A 20-YEAR-OLD MAN WAS MORE SUCCESSFUL
IN OBTAINING YOUNG WOMEN’S PHONE
NUMBERS IF HE HAD A DOG AT HIS SIDE
unlikely to walk sufficiently fast to enhance their
cardiovascular health.
It’s been claimed that dog owners get more exercise walking
their pet than someone who takes out a gym membership.
But perhaps that’s not much of a claim, since over half of
people who take out an annual gym subscription in January
have stopped going by April. And, even though some dog
owners undoubtedly do take more moderate exercise than
people with no dog to walk, this doesn’t seem to translate into
their living any longer. Perhaps dog ownership, compared
with a brief encounter with a dog cared for by someone else,
is stress-neutral: the daily routine of exercising the dog may
be relaxing, but owning an animal can be stressful,
particularly if it is disobedient or prone to illness.
Recently, the American Heart Association has stated that
dog ownership is “probably associated” with a reduced risk
of heart disease. Since this doesn’t seem to translate into dog
owners living longer, there may be another explanation.
It could be that it works the other way around: people with
poor health think twice before embarking on the
responsibility of caring for a dog for the next 15 or so years. BHAGESH SACHANIA/UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, GETTY
When and where dogs were first
domesticated is still hotly debated among
scientists. There are a few hard facts that all
agree on: dogs were once wolves (and not
jackals, as Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz
once maintained) and they were the first
animal to be domesticated, some time in the
late Pleistocene before the dawn of
agriculture. Beyond that, there is little
agreement. The earliest archaeological
remains that are unequivocally dogs and not
wolves date from 14,000 years ago, but
30,000-year-old skulls have been
discovered in France and Belgium that are
not pure wolf and may be dogs.
With such baffling archaeological
evidence, most scientists have turned to
DNA to find out when and where dogs were
first domesticated. Tens of thousands of
blood samples have been taken from street
dogs around the world, for comparison with
those of wolves. It’s even possible to
analyse DNA from ancient bones: minutesamples from the 30,000-year-old skulls
mentioned earlier are currently being
studied, and it has already been shown that
ancient dogs preserved in the Alaskan
permafrost were descended from Asian
wolves, not American ones.
Indeed, the ancient DNA may turn out to
be more informative than the DNA of living
dogs. Because dogs have been carried
hither and thither around the world, for
thousands of years, their current
distribution may tell us very little of their
origins – hence the competing claims of
different groups of scientists that dogs
variously originated in eastern Asia,
Mongolia, Siberia, Europe or Africa.
But why were the animals domesticated
in the first place? The most recent theory
is that dogs domesticated themselves,
initially living as scavengers in and
around our villages. Today, this is a way of
life still shared by three-quarters of a
billion unowned dogs worldwide.Perhaps they get a cat instead, which would account for the
generally poorer health of cat owners compared to the rest
of the population.Working dogs
Dogs can do more for their owners than just get them
outdoors: they also provide companionship to a degree
unmatched by any other animal. Some dog owners
even like to take their pets into the office. In fact,
campaigns to persuade companies to allow dogs in
the workplace have been gathering momentum since
the turn of the millennium.
While office workers’ stress levels generally increase
from the beginning to the end of the working day, studies
have shown that, if employees are allowed to bring their
dogs in, they actually feel less stressed by the end of the
day. It’s unclear how co-workers feel about sharing their
space with other people’s animals, but anecdotally it seems
as though a dog can reduce tensions by providing a focus
for conversation.
Several studies have confirmed that dogs do indeed
bring people together. In one, conducted in France, it was
found that a 20-year-old man was far more successful in
obtaining young women’s phone numbers if he had a dog
at his side: fewer than one in 10 complied if he was on his
own, one in three if he was with the pooch.
While there are certain drawbacks to bringing dogs to
work, including complaints from those with allergies, and
conf licts with religious beliefs, they do seem to bring
about a general lightening of mood.THE MAKING OF MAN’S BEST FRIENDAncient cave paintings
in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria, appear
to depict dogs alongside humansCan we tell when dogs were first domesticated?
February 2017 67