On Saturday, March 4th, I was gone from before 8 until almost 5 celebrating my granddaughter’s second birthday. While I was gone, Rita came over and let the big dogs out, fed the puppies, and continued bonding with her new addition, The Puppy Formerly Known as Peanut Buttercup. I mention this to make it clear that I did not abandon them and that, if anything, what all the dogs experience when Rita is here is comparable to a blissful interval in Puppy Disneyland.
Now to set the scene for what happened when I got home. Earlier this week I got an email from a college student who wanted to debunk the myth of domestic canine behavior being related to wolf behavior; she asked if I knew of any peer-reviewed studies that would confirm this. She opened her request, as some people do, with a list of all the notables she had contacted who were unable to help her. I can never figure out whether I’m supposed to be flattered by being lumped with this group, albeit at the end of the list, or whether these people are telling me they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by writing me. Anyhow, I told her the obvious (kindly!) which was that I doubted she’d find any peer-reviewed articles on that subject because I couldn’t imagine anyone with any background in canine ethology writing such an article or, if someone (I did not say “some idiot”) did, I could not imagine any academic wanting to put his or her own credibility on the line by giving such a good review. Saying domestic canine behavior had no relationship to wolf behavior was like saying human and primate behavior had nothing in common. She, btw, was grateful for this insight.
Fast forward to late yesterday afternoon when I arrived home in the middle of an icy cold downpour. The adult dogs greeted me with their usual, “Thank God, you’re home, my bladder is about to burst!! How could you leave me so long?!” routine. This lasted as long as it took them to look outside when I opened the door for them to go out. Then I had to practically throw them out and stay out there with them until they did what they’d told me they were dying to do. When I came back in, I fixed dinner for everyone. For the puppies, that meant a plate of high quality commercial mush. But the bigger dogs are on a raw diet, so that meant a turkey neck for Watson and chicken necks for BeeBee and Frica.
While the canine adults were gnawing away downstairs, I took the mush up to the puppies and assured them that I would never desert them and they would never starve to death, etc. etc. and that although I might not be as good as Rita, I was all they had. Soon Fric came up with one of her chicken necks and I automatically assumed that she wanted to be close to me because I’d been gone so long. I picked up the chicken neck and took it back downstairs and she came with it. Downstairs, I discovered she still had two chicken necks left. But she immediately started eating them so I didn’t give it another thought and instead went back upstairs to do some things in the office. A short while later, she came back up, too, and I assumed she did because she’d finished eating and wanted to check on the pups. Wrong. When I turned in response to a scuffle in the pen, I saw her on top of the crate peering down at the four pups clustered around a chicken neck she’d obviously dropped among them as if unsure whether it was friend or foe. About the time the Hulk decided it was his, I made a grab for him and convinced him it wasn’t.
Then I had a discussion with Fric, reminding her that she’d missed a few critical steps in the wolf/wild dog mealtime evolutionary sequence. When she got tired of nursing, the next step was to eat her prey and then regurgitate it to her young a while later when it was partially digested and nice and warm. Once their digestive tracts got use to that, then she could introduce them to chunks they could grind up themselves. She naturally looked at me as if I were nuts, as all the pets (and some of my students) do when I try to educate them in the finer points of their heritage.
Fric didn’t do this with her first litter which suggests that either having one more puppy or being older triggered the behavior. That she by-passed the barfing stage of the wild sequence doesn’t really surprise me because that seems like a behavior that humans would have selected against. Even if our ancestors didn’t, even the best intentioned contemporary owner (myself among them) often has difficulty providing positive reinforcement when the dog pukes in the house. I can see a good bitch not wanting to subject her pups to that negative human response. What Fric thought about me flying over the pen, grabbing the Hulk, and taking away the chicken neck is a different story, as is what she thought when I gave the spit-covered morsel to Bee.
Still, I wished that college student had been there to see this (sans my flying leap, of course) because the behavior was so clearly a variation on an ancient theme that had ensured the survival of countless generations of wild canines, including wolves.