“Oreo was my best friend growing up,” she says Brian Hare. If Hare wanted to improve his baseball skills, his Labrador eagerly took on the duties of the field. If she decided to explore the nearby woods, Oreo was always her go-to companion. But there was one place where the boy and the dog were always divided. “Oreo never set foot in our house. Not for once,” says Hare.
Today, the front door is not closed for most dogs in high-income countries, and many spend their days relaxing on couches and watching TV. You would think they would be doggy in heaven. But Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, believes that development has been left in the kennel. For millennia, he says, we’ve expected dogs to guard our property and protect our family at night. Now, we have another set of expectations. In addition to being friendly with strangers and resting peacefully at night, our indoor dogs will also need to respond to potty training, avoid chasing other animals and keep dirty feet off the carpet. “It’s evolutionarily inappropriate,” says Hare.
The good news is that this problem can be fixed. Numerous recent studies indicate that selective breeding and careful training can help dogs adapt to indoor life. Meanwhile, Hare and his team have created one “puppy daycare” to deepen the behaviors required in their laboratory and shed new light on the milestones of cognitive development in dogs. Better yet, researchers have devised techniques…
