Dogs built human civilisation. Calling them a menace now is betrayal

Human civilisation began with wolves by our side. Dogs were never supposed to be stray.

Representational image | Ankit Roy | ThePrint

The Supreme Court said in July, ‘‘There is all space for these animals, no space for humans”, telling petitioners to “open a shelter at home” if they wanted to feed strays, and later verbally directed Delhi-NCR authorities to capture, sterilise and confine all dogs permanently to shelters. But by 22 August, a three-judge bench stayed its own order, admitting such a blanket directive was unworkable and could create a Catch-22 given India’s poor shelter infrastructure.

The crisis is undeniable: the population of dogs has grown rapidly, creating tension in civil society, particularly in urban spaces where human and animal territories have overlapped. However, beyond legality, the irony is stark. Because the crisis that is under debate is of our own making. We, the humans, are responsible for this 21st-century dilemma. 

Now that dogs are cast as adversaries rather than companions, it is worth recalling how we drew wolves to our fires, and tamed them to suit our needs—only to turn away and abandon them

Eating at the same table 

Everything humans have created and achieved, from food on our plates to the devices you use to read this column, rests on one turning point in our history. Without it, none of this would exist: domestication. A process of adapting wild plants and animals for human use. It was this shift that opened the door to farming, to the industrial to the cyber revolution. Without domestication, according to archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson, we would probably be a couple of million humans on the planet, maximum, not the eight billion we see today. 

And it was the dog that came before kittens, chickens, goats, cows, or crops. Humans formed an unlikely partnership with the grey wolves, the common ancestor of all the domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). Over time, these wolves underwent striking physical and behavioural changes: their skull, teeth, and paws shrank, their body temperature changed, their ears flopped, and they acquired a more docile temperament. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces and master the art of the ‘puppy eyes’ to grab our attention.

Scientists suggest that somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, wolves (Canis lupus) began edging closer to human camps in search of animal scraps and other edible discards. Humans, in turn, recognized the usefulness of wolves as hunting partners and then later as guards. At this stage, companionship was never on the minds of wolves when they began to tag along; they were merely sharing the table (and the kill). Biologists call it ‘commensalism,’ literally translated to eating at the same table. 

But in 2021, James A. Serpell challenged the ‘commensal scavenger hypothesis’. Drawn on anthropological observations of present-day hunter-gatherers, he argued that such a pathway is unlikely. His paper concludes that wolf domestication depended on a more deliberate cooperative bond between humans and wolves based on the early socialisation of wolf pups into the community. Zeuner (1963:84) also believed that adopted wolf pups, which grew up in human company and revealed their social propensities.

Whether it was commensalism or socialisation between humans and wolf pups, things changed rapidly when humans started to build permanent settlements. The relationship deepened based on mutual benefits. Humans needed protection from other predators, and wolves got food. For generations, this bond deepened and paved the way for dogs. When, how, and where this domestication process began is still not known, but studies estimate at least 11,000 years of history.

In 2020, a paper ‘Origin and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs’, the study sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes from Europe, the Near East, and Siberia. These samples were compared with modern dogs and wolves. The findings reconfirmed that all dogs have common ancestors, suggesting a single origin (as opposed to the dual origin proposed in 2016), from wolves. This completely negated early assumptions made by scientists like Charles Darwin (1885), who was puzzled by the huge variety of dog breeds and suggested that the dog must be descended from several different species of canid, extinct and recent. 

This study also highlighted that by 11,000 years ago, there were already five major, genetically distinct dog lineages, indicating that the diversification had occurred much before the advent of agriculture. Strikingly, the genetic history of dogs both mirrors and diverges from our own—tracking human migrations across continents in some cases—as co-travellers and companions, and taking its own unexpected path in other cases. 

 By the time plants were domesticated, dogs were already man’s best friend. Around 14,000 – 12,000 years ago, dogs were being buried alongside humans, a testament of companionship woven into the social and emotional world.

In the name of dog

In the Indian context, archaeozoological studies have found evidence of dogs right from the Mesolithic period – 10,000 years ago. At Bhimbetka, 14 (out of 41) drawings of dogs are dated to this time period. Similarly, at Adamgarh in Madhya Pradesh and Bagor in Rajasthan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of dogs. By the Neolithic, dogs were fully integrated into human settlements. At Mehrgarh, 8th millennium BCE, dog remains appear alongside cattle, sheep, and goats. 

During the first urbanisation, faunal remains and dog figurines – sometimes with a collar – are proof of their continuing collaboration. A turning point, however, could be seen at Burzahom, in Kashmir, where a dog was buried with the owner under the very floor of their home. This interdependent relationship shared between dogs and the people of Burzahom is artistically depicted in the engraving on a stone slab at the site. 

 

21st-century dilemma

It’s undeniable that domesticated dogs are largely a product of human-driven artificial selection, with natural selection playing a smaller role. Man’s control of this animal has given rise to the vast array of breeds that range in size from the tiny Chihuahua to the Great Dane. From ally to guard, to pets, they have fulfilled many roles over tens and thousands of years of human history. 

Today, with rising skyscrapers and population combined with changing aspirations, dogs don’t fit the bill. They are no longer seen as co-travellers in our evolutionary story, but as a nuisance, a threat, and even an enemy. The truth, however, remains that dogs were never engineered to be ‘awara’ or strays, they were made to live like domesticated animals of the community. The situation is not better for pedigree dogs; they are also abandoned. 

Recent debates and protests have laid bare the selective memory of humans. The argument that there’s more space for animals and not enough for humans is removed from a fundamental truth. There would be no human cities, no civilisation, no space at all without the animals we first domesticated. The dog carved out that space with us. To now claim there is no room for them is betrayal. 

Irony is that even this betrayal will not solve the crises – humans and dogs deserve safer streets. For that, we need a strict (on the part of humans) and humane (for dogs) approach. 

Disha Ahluwalia is an archaeologist and research fellow at the Indian Council Of Historical Research. Views are personal. She tweets @ahluwaliadisha.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)