Author of the week: Mark Derr

last updated 8 January 2015

Mark Derr believes that dogs and humans were always destined to be friends. In How the Dog Became the Dog, Derr, who has been writing about canines for 20 years, challenges what we think we know about the origins of our four-legged compatriots. “For decades, the story told by science has been that today’s dogs are the offspring of scavenger wolves” and that they wandered into villages to feed on humans’ garbage, said Derr in The Wall Street Journal. He thinks it’s more likely that dogs and humans met and bonded while out on the trail, hunting the same prey. In Derr’s view, dogs weren’t valued first for their whining obsequiousness, nor did breeding steer dogs’ evolution from that moment on. “We chose them, to be sure,” says Derr. “But they chose us too.”

One of Derr’s more curious findings is that a “dog-like wolf” seems to have evolved in every place in the world where wolves and humans shared turf, said Emma Mustich in Salon.com. In that sense, he says, “the dog is an evolutionary inevitability.” But no matter how close man and dog have always been, misunderstandings persist. In dog packs, Derr says, leadership isn’t typically established through aggression, as Cesar Millan has taught in his Dog Whisperer TV series. Derr insists that early wolf packs closely resembled early human tribes. “The pack,” he says, “was an extended family. The alpha male often deferred to other animals in the pack. Why? Because not fighting is more important to social cohesion than fighting.”