Introduction

First as scavengers, later as companions, servants, and protectors, dogs have been with us a long, long time. But the fate of dogs in the crowded modern world is uncertain. Dogs fit easily into past human societies based on hunting and gathering, and later on agriculture, but less room is left for them in today's cities. Forty percent of U.S. households have at least one dog, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. But dogs are now outnumbered by cats. Writer Cullen Murphy summed up, only half-facetiously, the broader implications of this shift:

Consider an America congenial to the dog: it was a place of nuclear or extended families, of someone always home, of children (or pets) looked after during the day by a parent (or owner), of open spaces and family farms, of sticks and leftovers, of expansiveness and looking outward and being outside....Consider an America conducive to the cat: it is a place of working men and women with not much time, of crowded cities, of apartment buildings with restrictive clauses, of day-care and take-out food, of self-absorption and modest horizons.

Increasing intolerance for dogs is shown in more and more laws, which regulate when dogs must be confined, where their owners may take them, and even how many may live in a house. But before getting into the legal rules, here's a brief look back at the shared history of people and dogs, and how they've come to play such a ubiquitous role in our society.

A Little History

Only two animals have entered the human household otherwise than as prisoners and become domesticated by other means than those of enforced servitude: the dog and the cat. -- Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog

Most people think they know how dogs came to be part of the human family: someone living in a cave took in an orphaned wolf puppy and tamed it. Or wild dogs hung around human encampments looking for scraps and gradually got tame. Or wolves started hunting in cooperation with humans and were rewarded with a share of the kill. Probably none of these theories is accurate. But luckily for all of us who like to speculate, we may never know for sure.

Experts differ on just when dogs were domesticated. Some say the evidence indicates domestication as far back as 14,000 years ago. Almost all agree that the dog was the first -- by as much as several thousand years -- domesticated animal.

What wild animal metamorphosed into the modern dog -- an animal we now know so well that its Latin name is Canis familiaris? With the advent of DNA sequencing, there is no longer much doubt that the gray wolf ( Canis lupus) is the ancestor of the modern dog. Some biologists even consider them the same species, and dogs have almost certainly been cross-bred to wolves since domestication.

Dogs are biologically suited to domestication, says one writer, because of their tendencies toward curiosity, a willingness to move, and the ability to learn throughout life. These traits (which are shared by humans, by the way) allowed them to approach human settlements and enter into a symbiotic relationship with people.

After agriculture replaced hunting and gathering, and permanent settlements replaced the nomadic way of life, selective breeding of domestic animals began in earnest. It is that breeding -- the human tinkering with canine evolution -- that eventually led to today's astonishing variety of domestic dogs. People bred dogs to emphasize certain desired characteristics and, over the years, developed breeds with the traits they needed. Thus the coursing hounds -- salukis, greyhounds, and others -- got the long legs, good eyesight, and slender build they needed to chase prey long distances over open terrain. (Believe it or not, the original idea was not to have them chase mechanical rabbits around a track.) Other hounds -- bassets, beagles, and bloodhounds, for example -- got their extraordinarily keen noses, which enable them to trail prey. Herding dogs such as collies and sheepdogs were bred for intelligence and the herding instinct. Toy poodles, Chihuahuas, and other tiny dogs are scaled-down versions of full-sized ancestors. The list goes on.

The Dog's Place Today

Dogs still herd sheep, sniff out drugs, help their disabled owners, and guard buildings. But the main contribution of most dogs these days is companionship. Dogs make people smile and laugh, give them uncomplicated and unconditional love, and stick with them when others have gone.

Dogs as Companions

Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other. -- Robert Benchley

Studies and surveys of dog owners consistently reach a simple but important conclusion: Pets make their owners happy. For example, take a 1984 Psychology Today magazine survey. Thirteen thousand readers replied, including enough non-pet-owners (12%), the magazine concluded, to allow some conclusions to be drawn about differences between the two groups. Pet owners were more satisfied with their lives, both past and present. (That result may be partially explained by demographics: the owners were as a group more affluent, though less well educated, than the nonowners; also, more of them were married.) Fifty-seven percent of pet owners, if stranded on a desert island, would prefer to be with their pet than another person, according to the American Animal Hospital Association.

Many parents get a dog "for the children," because they believe that growing up with a dog gives a child companionship and teaches responsibility, gentleness, and compassion. They're right, according to several studies. For example, a group of preschoolers allowed to care for a puppy at their school became more cooperative and sharing, according to the researchers who studied them. "They have to put themselves in the pet's position and try to feel how the pet feels," explained one researcher. "And that transfers to how other kids feel."

On a standardized personality test (the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), graduate students who had owned dogs as children showed significantly higher self-esteem ("ego strength") than those who had not had pets. The researcher theorizes that having a dog lets a child form attachments without fear, because of the unconditional acceptance the dog gives the child. The dog's trust helps the child trust himself.

And perhaps children should consider getting a dog "for the parents." According to one study of 454 new parents, men who are attached to their pet dogs also make better fathers. The dog-owning dads consistently scored higher on tests geared to measure their perceptions of happiness about their relationship with their babies, their marriages, and their role as fathers.

Dogs as Therapists

A psychotherapist would have much to learn from watching the way a dog listens. -- Dr. Victor Bloom

Four out of five people who responded to the Psychology Today survey said that when they were lonely or upset, pets were often their closest companions. One woman in a difficult family situation wrote that without her dog, she "could not tolerate life."

