Dan Snow's History Hit - How Dogs Became Man's Best Friend

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Mike Loades joined me on the podcast to talk about the history of dogs, and they are intertwined with human history.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, Malcolm Danstow's History here. Thanks to everyone who listened to the brilliant Frank Madonna on Hitler this weekend. I think it's on course to becoming our most listened to ever podcast. Frank Madonna talks about the war years, Hitler's leadership and descent into utter madness, genocide and chaos. We got wonderful readings exclusively from Frank Madonna's new book read out by Paul McG mcgann so lots of people have been enjoying that thank you very much for all the feedback this episode also features someone who's been on the podcast many times mike loads brilliant writer tv presenter broadcaster many of you will know as one of the world's leading experts on medieval weaponry or weaponry

generally he's he's shot fired swung clubbed pierced lots of different things with lots different weapons he's an absolute legend but this time he's you can tell it's a bit of a passion project this one this time we're going to talk about the history of dogs man's best friend and how they have evolved how they've been pushed in certain evolutionary directions by humans for certain purposes. Hunting, guarding, warning, rescue, all sorts of other amazing, amazing things that dogs are good at. This is a fascinating podcast. If you want to come and see a recording of this podcast live, we've just released tickets to 2021's live shows. If you go to history.com slash tour, you can come and watch us in one of the uk's major cities if you don't want to do anything live if you quite like staying in your house

and you you're glad you don't have to go out anymore then we got that covered too because you just go to history hit dot tv use the code pod one pod one and you will get a month for free and your next month is one pound euro dollar of history hit tv it's like the netflix for history the world's best history channel we're advancing all fronts here folks but in the meantime everyone here is mike loads enjoy mike very good to see you welcome back to the podcast very great pleasure to be here as always now this is interesting because this is the man's best friend, the dog. For how long have we been using dogs? Ah, well, you will know, as an author of books, that the biggest nightmare one has

is that just as you publish it, somebody finds some new bit of archaeological evidence that changes what you've written. And it happened the week my book came out. They pushed back the date for the earliest dogs. It doesn't really affect my book, but it was slightly annoying. Well, no, it wasn't annoying. It's exciting. It's thrilling. New knowledge is always thrilling. And that's what we're here for. So my book is not about the evolution of dogs. It's something else which we'll come to. But in the introduction, I do give a little potted history of how dogs evolved via a proto-dog.

That was around 10,000 years ago, was the general thought. They've now pushed that back by about another 10,000 years, so 20,000 years ago. We've got five distinct types, genetic. It's genetic research. This is the new cutting edge of history where, you know, it's not just digging up things from the ground. It's the stuff we find from the DNA. So it's very, very exciting research. It changes one line in my book, but otherwise, everything's intact so far. Have we tried to select, for example, great huskies to pull sleds and that's made them good at pulling sleds? That is the organising

principle of the book. So we start with the premise that genetically all dogs are wolves. There is a Frankenstein element here to the extent that these breeds do not exist naturally. So, for instance, the bulldog is quite controversial because of its squashed face and it can't breathe, and because it can't give natural birth, and it's deformed. And everyone goes, poor old bulldog, but isn't he cute? Well, it's not poor old bulldog. I mean, it is poor old bulldog, but isn't he cute? Well, it's not poor old bulldog. I mean, it is poor old bulldog, but it's not that they're naturally like that. We made them like that.

Human beings created that look. Now, we'll stick on the bulldog. It extends because it is the most extreme example i mean the book there is a page which has got two crania in it from the natural history museum ones from talking about 1870 head of a bulldog and ones from about 1910 the head of a bulldog and you can see the deformity has happened in the space of 50 years. Because if you look at bulldogs in art, they don't have such squashed in faces. The gripping dog holds it. And bulldogs had this grim purpose that they were used in the bull baiting arena. They were used by farmers to get hold of a bull and control it. But on the South Bank of London, you know, next to the Globe Theatre,

was the bear pit and the bull pit. And these dogs went into the bull pit and people paid money to see which one could hang on the longest. And these things have been, you see old prints, they're flung through the air. Now, grim and disgusting and depraved though that is there are things we need to draw from it number one is the dogs that did that were supreme athletes you can't be thrown from a ball bounce get, get up and jump back again, lunging and flying up to grab

the bull, unless you're an absolute athlete. That bears no resemblance to the poor old waddling Churchill lookalike. Now what happened was bull baiting, quite rightly, was made illegal. It was banned. It carried on illicitly for a while, as these things do, but eventually we got rid of it, and very good that we did. What happens to the bulldog? They actually also have the most delightful personality. Very often, fighting dogs and bulldogs and things have wonderful, cuddly personalities, because although they're vicious with another animal they have to be handled by a human so they are fabulous dogs as companions and what happened was they remain only as companion dogs but they're redundant their function has gone and now they're only a companion. Fads and fashions come in.

So certain things that appeal to certain aspects of companionship is a flatter face, a rounder face and rounder eyes. So we're starting to breed these bulldogs without a mind to the fact that the poor things are suffering. They can barely breathe, they can barely walk, they're in constant pain, most of them. The dog wasn't naturally like that. Human beings made it like that. And it's the same with overlong backs of Dachshunds, it's the same with German shepherd dogs with their overly slanting haunches to make them look as if they're just about to spring into a flying leap onto an attacker. Well, but the poor dog is in pain in its hips because it hasn't been bred with the right kind of top line. So there is a message, but that isn't the spine of the book. The spine of the book is the adventures and the celebration

of this extraordinary collaboration with dogs. In the book, you go on a sort of this extraordinary collaboration with dogs. In the book, you go on a sort of adventure, really, through huskies and hunting and retrieving, all these things. Give me some of the more remarkable codependent relationships we have with dogs that you've discovered as you've travelled the world. Everybody knows herding dogs. Everybody's seen one man and his dog. Everybody knows what border collies do, etc.

