Spirit of the Wild Dog: The World of Wolves, Coyotes, Foxes, Jackals and Dingoes

This book on wild dogs written by famous australian ethologists, L. Rogers & G. Kaplan is an outstanding piece of work. While there is a vast amount a literature on dogs, only a handful of it has the scientific value that is necessary to really understand dog behavior. "Spirit of the wild dog" is one of these books. It is written by 2 scientists who have a large comparative and evolutionary view which gives this book one of its unvaluable aspect. The scientific information contained in this comparative book beautifully contrast with anecdotes on dogs which unfortunately constitutes the bulk of dog literature. Therefore if one wants to know about dogs, he better buy this book easy to read and scientifically sound.

While I found the book to be informative and interesting, and I certainly don't regret buying it, it was somewhat different from what I had expected. I had expected the pages to devote more individual time to each specific canine species. Instead, the chapters were dedicated to exploring some of the characteristics shared among the canines (Intelligent behavior, Communication, etc.). I guess it wasn't as comprehensively expository of each species as I wanted it to be, but a good read nonetheless.

even if written to an 8th-grade reader's level. A long time canine fan, I learned a thing or two from this book that I hadn't run across elsewhere. If you're a dog fan, you'll want to know more about their wild canine relatives.

This book posed a few intriguing questions for me, in which animal lovers, biologists, social theorists and others might also be interested. The authors have backgrounds in animal behaviour, neuroscience in animals, and animal communication, cognition and welfare.Dogs belong to the family Canidae, ground-living carnivores with around 36 species, although some of these species interbreed. The lineage is around 40-50 million years old, originating in North America. They reached Europe around 5-7 million years ago, where the well known grey wolf is though to have evolved, who then passed back into North America, amongst other places, around 700,000 years ago. All domestic dogs appear to derive from one ancestral species-Canus lupus-the grey wolf. Latest evidence suggests dogs were first domesticated around 135,000 years ago, perhaps as old as early homo sapien (p12). A variety of wild dog characteristics can be found in the domestic versions, with some notable exceptions.Short-sightedness is probably a domestic trait only (p45). All dogs move their ears and head around to pinpoint location-originally location of prey. Domestic dogs have two photopigments in their eyes, unlike humans with three, meaning they are slightly colour blind (compared to us). Smell is, of course, well developed, and they can tell which direction an animal/person was moving-an important hunting ability (p49). Wild pups must not stray from the den, and so domesticates can reasonably learn to stay at home. Howling (in wolves) is used to increase distances between clans and individuals. (I think there is more here-sex?, hunting prospects?, group development?). Sniffing in all dogs is intimately related to pair bonding and territorial marking. There is a variety of vocalisation forms in wild dogs, such as short distance barks, yelps, and whining, with some co-opted for dog-human communication-eg human sentence upwards inflections reflect some whining communication, etc. Barking, though variable in type and frequency, occurs in all canids, despite common misconceptions. Regurgitating food to the young is also common to all canids (I have a collie who as a puppy managed to steal my dinner from my mouth once-totally innocently of course).Grey wolves, as opposed to some other canids, have a strong vertical social structure. Occasionally submissiveness is ignored by a superior, due to hierarchal threat, or occasionally the inferior won't submit, and an individual may occasionally be forced out of a clan entirely (sound familiar? p94).Also of interest is that African wild dogs have a flatter social structure than grey wolves, which appears to be proportional to their `harsher' environment-that is, elements of in-group competition and in-group rivalry are reduced when conditions become more hazardous-group hierarchy in this sense is an evolved 'luxury', so to speak (p103-104). (This idea has interesting implications to social inequality in humans). Also, species which have a high degree