This finding explains why the most striking benefits of an animal's companionship are reaped by people who lack close human relationships: neglected or disturbed children, lonely older people, or prison inmates. For example, a study of fifth-graders found that for children who were emotionally neglected, pets served as confidants and friends -- in essence, substitute parents.

Therapists and administrators now routinely use animals to treat or manage such patients. But for the most part, animals entered into the world of psychological therapy serendipitously. One psychiatrist, for example, happened to have his dog in his office when a young patient came early for an appointment; the dog became an integral part of the child's therapy. In the 1970s, an entire course of research was triggered when troubled adolescents in an Ohio State University hospital -- many of whom had refused to communicate with the staff -- asked to play with dogs used for behavioral research, which they had heard barking in a nearby kennel. Even the most withdrawn patients improved after contact with the dogs.

In one study of children with severe emotional problems, half were given traditional therapy, and the rest were allowed to play with a dog during their therapy sessions. The children who received conventional treatment got worse (as measured by standard tests of ability to control themselves and empathize), but the children who played with dogs got better.

It is not an exaggeration to say that pets can give people a reason to live. Often, people institutionalized in prisons or hospitals, for example, have no goals, no responsibility, no variety in their lives. Animals, either as visitors or residents, make the atmosphere more home-like and can have a wonderful, enlivening effect on morale.

An institutionalized person who is allowed to care for a pet may become more alert, involved, and sociable. As one prison psychiatric social worker put it, "the therapeutic results are nothing short of miraculous." Take the story of Jed, who had been in a nursing home for 26 years after suffering brain damage in a fall. He was believed deaf and mute. When he saw Whiskey, a German shepherd-husky dog that had just been placed in his nursing home, he spoke his first words in 26 years: "You brought that dog." He began to talk to the staff and other residents, and to draw pictures of the dog.

Dog owners go to the doctor less than people who don't own dogs, concluded another study of 1,000 elderly Californians. Dog owners had 21% fewer contacts with physicians than did participants who didn't own dogs. The researcher, UCLA professor Judith M. Seigel, surmised that the dogs were a "stress buffer," which lessened the need of their owners to seek out physicians in times of psychological stress.

If you do get sick, a pet can help you get better faster. One study compared postcoronary survival of pet owners versus nonowners; among the pet owners, 50 of 53 lived at least a year after hospitalization, compared to 17 of 39 nonowners. Even eliminating patients who owned dogs (whose health might have been improved just from the exercise of walking the dog), the pet owners still did better. In a follow-up study, the same researcher found that pet owners' worry about their animals actually speeded their convalescence by providing "a sense of being needed and an impetus for quick recovery."

Now that scientists in the medical and psychiatric communities have accepted what pet owners have always known -- that animals make people feel better -- they have set about documenting the physiological effects animals have on people. When people pet dogs, especially ones they have grown attached to, their blood pressure drops. The same happens when people talk to a dog -- although talking to another person usually raises blood pressure. Even the presence of a dog is comforting. In one study, people who took a standardized anxiety-measuring test when the experimenter's dog was in the room scored lower than those who took the test with only the experimenter present. Another experiment showed that women attempting a difficult task felt less stress and fared better when their dogs were nearby than when a human friend was close.

Let's let that old dog-lover Freud have the last word on the psychology of dog-people relationships. Here's how he described the "extraordinary intensity" with which he loved his dog, Topsy: "affection without ambivalence, the simplicity free from the almost unbearable conflicts of civilization, the beauty of an existence complete in itself ... that feeling of intimate affinity of an indisputed solidarity."

Dogs in the Law

Dogs occupy their own odd niche in American law and its principal predecessor, the "common law" of England. Common law is what has evolved as judges decide cases, one by one, over hundreds of years. Unlike statutes, the common law is not written down in one place, but instead is deduced from the judges' writings. The English common law came to this country with the colonists, and forms the basis for the law of every state except Louisiana (which took its law from France's Napoleonic Code).

Under English common law, dogs were not considered to have any intrinsic value. They were kept, in the eyes of the law, merely for pleasure. Only "useful" domestic animals (ones you could eat or put to work), such as cows, horses, sheep, and chickens, were considered to have value. This reasoning seems especially odd when you look at how many dogs were kept to catch rats, herd sheep, or guard houses, but that's the way it was.

Because dogs weren't "property," it wasn't illegal to steal them under the common law. It took an act of Parliament (or a state legislature, in this country) to make stealing a dog a crime. And even when a legislature did act, the result wasn't always a paragon of logic: in England at one time, it was a felony to steal a dog's collar but a misdemeanor to steal the dog.

Nowadays, the law in most places and for most purposes treats dogs just like other kinds of property. Because a dog is property, it has no legal rights of its own. So a dog can't inherit property or sue in its own name. Those rights are reserved for its owner.

But cracks are appearing in this doctrine. Sometimes, courts just cannot ignore the fact that dogs aren't items of property in the way that, say, appliances are. One refrigerator is pretty much like all the others that rolled off the same assembly line. But every dog is unique. They are the subject of custody disputes by divorcing couples, and owners sue for emotional distress when their pets are injured.

It's been proposed that dogs be treated more like children than like property, so that instead of owners they would have guardians. (A few places, including Boulder, Colorado, Berkeley, California, and the state of Rhode Island, now refer to pet owners as guardians.) But a radical departure from traditional law -- which would, among other things, allow pets to own property -- is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[Endnotes] omitted for online sample chapter.