Why dogs love bones

Most carnivorous animals like lions and tigers and bears (and of course, humans), eat meat and leave out the bones. It is understandable, as meat contains essential nutrients and is easy to digest. But why do dogs love bones so much? Answering this question gives us a deeply insightful view on how evolution and selection works, and how man has nearly played god by almost creating a new animal. It is a story of how an unlikely acquaintance evolved into one of the most powerful bonds of friendship through the passage of time.

It is a debated fact when this story starts, but it most likely started around 40,000 years ago. Agriculture had not yet been invented. The only source of food for humans was hunting and gathering. Meat was precious. All animals hunted for meat, not many succeeded.

A particular animal was the ancient wolf. An ancestor of the grey wolf that we see in zoos, which looked very similar. The wolves were not always successful with their hunts. So they turned towards a place where there is always some meat available: human camps. But humans are hostile. They won’t share their meat. And wolves can’t possibly try to fight the humans for food. So some wolves took an easy way out. They settled for a less filling yet harmless meal: they decided to pick up scraps.

When  humans are done eating, they throw away the waste that they cannot eat:  which consists of internal organs like liver, intestine, small pieces of meat and most importantly, bone. Only the wolves that were okay with eating these throw-aways, especially eating the bone, waited outside human camps and ate it. Even though at first it seemed like these wolves were settling for less, it quickly became evident that they had a massive advantage: humans eat regularly. So these wolves got their food regularly outside human camps, and they did not even have to hunt. Hunting takes a lot of energy, so even as they ate less, they had to spend even less energy and they had a lot to spare. And what happens when an animal has energy to spare? It makes babies. They grew in number. These first generation wolves had converted from meat to bone, while their babies grew up eating bones. And so they liked bones even more (This example of two generations is greatly simplified. In reality it would have taken centuries for wolves to get accustomed to eating outside human camps without attacking the humans).

Humans also would have noticed the wolves, of course. Humans are very observant. At first they would have seemed like a threat, but then humans saw that the wolves don’t attack them, because it is better for them to just eat and leave. So humans just did not bother with the wolves at first. They just let them eat their scrap. 

The first time humans noticed that there is an advantage to having wolves around, was probably when a wild animal (or humans from other settlements) attacked. Wolves are equipped with a far greater sense of smell, sight and hearing than humans. So wolves can notice a wild animal or an attacker from a long distance. And they would make sounds to alert other wolves in the pack, which is a common response to threat in almost all animals. This clearly benefited the humans, as they also could now notice a threat from far away (Even today, dogs make the best guards. They were probably the first guards we ever had). And on many occasions, the wolves would even attack the wild animal, for their own safety, which resulted in the safety of humans too. 

And now, the wolves and humans have mutual benefits of being together: I feed you, you guard my camp. It wasn’t said like an agreement, but it just naturally happened.

And humans have a very odd capacity: to live as a society. We take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, we share food even if we are hungry and we have hierarchies of power and authority. Wolves too, have a similar societal structure. They hunt in packs, they share the hunt with individuals that cannot hunt. Younger wolves take care of older wolves. If a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack raises her pups. A very human-like society. These qualities can be observed in wolves even today. And therefore it was easy for wolves to understand humans, and vice versa. They already had the concept of helping and mutual benefits. So they understood this relationship well.

For thousands of years this relationship continued. And along the way, humans were slightly tweaking these wonderful animals to fit in better. Some wolves were friendlier and touchy with humans, and some were not. Humans shooed away (or killed, most likely) the unfriendly ones, and kept the friendly ones. These friendly wolves had babies that were also friendly with humans. Some wolves were good at guarding. Some hunted and brought the hunt to the camp, instead of eating (The first retrievers. Whether they wanted to share with the humans, or were just bringing it to the place they called home, is a different question). These wolves, the humans kept. The ones that were bad at guarding and ate the hunt without bringing it back, the humans did not keep. These wolves had babies, which were also good at guarding and retrieving. 

These were the criteria by which humans consciously decided which ones to keep. There was also an unconscious aspect. The wolves that looked pretty had a better chance of being kept by humans. The wolves that looked cute had a better chance of being raised by humans. And pretty wolves had pretty pups. So unconsciously, through generations, the wolves were becoming more aesthetically pleasing to humans. This is a major factor, because they even developed a muscle above their eyes to make the ‘puppy face’. This muscle has no evolutionary purpose other than to make the animal look cute. The puppy face reminds humans of human babies, and produces a natural desire to take care of the pup.

By this process of knowingly or unknowingly  “selecting” which ones should be kept and which ones shouldn’t, humans created a variety of the wolf that was very unlike the wolf: it preferred to eat scraps and bones, it stayed up at night to guard, it hunted and brought the hunt back instead of eating and it looked very cute. Humans had ‘created’ dogs, through selective breeding.

Dogs were the first animals that were domesticated. It is possible that they even helped us domesticate other animals like cattle and sheep. Since they understood human relationships and even human emotions to a certain extent, it was easy for them to make a strong bond with humans. And humans also came to see them as friends or family. And we have been together ever since. Dogs are quite literally man’s best friend, it is not just a figure of speech. Dogs were created to be man’s best friend, by man.

Later on, dogs were even more specifically selected and bred. Fast males were made to breed with fast females to produce even faster pups. They were selected separately for speed, looks, fur, size, face (pugs lol), ferociousness, ability to hunt, ability to track, ability to herd cattle and sheep (German shepherds are literally shepherds bred to herd sheep) etc, which, over centuries, lead to a vast number of varieties within dogs. 

This concept of selectively breeding dogs to get many varieties is one of the main factors that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the theory of Evolution through Natural Selection, where instead of man, nature is the selector of animals depending on their ability to survive in an environment, and thus produce large varieties of animals from a single ancestor, over a tremendous amount of time.

Darwin believed that dogs descended from crossing of wolves and foxes, but recent studies make it very clear that dogs are just modified wolves. So when did the separation happen? When is the line in history when they clearly separated and broke off from wolves?

The truth is, it hasn’t even happened yet. Dogs are not just descended from wolves, they still are wolves. Just as there are many varieties in dogs, dogs themselves are a variety of the wolf. Dogs and wolves can reproduce to have fertile offspring. It is impossible to distinguish wolves and dogs through DNA tests. The scientific name for dogs, Canis Familiaris (The familiar Canine) has been changed to Canis Lupus Familiaris (The familiar variety of the Canine wolf), to reflect the fact that they are merely subspecies of wolves, and not an entirely different species. 

So why do dogs love bones? Because all dogs are descended from wolves that liked bones.

Mozhi, ( 01 July, 2021)