdest, I would say, but one
of the biggest hangups I had with the like it's
called the Pinocchio hypothesis, is adopted because you're trying to
make it into a real boy or real wolf or whatever,
real dog. I guess I should say. I always wondered
do people just stick their hands in wolf dens and
(22:29):
risk getting their fingers bit off? Or how does that work.
So there's a there's a theory of domestication called the
Pinocchio theory. Yeah, so either the mother died and they
adopt the pups or they just intentionally said, I'm gonna
make a dog today and like when you know, we're
gonna keep it as a pet kind of thing. Yeah,
now that I know this theory, I'm a firm believer
(22:49):
in it. Serious, I think. I mean, because people that
are on the landscape, a lot that are in the woods,
a lot which obviously hunter gathers. I mean, over sure,
anywhere else to go do you encounter dens and groundborough
Den's like a wolf would have, are very visible as
opposed to other types of animals that would have kind
(23:12):
of vegetation nests as den's you know that are camouflage,
Like a hole in the ground is not camouflage, and
you know, so I can see and in in prehistoric
hunters also killed animals from their dens on purpose because
it was a good ambush spot. I bet somebody like
(23:33):
saw a fresh wolf did went over there with their
spear or their adleaddle or their rock or whatever they
had killed a wolf. And then I was like, dang,
I hear some puffs whimper and reached in there and
pulled out a few bottom home, threw them to their
ten year old son and said, hey, let's feed that
thing tam it. We've just created a whole new theory. David,
(23:54):
there you go that that's cool. I don't get to
like work with modern hunters too often, so it's always
nice to hear of these stories. So the similarities between
wolves and humans is fascinating. If a wolf that hunts
in the pack, he's got to be tuned into the
nuance and obviously primarily nonverbal nuance of the pack numbers,
(24:15):
because they have this hierarchy and significant social structure inside
their their pack that enables them the hunt. They have
alpha male, they have total hierarchy. So that enabled wolves
to move into a very similar hierarchy that humans had,
and they would have been able to pick up on
(24:35):
nonverbal cues like when a human was upset with them,
when a human was happy with them. They would have
been able to perceive danger that like this human wants
to harm me, or this human doesn't, so talk about
that a little bit. How did our similarities bring us together?
The biggest one that I've learned recently is that wolves
(24:57):
kind of have a more monogamous lifestyle then other animals do.
And it's not that they mate for life with one person.
They just they rear they're young together. And even if
humans in the past we're swapping, you know, babysitting duty
between the different people. The point is we put a
significant amount of time into raising our young, and wolves
do the same thing. All species adapt a strategy for
(25:23):
rearing young. Some have lots of offspring and give little
to no parental input, like a fish land thousands of eggs.
In the biology world, this is termed our selection or
an R adapted species. Remember that the R stands for
reproduction and lots of reproduction. Other species put significant inputs
(25:44):
and smaller numbers of offspring, like an elephant, which it's
calf stays with the mother for three to five years.
This is called K selection, and K refers to carrying capacity.
Even though those are two cs, not sure the connection.
Humans and wool are both K adapted species, meaning that
we put a lot of parental input into our offspring.
