Radiolab - Dogs Gone Wild

Episode Date: May 18, 2011

In this short, a family dog disappears into the woods...and the mystery of what happened to him raises a big question about what it means to be wild.

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W. N. Y. C. C? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Jada Bumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab.

The podcast. Today on the podcast, we are going to revisit something that we explored once upon a time in a show called New Normal. Should you guys talk to each other now? Yeah. Hello, hello. Who's this? In that show, we talked with a fellow named Brian Hare, who's an evolutionary biologist. Yeah, that was...

That's him. And he told us the story of a guy whose name was Dimitri Belayev. Demetri Belayev was a very famous geneticist in Russia. He was alive during World War II. He was pursued by Stalin, had a very interesting life, ended up in Siberia, where he began... One of the most exciting experiments in biology. What he did is he took a bunch of wild foxes in Siberia. And he kind of weeded out the aggressive ones.

You mean he killed them? Shop them, yes. And he did this for generations. Anytime a fox was aggressive to people, he would kill it, unfortunately, and then he would keep the other ones. And in a relatively few generations, I think it was 10 or so? Yeah, 10. Yeah, 10. He was able to create a kinder and gentler fox.

They had foxes that were attracted to humans, which you would kind of expect. But the thing that really got us fascinated by the fox experiment was as these animals' behavior changed, their bodies changed. Here's that part of the show. What was exciting and surprising was that these same foxes, they actually show a whole suite of changes that he did not select for on purpose. Like, what do you mean? Physical changes. These foxes, as they became more gentle for some unaccountable reason, their ears, instead of pointing straight up, flipped over. That's right.

It was a big accident that they now have floppy ears. The tails on a fox, which in a wild one, The fox, they're straight. Now? They have curly tails. They have multicolored coats that are no longer just gray. The tips of their paws lose color. The teeth get smaller.

And their bones became very thin. Their bones got thinner? Yeah. Yes. So what happens to the skull and the face is it actually becomes more feminine. The whole animal becomes more delicate and more puppy-like. Wow. This was really a surprise to us because, I mean, when you, we domesticate a dog, you do expect it to become nicer to people. What you don't expect is all this

other stuff, that it becomes essentially a completely different animal. Well, an animal, completely, or certainly differently shaped animal. Well, that's the question, really. How different is it? Once you've become domesticated and known a household pet, is there anything in you, anything inside that's still just a little bit wild? Turns out our producer at the time, Lulu Miller had been thinking about this. Okay. And she wrote an essay. Which is not our usual style, but this is kind of fine.

Yeah, and it takes that question, you know, what's left? What's wild that's left? And it brings it much closer to home. Okay, so... Here's Lulu. On most of his birthdays, Maureen would give Charlie a sweater. Maureen was my dad's co-worker. Charlie was my dog.

He was a little white terrier, a very active little guy, always snuffling around at something. barking, growling if you took his spot on the couch. But when we'd zip him into that year's sweater, he'd go completely still. And he'd get that same stillness when my sisters and I would sit in a circle around him and color on his white fur with magic markers.

I used to think he was still like that because he was happy, content to be our little dog. But now, I don't know. Wildness glimmered up in him, though, from time to time. He'd chase after vacuum cleaners, growl at bongo drums, and suspiciously eye the dishwasher. But he was quiet mostly, stoic, a good listener. My dad's only friend through long stretches. My dad's a guy prone to the nostalgic and swoops of sadness, and I'd stumble in on him in early mornings,

in tender conversation with Charlie, testing ideas out on him. What do you think, big guy, he'd say. What do you think? I imagined he was very... lonely, Charlie, that is, lost in a purgatory where he didn't belong. Okay, congratulations. You've made it this far in someone else's pet story. I promise, things are about to change. Because it's shortly after his 13th birthday,

Maureen, I think, got him a little blue-gene jacket with a sheepskin inside and Levi buttons, that Charlie got eaten by a pack of wild coyotes. Let me back up, just a step of step. or two. This all happened on Cape Cod, the easternmost tale of Massachusetts, where you can find beachgoers in the summer, Kennedy's, I think, if you know where to look, and very few predators. A couple hawks, the occasional fox. But other than that, as the local fauna goes, it's pretty much snow white land. Chipmunks, bunnies, skunks. Until the coyotes came. I was about 15 when we first started hearing about them. And for us

East Coasters, it made no sense. Coyotes were symbols of the West, somewhere far, far away from Massachusetts, somewhere where the land was orange and wide and open. So, I looked into it, and it turns out that for a long time it was that way. Coyotes, like big states and cheerful personalities, was a strictly Western thing.

