History of Dogs
A clay dog from Han Dynasty China (about 100 BC)
Dogs are a kind of wolf. They were the first animals that
people fed on purpose, earlier than sheep or cows
or chickens. People have been taking care of dogs
since about 13,000 BC, in the Stone
Age, before the beginning of farming (and possibly much earlier; maybe as long as 100,000 years ago, before people left Africa). Most likely, dogs themselves began
this relationship by hanging around people's campsites (there weren't any
villages yet), trying to snatch some of their garbage to eat. At first,
people must have tried to scare the dogs away. But after a while, some of
them realized that the dogs ate rats, and also helped to clean up food garbage
that drew flies and other insects. So campsites with dogs were cleaner and
healthier than campsites without dogs. Fewer people got dysentery
and died.
The people who lived in these cleaner campsites grew up stronger than people who shooed away dogs,
and there were more of them. Eventually, the dog-lovers pretty much took over, all over the world.
Somewhere along this line, people probably began to see that the dogs could do other
things too. Dogs could let you know if any big animals or human
enemies were coming. Dogs could let you know if the baby was getting
into trouble. So people began to encourage the dogs to hang around. At some
point, people also began to teach dogs to obey them, and they also started
to use the dogs to help them hunt other animals,
and to pull sleds. This was the earliest domestication of any animal, and
may have given people the idea of domesticating sheep
and goats, which came next. It doesn't seem to have happened once, in one
place, but many times, all over Europe and Asia, especially in India.
Dogs continued to be useful to people, and to live with people, even when people started to farm and to live in villages. It turned out that dogs could also guard sheep, and help to herd the sheep when you were moving them from one pasture to another. Some people ate them, especially in China. You might think of those dogs as a great way to turn garbage into food. Even in places where people usually didn't eat dogs, like Europe, dogs provided an emergency source of food when there was a famine. If you were starving, you had to kill and eat the village's dogs before they decided to eat you (and then there would be a lot more rats than usual, without the dogs to eat them, and you would live on the rats for a while).
Today you probably think of your dog as a pet, and give it food. But in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, hardly anyone was rich enough to give food to a dog on purpose. Most dogs had to find their own food in people's garbage, or they had to eat rats. Only working dogs that herded sheep or pulled sleds would have been given food. So most dogs, like most people, were skinny and had lots of diseases and bugs.
To find out more about the history of dogs, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Wonders of Donkeys, by Sigmund Lavine and Vincent Scuro (1979). For kids.
The Definitive Donkey, by Betsy Hutchins (1999). All about donkeys, including how to train them.
Horse Power: A History of the Horse and the Donkey in Human Societies, by Juliet Clutton-Brock (1992).