(26:11):
A wolf pup would respond pretty well to how humans
obviously were to raise it, and that's why dogs we
kind of see puppies like babies to us. Now, Uh,
there's like that hierarchy that they're used to, and they
feed off of social cues. So if you watched wolves
hunt or wolves eat, one always eats first. Some have
(26:32):
to stay back and wait till later. That's something humans
could replicate in the past, or just all sorts of
little things like that, and like eye contact as well,
like you could just be like no and directly raise
your voice and do it and it we might stay
back kind of thing, you know. I guess the other
thing too, is that they have built into the structure
of their biology a desire to submit to something like
(26:55):
there is a there's a boss, and so I mean
in the dog human relationship, the human is always the boss,
you know. Yeah. Um. And I know there's a lot
of like debate with like dog training methods, if that's
like the way to go about it and stuff like that,
but I genuinely think it helped humans and dogs like
co exist together in the past, whether or not it's
(27:15):
a good training method or not. You know, talk to
me about dog eyes. So dogs have what's called or
all domestic animals have what's called NAT and neatny is
just accentuated juvenile features. So if you look at a
baby chimp, we're gonna go, oh wow, it's cute. If
(27:37):
you look at a baby chipmunk, you can say, oh wow,
that's cute. But to keep something juvenile and like behaving
not aggressively, uh, when you keep selecting for that trait,
it's gonna end up looking like that. Obviously, the ancestors
of cows are gone, but their horns have shrunk. A
bunch sheep is move on, and then the ibex is
(27:59):
the goat, all their horns have shrunk. So when you
do that with dogs, they're kind of snout kind of
shrinks a little bit. Their teeth get a little smaller,
and their whole body gets a little smaller, and they
stay cuter and their eyes have gotten bigger. So what
that does is we're accentuating is like you and I
are looking at each other right now, and we have
this like white sclera in our eyes. We're among the
(28:20):
only animals to have that that's accentuated as much as
it is. And then we've brought that out in dogs
so that we can both make eye contact each other
and read emotions. So what you're playing is like most
animals have eyes that are completely colored, Like you look
at the eye of the deer and it's like exactly brown,
So you can't pick up nuances of eye movement with
(28:43):
the white in our eyes. Were able to communicate more
clearly with our eyes. Is that is that what you're describing? Correct? Yeah,
and that's incredible. It is pretty cool. Chimps have it,
Gorillas have it um and not all the time. Their
iris kind of takes up most of their eye. Like
if you look like a deer or a horse like
you just said, because there is white, but it's it's
(29:03):
underneath the eyelids. You don't see it, like like what
a horse or a mule. Yeah, we've selected for that
puppy dog trait and the puppy dog. We didn't do
that intentionally though, I don't. I don't think so, because
somebody and like you know, the Mesolithic in a cave
wasn't like I'm gonna make these thing's eyes bigger. But
it just kind of happens over time because you're selecting
for that that juvenile behavior. So like if if you
(29:26):
had a litter of pups, you had six pups and
there were two of them that you felt a stronger
connection to and probably the person didn't even realize why
they had a stronger connection to this dog. They could
just communicate with this dog better, they had visual things
that they liked about the dog better. They would lean
(29:48):
towards nurturing that dog, and the survival of that dog
would be much more sure. Is that right? So? I
mean just like they would just over time, overdoing that
for a thousand generations of dogs, you begin to see
what at one time was nuanced become like a dominant trait,
which would be like wide around the eyes and eyes
(30:08):
that looked human exactly. Yeah, you're just accentuating that. That
is man, Yeah, it is. And have you heard of
the Siberian fox experiment at all? I have, but let's
talk about it. So the Siberian fox experiment was started
by Dmitri bla Yayev. He's a Soviet geneticist and he
(30:29):
wanted to breed Russian silver foxes and make them a
little more docile so they were easier to get their
furs from. I think one story said he was it
was for the Soviet army. I think another he just
was doing research, But it doesn't matter. The point is
he was breeding the foxes to get them to be
easier to you know, a fur farm. And that's kind
of where the debate comes if it's a good or
(30:50):
bad thing to do it from the beginning, But the
point is he would stick his hand in the cage
with a glove on and see which foxes were aggressive,
and if they bit the glove or hissed him, he
considered them aggressive. And if he put his hand in
there and they just kind of coward or didn't really
react to it negatively, he would call them a you know,
domestic or good. And he kept breeding those with each
(31:12):
other and breeding the aggressive ones with each other, and
the aggressive ones became very aggressive and had this crazy
adrenaline response, but the ones that weren't aggressive ended up
getting floppy ears, their tails started the wag, they had
spotted coats, and they had increased eye contact with people.
So in a sense, he made a domestic fox, which
is why there's a big movement of buying those now.
(31:35):
But the point with that would be that you know,
he did it very quickly in fifteen generations. I think
it's thirteen or fifteen. You can make something domestic really quickly,
and you can it definitely changes its features. So they
had the bigger eyes, they had all that kind of
So there's something genetically with it. Whether people in the
past were doing that from the get go and did
it in fifteen generations, I doubt it probably took thousands
(31:58):
of years. But the point, as you can get a
dog to understand this more, you'll need to understand domestication syndrome,
which is well accepted in the biology world, and it
describes how domestic animals look and act different than their
wild counterparts in consistent ways. And domesticated mammals it consistently
(32:19):
produces smaller brains, depigmentation or variance in color, and increased
tameness as a result of hormone changes that influence how
the animals respond to fear and stress. Oddly, in many animals,
including dogs, domestication usually produces floppy ears. The effects of
(32:41):
human selection bias on what once a wild animal was
is fascinating. Think of this way, a prehistoric human who
would have been basically just like us in consciousness, emotions,
and his drive for a better life bred as dogs
in a similar way. Say to like a squirrel dog breeder,
(33:02):
He'd say, I like the way that that one does
its job, so I think I'll breed him to that
one that does this good job too. Earnie On it
probably wasn't that straightforward, but simply the dogs that did
the work more naturally were the ones that got fed,
were nurtured and survived, so they naturally bread do that
(33:24):
for a long period of time, and you get this
human selection bias coming up very strongly in these dogs.