But in the 1920s, people started spotting coyotes in New York. And by the late 50s, they'd made it up to Massachusetts. Only, they couldn't quite get out to Cape Cod. See, Cape Cod is literally cut off from the rest of Massachusetts by a canal that's almost two football fields wide. So for decades, the coyotes were kept on the mainland. Until one night, sometime in the late 70s, a pack of coyotes decided to do what the rest of us do. They gathered up their kids together for a road trip and crossed the bridge. Or possibly some speculate swam across the canal.

but I think it's a far better image to picture them as silhouettes, walking in single file across the bridge, with a big white moon behind them. A-oo! So, suddenly they were there, and they started multiplying. More and more sightings of them in backyards and on runners' roots. The local press started running articles, keep your pets in after dark.

A cave was found, local lore has it, with hundreds of collars. In 1998, a three-year-old boy was bitten. And then, my sister found a goose, completely slaughtered, down on a dock by the pond. It was surrounded by a splatter painting of feces strewn so wide, she deemed it the of terror. Now, it turns out my family came to Cape Cod right around the same time as the coyotes. In the late 70s, my parents bought a cabin in the woods that overlooked a purple marsh. The cabin had a deck, and that's where we spent most of our time. time. We'd sit out there late into the night watching birds, then stars. And that's where Charlie

was the happiest, on the deck. He'd pace around occasionally, nails scraping the wood. But mostly he'd just flopped down with a sigh, a literal human sigh, and gaze out along with us. We never needed a fence, because he simply never left. When the coyotes first showed up, I used to like hearing them. You'd hear it as you lay awake in bed, the howls sometimes far off, sometimes right up close. It felt thrilling to know that things were happening. Life cycles in grisly nature, predators prey right outside the walls. It used to make me feel like part of the earth. So, here's how it happened from my perspective. It's late August. Sun is setting. We pull into the driveway, but we don't see Charlie on the deck. Immediately I knew something was wrong.

My dad said, no way, everything's fine. But then we heard a whimper off in the woods. My mom and sisters and I jumped into action. We called for him, shown flashlights. Charlie! But the woods had gone quiet. And I remember this part very clearly. We were all standing out on the deck, craning our necks, listening for something.

And just as my dad was forming the words, Look, there's nothing to worry about. He'll turn up in the morning. We heard the yelp. So, Charlie, that same noise he'd make when you step. on his tail, followed immediately by the howls. I ran into a closet to hide from the sound. The next morning, there was nothing.

Not a shred, not a collar, not a bone, not a piece of hair. They say one way the coyotes do it, especially with other dogs, is that a lone coyote comes up to the dog and starts playing with it. Eventually they go off together and, after just a few paces, the pack descends. Or, a slight variation, a coyote pretends to be hurt. It whimpers and cries and calls out for help. I can only imagine Charlie in that moment. There he is, standing face to face with his past self.

At long last, I imagine his head looked up a bit, his chest swelled, his ears perked up, and he stepped off the deck. It's right around then that we would have come home. He would have heard us roll into the driveway, seen our flashlights, heard our calls, and for once ignored us. I wonder how fast it happened. I wonder if he even knew.

I imagine he did. I imagine he saw the eyes suddenly all at once, realizing he was surrounded and thought, I've been had. Well played, my brothers. Well played. And I like to imagine a nod of respect on their part before they descended. The morning after it happened, we were emigued. My dad couldn't look up.

He kept rearranging chairs around the kitchen table as if some new arrangement would obscure the empty spot on the floor. And for so long, that's how we experienced it. It was about us, the family member we lacked. And then one day, years later, it dawned on my sister, that for all the sadness we felt, that last moment for Charlie was probably glory. For that one moment,

For that one moment, he was wild. He went out like a wild dog. We were all standing out on the deck when she said it. My mom smiled and said, yeah, that's a nice thought. But then she turned to us. You know, who's to say they got him? Who's to say he didn't off and join the pack? Well, first of all, that was a really sad story.

Yeah. That's Brian here, our Fox Guy, from the new normal show, not too long after Lulu wrote the Charlie piece. She and our producer, Soren Wheeler, called him up. Anyway, just to see what he thought of the story. Well, let me, let me, let me for, can I put on my totally non-emotive scientist hat for the moment? Yes, yes, please. Without you being too upset with me. So let me ask you some skeptical questions. Okay.

