In these times of crime and the fear of crime it is important to remember that a dog can prevent the theft of your furniture but your furniture cannot prevent the theft of your dog.
I keep a loose rein on the animals in part because I am disposed to prefer loose reins in most situations. But I also think that if I let the animals do more things, many of the things they do will give me pleasure. A lot of the fun of being around animals is that you get to see what they are thinking, and if you’ve got your dog trained like it’s in the Prussian army, it is not going to reveal much.
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Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s long-term study of the dogs of her household began when she agreed to take care of a two-year-old male Siberian husky named Misha while its owners were in Europe. Misha was a wanderer. On his first night in the Thomas household he jumped the back fence and took off. He returned in the morning, but the next night he was gone again.
This rigor was an essential corrective to older styles of observation that tried to fit animals into the categories of bourgeois society, but it could not survive the field experience of all the ethologists who were inspired by Lorenz and Tinbergen to spend years of their lives watching animals. Watch any group of animals–dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, even song sparrows–for any period of time, and you are bound to see individual differences. Smart ones, dumb ones, calm ones, excitable ones. Their responses to the world are not automatic. They represent, instead, reactions filtered through a specific, individual consciousness.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote about culture in lion prides in the Kalahari Desert in an article that ran in the New Yorker a few years ago. She spent part of her childhood there. Her parents were anthropologists who studied the Kung Bushmen. The Bushmen had no weapons capable of defending them from lions, but attacks were almost unheard of. Then in the 70s the area became a national park. Biologists moved in with a management scheme that required the “removal” of a large number of lions. After the removal attacks by lions on humans became alarmingly common. Marshall Thomas surmises that the removal of so many animals broke the cultural continuity that had enforced the long truce between lions and Bushmen.
The book tells of the efforts of a few U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists to protect these wandering wolves and to encourage them, if such a thing is possible, to concentrate their hunting on deer, elk, moose, and other wild prey, and away from cows and sheep.