The one thing that has been constant and the human
archaeological record is that where you find humans, you find dogs.
(33:45):
And we have had this animal with us side by side,
and scientists would call it coevolution. We have certainly changed
dogs from wolves to what we see today and all
the specific breeds of dogs. The question that I have
that is not answered for me yet is how have
(34:08):
dogs changed us? And how much do dogs in our
use and working with dogs actually define our humanity? And
I want I want to hear your thoughts on that,
because what we're seeing in some parts of where the
dog and human world overlap is we're trying to write
(34:30):
a new set of rules for how humans can use dogs.
And I want to hear your commentary on that. How
have dogs changed us? Yeah? Are you familiar with the
term behavioral ecology, describe that for me sure. So it
is the idea that organisms operate in a way to
get the most bang for their buck. In a sense,
(34:52):
you want to spend the least amount of calories to
get the most amount of calories back. So obviously hunting
with at ladles and chasing some thing is a lot
more calorie expensive than it is to shoot some of
the rival from further away. That being said, human behavioral
ecology is part of the archaeology that I study. You
can look at sites and how they form based on this,
(35:13):
and you can try to piece together what humans were doing,
like why they have so much food here there? With
that dogs having them with you, you would think, why
would a hunter gatherer want to waste their time feeding
another organism? Why spend this time doing that? For hundreds
of thousands of years, we don't see dogs, and then
all of a sudden, these things start appearing at sites,
(35:36):
and it would just make no sense to like feed
something extra. So there's a benefit that we get from them.
And since dogs can kind of just eat the scraps
that we have, you don't have to feed them excessive
amounts of food. Or they'll just eat our refuse around
the site. We can spend less effort hunting because you
have the extra set of eyes, the extra set of ears,
and their nose, and they can do a lot of
(35:57):
the work for us, so they get a lot our
calories back for us than we have to give to them.
So it's definitely increased our population in a sense. That's
increased there like hunting ability, and it's increased our our
range because not only do you have something that can
help you hunt more efficiently, you also have something that
when you tie it up outside your camp at night,
(36:17):
you're not gonna get lions, you're not gonna get panthers,
you're not gonna get Hyena's coming to mess with you
at night. You've made its safe. Yeah, And I would
say agriculture has been the most significant change in our
our technological history, uh, you know, because you can mass
produce and you can make cities and things like that.
But before that, right before it came dogs, and I
(36:38):
think that definitely helped get us to that point. Here's
an interesting thought. Have you ever taken note of how
ill equipped humans seem to be in the natural world.
We don't have thick hair, big claws or teeth. We
don't have a great sense of smell, we can't run
very fast, and we're weak compared to other animals are
(36:59):
side eyes. However, we're the most biologically successful mammal in
this epic of planet Earth. Do we owe a big
part of our current existence to dogs? Everywhere that we're weak,
they're strong. If you look at human existence as a whole,
every section of that existence is critical to the next.
(37:21):
And there was a time when we were quite literally
going one on one with nature. We were at the
mercy of giant, fast predators, extreme temperatures, and we lived
off the land. The last three hundred years of human existence,
where we've had modern conveniences is a new human experience
comparable to a single page in a book. Is thick
(37:43):
is a jacked up mudding truck in Mississippi. My point
is this, we survived and thrived in our hunter gathered
past in a big part because of dogs, not just
any dogs, but hunting dogs. The story of the dog
(38:04):
is synonymous with the story of mankind. And that really
brings me to like why I wanted to talk to you, Because,
like I said earlier, some people and ideas and philosophies
currently today are kind of trying to change the rules
about how humans used dogs, specifically inside of using hunting dogs,
(38:29):
which is the very foundation of the reason we even
have domestic dogs to begin with, the only reason you
have a chihuahua, the only reason you have a German
Shepherd in your backyard is because of hunting. And then
now in hunting space, the most persecuted hunting in North
America is big game hunting with dogs, particularly bears, mountain lions,
(38:53):
and and there's lots of different reasons why people see that.