Have you heard of Mark Beckoff? Mm-mm. He is the coyote expert. Okay. When he's tried to look for evidence that coyotes are doing all these horrible things to dogs, I'm just telling you what the guy argues. That he can't find any good evidence that, you know, it's coyotes that are to blame. Huh.

You mean like there's just no evidence that coyotes are even doing this? Yeah. Because first of all, coyotes aren't generally pack animals. They're generally solitary. And so now what does travel in packs is feral dogs. You know, but what's odd is that a feral dog wouldn't eat your terrier. So I'm flummoxed. I just don't know.

I'm not a coyote expert. Okay. So are you saying like maybe? Let me just ask you one more question just to be sure. So this is horrible, but Charlie was actually taken away? Yeah. I mean, we didn't, I mean, we never found there was no collar, no bone, no scrap of hair. How sure are you that it was multiple individuals?

I mean, did you see tracks or footprints or? No, it was all just on the here, on the, on the, the sonic level it was like at least one but in my memory it's like five howls these like just crazy witch like yapping and okay all right so so what that could be is it could be coyote pups do you know what time of year it was it was summer it was august so if they were you know if they were wellped in the spring and and by then they would have been five six months old so that makes sense And what would that mean? Like would the pups have done the killing or one?

No, no. I think mom would have done killing. They were, she somehow signaled to them and then they came and fed together. Wow. So can I, so this is soren. The conversation didn't end here because actually Lula and I started to ask Brian, like, forgetting what killed Charlie or what happened to Charlie. You know, is it, is it even possible, like scientifically? Can a dog, a domestic dog, somehow go back to being wild?

Kind of like the Fox experiment, but... The other way. Yeah. And that's when he told us about this particular kind of dog. New Guinea singing dogs? New Guinea singing dogs. Exactly. I even have a cool recording of one of their singing songs things.

And they're basically short-legged dingoes, and they live in New Guinea. According to Brian, they used to be just regular old, dogs, but a long, long time ago, they left humans somehow, started out on their own. And now... We have this very strange animal, which is a bit puzzling. It's like a dog. But not quite. One hypothesis is that actually they really have evolved such that they're basically now

completely wild. They've reverted back to being afraid of people. Like what we saw in the foxes in reverse, where aggressiveness or fear comes back. Yeah. So they avoid people, kind of like a wolf. But physically, Brian says, they look basically like a dog. So that would be, you know, they have the splotchy coat colors, and they have a smaller brain, thinner skeleton, all that kind of stuff. Floppy ears?

They actually don't have floppy ears, interestingly enough. That's one difference. There have actually been people who have said that they have slightly longer teeth than most dogs and slightly larger heads, which is also kind of more wolf-like. So there seems to be a couple things that are a little bit more like wolf, but a lot of things that are still like dog. I mean, it's all over the place. It's almost like they're in between. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine. And oddly enough, Brian says that you can actually kind of hear that.

Typically at night, you know, they will start to chorus, as it's called, and they'll howl. And so they'll all howl together, but it's not a wolf howl. Because a wolf howl is actually very low-pitched. Whereas the singing dogs are more high-pitched. and it's basically you know what would it sound like if a really small dog was trying to howl like a wolf they're tryhard wolves

like how far these dogs are they like ballpark three generations that they've been living in the wild are they just one like kicked out the back door are they yeah like how long did it take for them to get like that the last estimate I saw was 5,000 years Oh, 5,000 years.

So they've been away from humans for 5,000 years. It's an estimate. If they're 5,000 years away from humans, I feel like what I'm learning from you about the potential to become wild again is there's, at least for Charlie, as much as I may like to imagine that moment was wild. There's no hope. Yeah, unfortunately, I think that's what, I think unfortunately that is the case. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that he didn't have.

have the, you know, the desire to be wild. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that a little guy who'd been dressed up, he might have liked it, and especially a terrier. Come on. He's like, bring it on, bring it on, coyotes. Yeah. Come on, let's go. You know, maybe he was surprised.

It didn't, you know, and it was good to have that sort of one shiny moment. Thank you to Lulu Miller and our producer, Sauron Wheeler. And to Brian Hare at Duke University. Yeah. And I think that's. Pretty much it. That's what we have to say this time. I'm Chad Aboumrod.

I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. This is Ann Anderson, a radio lab listener from Richland, Michigan. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. at www.floan.org. Have a great day. Bye.

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