![]() There are about 900 million of them worldwide, just shy of 80 million of whom live in the U.S. Today, at least in areas populated by humans, dogs are the planet’s most abundant terrestrial carnivore. Wealthy eccentrics took to including dogs in their wills. Aristocrats took to including the family dog in family portraits. Our folk stories were populated by dogs: the Africans spoke of Rukuba, the dog who brought us fire the Welsh told the tale of the faithful hound Gelert, who saved a prince’s baby from a wolf. Our language reflected how love-drunk we’d gotten: the word “puppy” is thought to have been adapted from the French poupée, or doll-an object on which we lavish irrational affection. Never mind, though by then we were smitten. We kept paying dogs their food-and-shelter salary, but we got little that was tangible in return. If you didn’t need a working dog-and fewer and fewer people did-the ledger went out of balance. When humans ourselves left the state of nature, our alliance with dogs might well have been dissolved. So they welcomed those few in from the cold and eventually came to call them dogs, while the animals’ close kin that didn’t pull the good genes-the ones we would come to call wolves or jackals or coyotes or dingoes-would be left to make their way in the state of nature in which they were born. ![]() Our ancestors didn’t know what genes were many millennia ago, but they did know that every now and then, one or two of the midsize scavengers with the long muzzles that came nosing around their campfires would gaze at them with a certain attentiveness, a certain loving neediness, and that it was awfully hard to resist them. On chromosome six in particular, investigators have found three genes that code for hyper-sociability-and they are in the same spot as similar genes linked to similar sweetness in humans. But elsewhere in the genome, there are a few genetic scraps that make a powerful difference. Dogs and wolves share 99.9% of their mitochondrial DNA-the DNA that’s passed down by the mother alone-which makes the two species nearly indistinguishable. It was only by the tiniest bit of genetic chance that our cross-species union was forged at all. ![]()
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