They think it's a relic of the past. They think
it's bar barrack. Some people would say that it's not
relevant to modern times. What are your thoughts on that.
I think we have dogs for this reason, that's what
they're good at. And obviously, like you're a bear hunter,
(39:14):
you have dogs that are very good at hunting bear.
I'd imagine I talked to someone else recently about that
same thing, and you're right, Like a German shepherd is
a guard dog, and it's a it's a shepherd, and
like it can do that behavior as a pet in
a way, like that's not its only job, but it
can do it a two hours, just a toy dog essentially.
But then you have dogs like coon hounds and other hounds,
(39:38):
and you know, like hunting dogs that are designed and
bred for that, and it's doing them a disservice to
not do that behavior, and that's where you get aggression issues,
and that's where you get dogs that are always in shelters.
I agree, I think there should be a way for
dogs to do that kind of thing, and hopefully ethically.
But if they if a bear hunting dog that bear
(40:00):
hunting in an ethical manner, you know what I feel
like is happening, Like at the very core of the
argument that dogs should no longer be used for hunting
in the way that they have for the last and
let's be generous and say fourteen thousand years humans have
used dogs for hunting, maybe twenty, I would make an
(40:23):
argument that to take that away from from me and
my children would be to strip away a part of
our history that's potentially even coded into our d n
A because we have been with dogs for so long,
just like we've changed them, there's kind of incalculable ways
(40:44):
that they have changed us in this connection. I read
where they've done studies on dogs and humans that when
a human engages with a dog, there's oxytocin that is released,
which is a chemical the brain that humans crave and love.
We don't even most people aren't even aware of it.
We crave it and love it, and it gives us
(41:05):
a sensation of safety and pleasure. And the same chemical
is released in a dog when a human engages with
it and pets it. And so it's like this ancient,
irrational connection. And two, simply for the sake of whatever
(41:26):
reason that people would have to say, that's no longer relevant.
I feel like it's stripping away a part of our
humanity and I'm not cool that. David. Yeah, I grew
up in the Greater New York area and didn't live
out West, didn't get to experience the wilderness in a way.
So I grew up watching stuff like this and being like,
(41:47):
why would they do that? Like that, don't do that
to the animal, Like would hurt it? The cougar is
gonna die scared, the bear is gonna die terrified, you know.
But I moved out West for grad school, ended up
hunting pronghorn. My friends got to gut it with still tools.
That was really fun, and I got to see some
dogs hunt at one point. I've never done it myself,
but you're right in a sense, and like especially studying
(42:10):
this at the same time, I was just fascinated by
it because what I'm studying in the past is people
hunting with dogs. That's just the gist of it. And
I can't understand that unless I watch dogs hunt now,
or at least learn about it from people like you.
And I agree. I think it's a practice that should
be kept because it is an integral part of our
(42:30):
relationship um And obviously dogs sniffing dogs being centuries dogs
that can stay, why couldn't that stay? And I would
make the argument too that the quality of life that
my squirrel dogs have and my coon dogs have, I
would say, is probably far above the quality of life
that a dog has that lives indoors, that is never
(42:56):
allowed to free range across the landscape, dog that has
been genetically altered from its original state in such a
way that it can't really function. Like a lot of
those specific breeds that we have today would not have
survived in the wild there they were bred to be
(43:16):
for an aesthetic or for a certain, very highly specific job.
And hunting dogs are much more in tune with their
original design than just like your lap dog. I mean,
because you know, like my hounds, they're far from a wolf,
but they're way closer to a wolf than a chihuahua.
(43:39):
So that's where I have a problem with someone that
has a chihuahua telling me not to bear hunt with
my dogs. A philosophical problem with that idea. You know,
I do have empathy for people that may not understand
hunting with dogs. So it's it's not people that were against,
it's it's it's really lack of information, lack of understanding.
(44:02):
Because for someone that doesn't have any information that sees
some portrayal of a bunch of hillbillies turn and loose
their dogs to go kill a bear, that is very
very easy to portray in a negative way to someone
without information. Hill Billy bros. I've got to clarify that
(44:23):
the word hill billy is a term of endearment to
me and not a jab carry on. It takes a
lot of steps of information and pursuit of understanding the
position of the human that's doing that to actually come
to a place where you could go from zero understanding
to enough understanding to go, Yeah, I get it, Yeah,
(44:46):
I get why they do that. So we are up
against a big mountain that is hard to climb. Because
it's really easy to put up a billboard in any
place and say one liner, you know, this is a
bad thing. It's much harder to portray something as deeply human.
