I grew up around dogs always owned by individuals. Dogs I knew were always attached to an owner primarily following him or her and strongly integrated into a human family. As dogs live much shorter lives, men generally outlive them and there is bereavement that comes at the death of an animal which is where most kids have their first exposure to death.
Dogs with masters are trained to be subservient and loyal. This is to protect the masters children and belongings, and some of them would give their lives to protect their human masters just as is expected in the military of anyone of lower military rank. It’s worth mentioning in some elite armies persons of higher rank are called upon to give their lives protecting men of lower rank, though it doesn’t seem that this is often the case. In some instances the colonel will lead the privates and corporals into an attack.
There is a long history of dogs in the military where the animals play the role of men of lower military rank. People owning dogs feel a deep sense of responsibility for their welfare but get in return unquestioned loyalty. In conflicts such as Afghanistan, many are the stories of ordinary soldiers adopting dogs. But dogs like soldiers are made complicit in savage acts such as Abu Graib prison and. for hunting down defenseless humans and animals and in concentration camps. The Brothers Karamazov recounts a episode in which a military man of high rank is showing his dogs in a parade. A little serf boy of two or three inadvertently throws dirt on one paw. The next day the boy is taken out in public to be torn tor shreds in front of his mother, as example. The idea of the story was suffering of the innocents but you witness all the time just about everywhere the high regard held for privileged pets well over that of underprivileged humans. Humans use their bigger brains and intelligence to repress men and dogs. In many instances children have it over even large dogs who are stronger physically, not seeming to mind at all following orders in abject subservience, children or adults in a family being in charge of distributing little morsels of food. Dogs are willing to trade autonomy for abject slavery. It amazes me how obsequious and repressed an animal becomes in some instances even among children who are by nature controlling and bossy.
Where I grew up I observed when a female went into heat the males would go crazy often breaking out just to mate but that afterwards males were completely indifferent to their offspring. I’m told this is different from wolf families where family units, monogamous fathers and mothers spend time in family units hunting in their range.
In my recent visits to economically disadvantaged foreign countries, Peru and India in particular, I witnessed a completely different social arrangement between dogs and men. In Peru I started to collect what I called mangy dog photos. There I met dogs and people who were dirty thin bony and diseased and otherwise poorly cared for.
Where people live directly among dogs and other animals the relative relations between humans and animals seem paradoxically distant. I didn’t find instances where one human possessed a particular dog, but dogs seemed dependent on human habitations, seemingly living on scraps and extras and were tolerated by humans though poorly cared for. Since there seemed to be no loyalties under this system, it was hard to fathom the advantage humans had in this relation. I suppose out of the very many dogs there came to be some few instanced where one person and one animal would bond, particularly a child. It seemed it me at the time that unlike in the first world, no one had made any intelligent effort to control dog excess stray dog populations.
Dogs seemed to live their own existence as strays almost out in the streets. In Delhi in the mornings from the fifth floor of our hotel room I saw people starting their day, Periodically you would witness street dogs gather round different men who threw out scraps of something for stray animals. Some garbage was gotten rid of in this way since they had rare or nonexistent garbage service. Suddenly the mangy beasts would gather as if out of nowhere as a man would hastily throw them scraps from a kitchen and just as suddenly the animals would disperse. Generally dogs and other animals slept by day. But I’m a light sleeper and it seemed in the middle of the night, you could hear barks and activity and all kinds of night life from street dogs, Delhi night life.
How dogs and man evolved together is an active area of anthropological research. Men and dogs have lived together for at least 15 thousand years that is about as long as the last glacial melt and the rise of agriculture. According to some sources wolves and dogs separated genetically an estimated 44 thousand years ago and it seems more probable that we formed our original relations as hunter-gatherers not as agriculturists. But which social arrangement, the Anglo-American affluent type grew up with or the more distant non-individual owner relation I observed in poorer counties is actually the more “natural” or original?
Was it men or was it dogs who nurtured the original relation? I think you could make an argument in both directions. On the one hand we have the idea of men taking wolves maybe starting with friendlier or more amenable more trainable wolves and actively mating these with other more docile lovable immature forms with wide cute heads and short snouts what is called neoteny, the persistence of child traits common in domestic dogs. The important thing is men and wolves are both highly social creatures at the pinnacle of the food chain. On the one hand you could picture us as competing for similar prey. But both species it seems to me. learned early how they were after the same thing, essentially inhabiting the same biological niche and there was room for cooperation (symbiosis).
On the other it was the wolves themselves who began human relations as scavengers on the periphery of human encampments. Now the more docile among them were perhaps the first to be accepted into human family and even hearth and a natural niche eventually developed converting the feral wolf into the domesticated dog we know today.
Or more likely the dog-man relations were started naturally by the wolves. Then in the nineteenth century up to our own time, knowledge of breeding and even genetics developed until we have what is seen today diversity of dog, still a wolf in some respects, but different in others.
The modern dog differs from the wolf in many ways though its possible to mate with him so that by one definition they may still be part of the same species, actually not, because a real life domestic dog will almost never mate with a wolf. They may physically mate given number of chromosomes etc but will fail to behaviorally mate hence Canis lupus, v Canis domestics. As already pointed out, the dog is indifferent to his offspring whereas the male wolf does take some responsibility for raising his offspring. And the dog is less or not at all anymore, a pack animal, far less vicious and what is more obsequious and respectful to a human master. The wolf respects humans not at all. Oh we do have apocryphal stories whether overt fiction like Jody Picoult’s Lone Wolf of men living with wolves for long periods, and of Remus and Romulus yet for the most part it is men who accepted dogs into their own hearths and encampments and gradually through breeding and training, fashioned dogs into the animals we know today. Suffice it to say there is not an entirely symmetric but at least a strong mutuality to our interspecies relations, one of the strongest, resilient social relations between animals that is known.