Reimagining the Dog Meg Daley Olmert Enjoys a Story of the Victorian Drive Towards Unnatural Selection

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HISTORY Reimagining the dog Meg Daley Olmert enjoys a story of the Victorian drive towards unnatural selection.

harles Darwin, Charles Dickens and ended only in 1835, changing before their eyes. With wolves P. T. Barnum walk into a pub … a clas- with the first Cruelty extinct in Britain, animal baiting banned sic comic set-up that can only lead to to Animals Act. Rat and game birds bred and delivered within Cone punch line: The Invention of the Modern baiting remained a shooting range, dogs no longer needed Dog. This chronicle — by science historians gambling sport in valour, courage and stamina. Freed to select Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton and pubs until 1912. Afi- for conformation alone, each club created an historian Julie-Marie Strange — charts the cionados of these exacting standard for its breed’s appearance confluence of biology, class and popular ‘entertainments’ were and assigned a numerical value to it. entertainment that resulted in an unprec- known as “the Fancy”. There was little science to guide them. edented burst of nineteenth-century canine The Invention of Those who bred the They did have Darwin’s warnings about breeding. That tumult, they argue, stares out the Modern Dog: fastest, toughest dogs the evils of inbreeding; and a Lamarckian at us today from the eyes of our dogs. Breed and Blood could make a good belief in the heritability of acquired traits Science and engineering were reshaping in Victorian Britain living on wagers set by still lingered. The well-established prac- the British Isles, shrinking distances both MICHAEL WORBOYS, the thirsty new army tice of outbreeding periodically to improve geographical and social, even as Darwin- JULIE-MARIE STRANGE of clerks and mid-level performance was cast aside in favour of & NEIL PEMBERTON ian science effectively ‘shrank’ the distance Johns Hopkins managers. For their inbreeding to produce physical duplicates between species. A newly minted middle University Press (2018) wives, the new money of the latest standard. ‘Best of show’ would class donned morning coat and top hat, and bought servants, and go only to a black Newfoundland. The pug strode off to support the making of Empire. empty time and laps were soon filled by min- was shrunk from 14 kilograms to 10. Point- Vast numbers of people were ‘improved’ as iature dogs such as the King Charles span- ers grew larger. More toxic standards were their hard work finally paid off, and improved iel favoured by Queen Victoria (see Nature set for the newly redundant bulldog. Selec- people needed improved dogs. Between 1874 http://doi.org/gdthxg; 2018). tive breeding and surgical ‘face jobs’ pro- and the beginning of the twentieth century, The Fancy scaled up its ‘sporting’ events duced extremely flat-faced dogs that were the number of dog breeds recognized in Brit- and toy-dog beauty favoured in the show ain swelled to include foreign breeds, varia- shows. The gentry, ring but were report- tions of older ones such as the Welsh spaniel seeing this as entre- edly devoid of courage and the Skye terrier, and “manufactures”, preneurial overstep THE GOAL WAS and aggression. George such as the Yorkshire terrier. These dogs threatening to dilute Roper, a leading figure were whipped into must-have status through the purity of the Brit- in the Bulldog Club, another Victorian invention: the dog show. ish dogs’ pedigree, IMPROVEMENT lamented that the For the lucky and industrious, there was created the Kennel OF THE breed was “more liable much to celebrate, and the money and time Club to set rules for the to deterioration” than to do it. Over more than 270 pages, the shows. Yet, despite its DOG SHOW, others. authors document the dog show “mania” claimed dedication to The goal was that swept across Britain from 1862. It is improving breeds, the NOT THE improvement of the here that the new, improved dog took centre club never set breed- dog show, not the dog. stage, for better or worse. ing standards. Those DOG. Breed standards, based The British aristocracy had always been were the preserve of on fashion, were locked keen on dogs: stud pedigrees remain as local clubs devoted to a into place to make closely tracked and controlled as those of single breed, a newly emerged social stratum judging easier and competition fairer. The their masters. Canine valour was tested in spanning the amateur–professional chasm. result was dog‑as-commodity. the field and exalted in the arts. Meanwhile, Enter Darwin, Dickens and Barnum. The authors’ exhaustive documentation of the dog as entertainment had long been the Unnatural selection, social pretentions and these socio-economic forces supports their domain of the ‘lower’ classes. Bull and bear showbiz set the tone for thousands of dog thesis that today’s dog is a deliberate invention baiting, popular in Elizabethan London, shows drawing Victorians of all classes (on of the Victorians. But, for all the research and separate days) to marvel at dogs that were reporting, they do not explain the emotional NEW IN A Million Years of Music PAPERBACK Gary Tomlinson MIT Press (2018) “Musical expression is a universal characteristic of our species.” Musicologist Highlights of this Gary Tomlinson explores the reaches of that idea, and to what extent the season’s releases. traits essential to music-making can be seen as evolutionary behaviours, traceable across human history. Expertly interweaving humanities and science, Tomlinson demonstrates how the answers to philosophical questions surrounding modern music can be discovered in their ancient origins.

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drive behind it. Why did the Victorians want learn that members of the Fancy were said to a gene profile associated with a painful this dizzying variety? What did all that mess- to treat dogs better than their families; that urinary disease. A simple outbreeding to an ing about with dogs’ appearance do to the toy dogs were bred to tolerate the excessive English pointer in 1973 left the breed with animals’ emotions and behaviour? fawning of their mistresses; and that the spots and good health. In 2011, 15 genera- Thanks to Russian geneticists Dimitry shows’ popularity was “driven by the partici- tions later, the American Kennel Club finally Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut (as chronicled in pants’ passion for dogs”. The only evidence of recognized it as a true Dalmatian. Trut and Lee Dugatkin’s 2017 How to Tame a passion, however, appears in those (mainly We now have the genetic science and Fox (and Build a Dog)), we know that select- women) who fought to abolish the shows technology to make true improvements to ing for tame behaviour in wild foxes changes because of abusive conditions (such as long the twenty-first-century dog. We can and the animals’ look. The reverse should also hours, lack of water and worse). They also we must use this knowledge to re-invent hold: that selecting for coat and eye colour spoke out against breeding standards that led the Victorian canine into an animal bred for manipulates genes that affect behaviour. If to gross deformities and diseases still with good health and temperament. I can’t wait to such bundled temperamental effects were us. Cruel ear cropping was abolished in Brit- see what that dog looks like. ■ mentioned in the vast nineteenth-century ain in 1895, but the 2007 ban for tail docking breeding literature, it would have been still allows exemptions for working breeds Meg Daley Olmert is the author of Made fascinating and important to include them. such as spaniels, poodles and pointers. For Each Other: The Biology of the Human- Given the profound sense of attachment To me, the greatest service offered by Animal Bond and director of research for on which the human–dog bond evolved, I The Invention of the Modern Dog is to Warrior Canine Connection, a service-dog would have expected that this bond — or the remind us not to breed dogs for confor- training intervention to reduce the symptoms lack of it — would be an important factor in mation alone. We knew that 150 years ago. of combat trauma, in Boyds, Maryland. the Victorian explosion in breeding. We do Take the Dalmatian, which owes its spots e-mail: [email protected]

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut Kevin N. Laland Princeton Univ. Press (2018) Univ. Chicago Press (2018) How did the human potential for culture Biologists Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut evolve from hominin behaviour and cognition? chronicle Trut’s extraordinary, long-running Evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland navigates research with Dmitri Belyaev on the domestication the false leads and breakthroughs that led to his of silver foxes — work that effectively shrank theory that culture is both a result of evolution, and 15,000 years of evolution to decades. a factor that has effectively shaped its progress.