The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection between Humans and Dogs
by Jon Franklin
Some of the credit for The Wolf in the Parlor may have to go to John Steinbeck.
Just as science reporter Jon Franklin began to study dogs – piqued by a photograph of a twelve-thousand-year-old tomb that contained a man and, at his side, what appeared to be a wolf cub – his then-girlfriend Lynn asked if they might get a poodle. Franklin was not pleased – he “had a reputation to maintain as a hard-assed reporter” – until Lynn reminded him that none other than Steinbeck traveled the country with his standard poodle, Charley.
Franklin got a Charlie of his own. The pup moves Wolf in the Parlor along, guiding Franklin to meditate on peculiarities of dog and human mind and behavior, along with our long shared history of survival and companionship. Wolf in the Parlor is the chronicle of Franklin’s slow conversion to dog person, and his slow realization that we have, in a way, evolved to be dog people.
Franklin’s pedigree (so to speak) is helpful for his work here – he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner for explanatory journalism and feature writing. He’s wary of the schmaltz of most “dog stories” but also dismissive of his colleagues who treat emotion as a shroud around a story without realizing emotion can well be the story. His book moves in a way that seems illogical – taking up, at turns, nuclear paranoia, Spinoza’s spirals of learning, the shapes of clouds – but still gets where it wants to go, as if by unknowable design. As he asks, at one point, “How do I segue between the dog bounding ecstatically through the rainforest and MacLean’s coolly mechanistic vision of the human dilemma? The jump might seem at first to transcend logic, but then whoever said biology was logical?”
As he searches for the origins of the human-canine affair, Franklin finds that for all our modern affection for dogs (and all the money we spend on them), we don’t seem to care much about the biology behind how we came to love them. Dog evolution might be, he says, “the most stagnant of scientific backwaters.” One scientist does lead Franklin to a dog birth date – when the animal became distinct, according to fossils, from the wolf, between eight and twelve thousand years ago. When Franklin asks for specifics, the scientist sighs, “Do you know how much carbon dating costs?”
So Franklin studies the wolf, poetically describing their co-development with humans as a “long, slow, syncopated waltz of hunger, terror, blood, death and rebirth.” He is romantic about the creatures but also scientifically studious; he anthropomorphizes but also considers the problems of doing so. And he finally finds the missing link of the human-canine evolution tale, the “follower wolf,” which fifty thousand years ago started scavenging alongside human communities, separated from his or her pack, and began a new line.
From there, as Franklin puts it, “the implications cascade.” Follower wolves relied on humans and, increasingly, humans relied on them: their acute senses alerted humans to dangers; their puppies made a decent dinner. After the end of the last ice age – at that crucial twelve-thousand-years-ago mark – humans and wolves came to compete in “a dying world,” Franklin writes, in which “the losers would become legend: the saber-toothed tiger, the dire wolf, the mammoth, the giant elk.” Follower wolves became herders, helping ensure that humans won the battle. Humans, in turn, began to protect and care for follower wolves. More notably, Franklin guesses, it seems that women’s selection became natural selection: they favored the meaner pups for food, and the kinder ones for keep, for easing the pains of the elderly and entertaining the kids. Fast forward to medieval Europe, when breeding was becoming a cottage industry. Later on, Charles Darwin studied breeding at kennels to examine how humans made dogs.
Human desires still govern the breeding of dogs, Franklin writes, often to a cruel extent. Our penchant for cute flat faces – even Walt Disney switched Mickey’s longish rat nose to a cuter snub, Franklin points out – means we breed dogs that must live with severe respiratory problems. Our quest for cute created teacup poodles, which often have constant tremors from seizures.
But breeding isn’t the sum of our relationship with dogs. From early on, dogs have simply made us whole – happier and more human. But, Franklin notes, “For us to see the dog as part of ourselves would be to admit to our own emotional frailty.” By the end of Wolf in the Parlor, it seems the hard-assed reporter is no more.
Further Reading: Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond
*Photo courtesy The Pack.
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