经济学人下载:狗-人们最好的朋友

But what makes the dog-wolf paradigm especially misleading, Mr Bradshaw argues, is that until recently, the studies of wolves were of the wrong wolves in extremely artificial conditions. In the wild, wolf packs tend to be made up of close family members representing up to three generations. The father and mother of the first lot of cubs are the natural leaders of the pack, but the behavioural norm is one of co-operation rather than domination and submission. However, the wolves on which biologists founded their conclusions about dominance hierarchies were animals living in unnaturally constituted groups in captivity. Mr Bradshaw says that feral or “village” dogs, which are much closer to the ancestors of pet dogs than they are to wolves, are highly tolerant of one another and organise themselves entirely differently from either wild or captive wolves.

Bradshaw说，一直到最近，科研中的“狼”从来都是人工环境下的狼，因此导致了狼和狗的模式问题上的误导。在野外，狼群都是由三代以内的近亲成员组成。狼群中第一批幼崽的父母成为这个群体的领袖，但它们的行为准则是一种合作，而不是统治和服从。然而，生物学家所研究的狼群是被捕获的，并非自然构成的群体，因此会得出关于狼群等级制度的结论。Bradshaw认为，野狗和土狗相比于狼而言，与宠物狗的祖先更相近，彼此之间更加包容，它们的组织与野狼或是捕获的狼都是截然不同的。

Dogs are not like nicely brought-up wolves, says the author, nor are they much like people despite their extraordinary ability to enter our lives and our hearts. This is not to deny that some dogs are very clever or that they are capable of feeling emotion deeply. But their intelligence is different from ours. The idea that some dogs can understand as many words as a two-year-old child is simply wrong and an inappropriate way of trying to measure canine intellect. Rather, their emotional range is more limited than ours, partly because, with little sense of time, they are trapped almost entirely in the present. Dogs can experience joy, anxiety and anger. But emotions that demand a capacity for self-reflection, such as guilt or jealousy, are almost certainly beyond them, contrary to the convictions of many dog owners.

作者认为，虽然狗有着非同寻常的能力走入人们的生活和心灵，但它们并不像精心养育的狼，也和人不同。这并不是在否认，某些狗是非常聪明的，或者能深刻感受人们的情感。但它们的智慧与我们不同。有种说法，某些狗能理解的词汇量相当于一个两岁孩子，这其实是一种错误且不恰当地衡量犬科动物智力的办法。在一定程度上说，狗的情感范围比人类的窄，部分是因为其时间观念不强，它们的时间观完全局限于“现在时”。狗能体会快乐、不安、恐惧。但是与狗主人所认为的不同，大多数的狗无法体会那些需要自省力的情感，例如内疚或嫉妒。

Mr Bradshaw believes that it is difficult for people to empathise with the way in which dogs experience and respond to the world through their extraordinary sense of smell: their sensitivity to odours is between 10,000 and 100,000 times greater than ours. A newly painted room might be torture for a dog; on the other hand, their olfactory ability and their trainability allow dogs to perform almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early stages of a cancer long before a normal medical diagnosis would detect it.

Bradshaw认为，人们总想寻找某些特殊的方法，通过狗敏锐嗅觉使之与周围世界沟通（狗的嗅觉是人类的1万到10万倍），这其实是很困难的。一间新粉刷好的房间对狗而言是种折磨；从另一方面讲，正是狗的嗅觉和它们的可驯养性，使之能够做一些不可思议的事，例如能通过嗅觉发现早期癌症，且比普通医疗诊断更早。