Also a very huge component of scientific wildlife management that
(45:10):
actually helps the species that we're hunting thrive. I mean,
that's that's the biggest thing, David, of our position as
hunters is. Yeah, we're not just wanting to have fun
with our dogs. That's part of it, and yes, that
is why we do it. But it's a beautiful stone
that kills two birds with one chunk because we get
to have this amazing interaction with our animals and a
(45:32):
lifestyle that's built around them, and we also get to
be key contributors to the success of the species that
we're hunting. I mean, that's why North American hunting is
just like this beautiful thing, and it has been portrayed
in such a way that many people wouldn't describe it
or understand it that way. And and dogs are one
(45:55):
of the most contentious parts of it. And so I
hope that are standing. Kind of the deep human history
with dogs, the original way that we used them, the
original design of how we use them, can help people
bridge the gap between that and now when they see
me with my coon dogs and squirrel dogs and bear dogs.
(46:18):
Because I think it's an awesome thing. I think it
it makes me more human to turn loose my dogs
in the woods and interact with them. I'm raccoon hunting
with my daughter River using our American plot hounds. We
free cast the dogs into the darkness, meaning we've just
(46:41):
turned them loose with GPS collars on so we can
keep track of them, and they've gone out and found
the fresh scent of a raccoon. Hopefully they'll trail the
scent of the critter until it runs up a treat
where they'll tree it, meaning they'll bark at the base
of the tree and wait for us to come to them.
(47:01):
Following hounds that you've trained is a rare human pleasure,
tickling ancient mechanisms inside of me that are beyond reason,
and our hunting serves an important role in wildlife management.
We're in for a treat, all right, River, you're right dogs,
(47:27):
All right, River, We're gonna we're gonna turn these dogs
out by this pond. It's been raining, but I figured
by now the coons have had a little time to stir.
Let's just get him, all right, and you ready, Scooter,
you're ready? Firm? Ah, you're ready. We'll get him. Did firm?
(47:52):
Just part? I do? True? It sounds like it. It
sounds like it. Man, it's about to rain. Are they
are they moving? Let's just walk out here? Are they moving? Man?
(48:19):
If they treat one tonight, I'm gonna be pretty proud
of not ideal conditions? Yeah, oh yeah, good lords. Talk
to him now, talk to I don't know we're gonna
find him in this mess, but I think he's in here.
What do you think? It's amazing what these dogs can do.
(48:46):
We have never had any clue that coon was around here.
Talk to him, talk to him. Yeah, River, I've been
dragging you around since you could walk. Coon hunting ever
think that this is ridiculous and kind of irrational? How
much we love our dogs? Of course not, It's totally right,
(49:08):
totally what you think? So so convinced. You know, most
people are home watching Netflix right now, and we're out
here wandering around the ticks and chiggers and getting wet
the river. What do you what do you like about
this coon hun I like, like all of it. I
like it's the only I think it's the only t
(49:30):
typeting we do that's at night, and so it's cool
to be out here at night. And then, I mean,
it was so fun training these dogs. I mean I
remember when we were I was like twelve years old
and training Fern, and it was like the coolest thing
in the world. And it's so cool now that she'll go,
she'll go trained by yourself, and that we taught her
how to do that. So it's awesome to see see that.
And then it's also the only kind of hand you
(49:51):
can talk through. So you can't have to sit still.
You don't have to. You can people. Yeah, you can
bring you bring your friends, and bring your dogs. If
your dogs are your friends, and your dogs are your
best friends, good boys, by good, all right, he's in
(50:13):
the whole way. I'm gonna find him. We're gonna find him.
Let's go home. My grandfather's bird dogs have long since passed,
but his love of working and hunting dogs is strongly
alive inside of me today and every time I turn
(50:36):
loose my coon hounds, or I see my squirrel dogs
elated to tree. A squirrel sense exactly what he did
and what ancient humans of the past did too, A
deep and hard to explain fascination and partnering with the
dog to do work and acquire wild protein. I'm confident
(50:57):
that our connection to dogs and specific lead to hunting dogs,
is an important cog in the robust definition of what
it means to be human. You can follow my guests
David ian How at David ian How dot com. You
(51:18):
can also follow him on YouTube and Instagram at Ethno
Sinology that's e t h n O se y n
O l o g y ethno sinology, which is the
study of dogs and humans. Check out David I and
How
Host
Clay Newcomb
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