This spiffy little terrier is volunteer number one on
day number one of an ambitious project launched
by Harvard University evolutionary neuroscientist
Erin Hecht to answer basic questions about what
dogs do and why they do it. She plans to collect
data on the psychology and behavior of hundreds
of them across all breeds over many years: how
easily they make friends, how well they behave,
how they feel about vacuum cleaners. Four video
cameras document Chevy’s reactions to an exper-
imenter’s precisely scripted maneuvers. From a
reception room next door, the rest of Hecht’s team
watches through a one-way mirror.
After some preliminary scratches and pats,
Harvard undergraduate Hanna McCuistion gives
Chevy a few treats, then places the next one un-
der a glass jar. He sniffs eagerly at it, then gazes
beseechingly at her, cocking his head back and
forth, turning up his dials to maximum cute. A
classic move, Hecht explains: Faced with a diffi-
cult situation, a dog quickly turns to a human for
help. After 20 seconds, McCuistion lifts the jar for
him, and he gobbles up the snack.
A few more simple tests, then she ushers Chevy
into a large wire cage and leaves him alone in the
room. He fidgets and softly whimpers. Experi-
menter two, Stacy Jo, soon enters, but she turns
away, facing the wall for a few long moments while
Chevy stares fixedly at her back. Without mak-
ing eye contact or speaking, she approaches his
cage and sits precisely 1 foot in front of the door,eyes on his chest. Chevy stands
stock-still, ears perked, trembling
slightly. Nonscientifically speak-
ing, this dog is completely weirded
out. From the other side of the
mirror, the scene is both agoniz-
ing and hilarious, like the world’s
most awkward date. Heroically, Jo
keeps a straight face.
The data from these tests—plus
DNA samples—will ultimately
give Hecht new hints about what
changed in dogs after their wild
leap into tameness. Biologically,
they are almost all wolf; techni-
cally, they’re the subspecies Canis
lupus familiaris, but they are fundamentally dif-
ferent from their forebears. You can hand-raise a
wild animal to be tame, and that individual might
be gentle and mild-mannered. But domestication
is a different story. For dogs and other animals
who live with us, tolerance and trust are engraved
in their genes and in their brains.
Hecht’s study is a way to get insight into the
broader subject of how neural matter evolves un-
der strong environmental pressures—in this case,
the very peculiar circumstances of living with,
depending on, and loving another species. “I’m in-
terested in dogs, both for the sake of dogs, and for
what we can learn about humans,” she says. “But
more generally, dogs are a great way to understand
basic processes about how brains evolve.”
She is among a wave of investigators puzzling
out exactly how these furballs got to be our face-
licking, tail-wagging, number-one fans. We prefer
to think that humans wrote the story of domes-
tication: Some galaxy-brain hunter- gatherer
kidnapped a wolf puppy, then shaped a new spe-
cies as a prey-sniffing partner, watchdog, and
companion. But increasingly, most researchers
think that dogs were the original authors of this
tale. Long ago, some wolves hitched their destiny
to ours, launching an extraordinary love affair
that forever entangled both our fates.
Though archaeology can help us pin down the
when and where of dog domestication ( current
thinking is that it happened at least 15,000 yearsA BLACK-AND-WHITE BOSTON TERRIER NAMED CHEVY,
AS SLEEK AND DAPPER AS A SEAL IN A TUXEDO, TROTS
CRISPLY INTO THE SOUNDPROOF TESTING ROOM. HIS
JAUNTY CONFIDENCE WILL FADE QUICKLY AS A TEAM
OF RESEARCHERS SUBJECTS HIM TO A SERIES OF
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT WILL DAUNT,
DISMAY, AND ULTIMATELY BAFFLE HIM. POOR CHEVY
IS ABOUT TO BE GASLIT FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE.96 SPRING 2020 / POPSCI.COM