But actually, there's a whole range of different types of sheepdog. Some do it by barking, some by barging, some by nipping. The border collie does it by eye. But for cattle droving, there's the surprise for some people. They use a dog called a heeler, which nips at the heels of the cattle. And as their cattle kick back, it ducks and the heel flies over its head. They're called nip and duck dogs. Well, in fact, that's the corgi. So the corgis were the drover's dog. Another type of shepherding dog is the livestock guardians. Now, we don't encounter them in England. We consider

dangerous dogs. Nobody knows much about them. We know about the Pyrenean mountain dog. We have that in England as a pet. But generally, we don't have the livestock guardians like the Kangal, the Anatolian shepherd dog, which I went to meet. But they use them in America because they have real predators. They have, in some parts, wolves, but they certainly have coyotes. They have, in some parts, wolves, but they certainly have coyotes. So you do need a fierce dog that will live out on the hill and look after its goats or its sheep or whatever it's looking after. The way they do this is they introduce the pup at eight weeks old to the species it's going to look after. the species it's going to look after. In Kazakhstan, they recently unveiled a garish gold statue of an alibi, which is a type of flock guardian, isn't it? It's the national dog, very ferocious dog, but you

need it out in the steppes of Central Asia. So these Anatolian dogs, the ones I went to visit, the sperm from the male dog had been sent to Namibia, where it is used to protect the cheetah. 98% of the world's cheetah population is in Namibia, and they are an endangered species because the small stock farmers with six goats or three sheep or whatever, poison, trap and shoot the cheetahs because they prey on their herds. There is a charity that gives these flock guardian dogs to the farmers and predation rates are cut 80-90%. So no cheetahs get harmed in the process. They don't need to come near the sheep. The dog deters, and the farmers now no longer need to trap, shoot and poison them. There's an endangered penguin on an island just off New Zealand, because there's an invasive species of fox that's not indigenous to the island,

but it's an uninhabited island. They stuck some muremas, which are the Italian flock guardian dog, on that island, and those dogs look after the penguins and have saved them from being extinct we can't let these dogs die out they are as valuable and potentially valuable for future uses we haven't yet dreamed of as the diversity of the natural world sled dogs you mentioned it's obvious hauling is a big thing that was a thrill. I went to Alaska and I was able to tell stories of the Klondike gold rush, able to tell stories of the old trappers. And so, again, dogs took me into historical tales and into historical people. took me into historical tales and into historical people.

The Belgian army in World War I used these mastiffs as machine gun dogs. So they had these Belgian mastiffs, which is now an extinct breed, and the Belgian army cottoned on to the fact that they would be good for pulling the Maxim gun on a two-wheel rig and ammunition carts, etc. And in the low, sandy coastal areas, this had the advantage, the German advance, that they could send a spotter up to the dunes who could have a look. And if he saw an enemy, then he could whistle and the dogs would run up with the machine gun. Silent, low, so they can't be seen in flat country above the dunes or tall grasses or a field. Rubber-tied, being pulled by dogs, no noise, not like being pulled by a horse at all.

And they would bring the machine gun up to the person, unshackle the dog, dog would go back, they would use the machine gun. And there's wonderful archive images of the Belgian army on the march with hundreds of these machine gun dogs. Talked about hunting and retrieving. Are there many dogs helped humans in that department? I was very aware when writing it that hunting is a very polarizing issue. And I wanted to find a way to handle that because I think the stories of the dogs are interesting. The context of cultural history is interesting. The context of social history is interesting. And so half the breeds from herding to livestock, sled dogs, cart dogs,

carriage dogs, Dalmatians on the Grand Tour following carriages, are non-hunting. But so many game finders, sight hounds, scent hounds, mastiffs, terriers, are hunting breeds. So what I did, there was no hunting activity that I couldn't either substitute or simulate. And so that is what I did. So when I went to the desert in Jordan, to the wonderful

Wadi Rum desert, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed, one of the most romantic landscapes in the world, to look at sighthounds, I drove out into the desert and met some Bedouin by a predetermined rock with their saluki. And the Saluki is one of the oldest breeds. From 3000 BC, there is a mummified Saluki in the Cairo Museum. It looks almost identical to the Salukis we have today. Salukis are also interesting because they are the only dog that is given value in Islam. In Islam, most dogs are considered unclean except for the Saluki which is a holy dog, was actually blessed and sanctioned in the Quran. So

there's a whole cultural world there that becomes immediately fascinating. Now hunting gazelle is illegal in Jordan so we're never going to do that anyway but what these dogs were originally for was for hunting gazelle and the way they did it was you would ride out into the desert on a camel with the sunuki on your lap in order to so it's like you know because you might be riding for three or four days before you find a gazelle so you don't want to tire the dog out so you'd have the sunuki on your lap and you would carry a falcon which is really your spotter plane and you sort of get out there and fly your falcon and these falcons were trained to dive bomb gazelles because they would feed them bits of gazelle but of course a falcon can't take a gazelle but the dog a sight

dog could see that little speck drop from the sky jump off the camel give chase and you'd gallop after him well i wanted to simulate all that. Wonderful to hear your enthusiasm for all these things. What is the book called? The book is called Dogs, Working Origins and Traditional Tasks. It's about dogs, but it sounds like it's about us as well. It's every bit as much about us as it is about dogs absolutely it's about that symbiotic relationship it's our story oh mike you're an absolute hero thank you very much for coming on the podcast thank you dan hi everybody just a quick message at the end of this podcast.

I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review,

I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.