经济学人下载:狗狗,人类最好的朋友

One idea has governed dog training for far too long, Mr Bradshaw says. Wolf packs are supposedly despotic hierarchies dominated by alpha wolves. Dogs are believed to behave in the same way in their dealings with humans. Thus training a dog effectively becomes a contest for dominance in which there can be only one winner. To achieve this the trainer must use a variety of punishment techniques to gain the dog’s submission to his mastery. Just letting a dog pass through a door before you or stand on the stairs above you is to risk encouraging it to believe that it is getting the upper hand over you and the rest of the household. Mr Bradshaw argues that the theory behind this approach is based on bad and outdated science.

布拉德肖说，长期以来一种观点指导着狗的驯化。一般认为，狼群内部等级森严，头狼具有绝对领导权，狗在与人类相处时，这一点也与狼相同。于是训狗实际就成了一场领导权的竞争，最后只有一个胜者，要么人胜，要么狗胜。为赢得这场竞争，人类必须用各种惩罚手段使狗对自己服服帖帖。例如，若允许狗在你之前进门或上台阶就会让狗觉得自己可凌驾于你和家人之上。布拉德肖认为这种训狗方式背后的指导思想是过时的谬误理论。

Dogs share 99.6% of the same DNA as wolves. That makes dogs closer to wolves than we are to chimps (with which we have about 96% of our DNA in common), but it does not mean that their brains work like those of wolves. Indeed, the outgoing affability of most dogs towards humans and other dogs is in sharp contrast to the mix of fear and aggression with which wolves react to animals from other packs. “Domestication has been a long and complex process,” Mr Bradshaw writes. “Every dog alive today is a product of this transition. What was once another one of the wild social canids, the grey wolf, has been altered radically, to the point that it has become its own unique animal.” If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.

狗和狼的DNA相似度高达99.6%，这样狗与狼的相似度甚至比人与大猩猩还要高（人类与大猩猩的基因相似度为96%）。但这并不意味着狗和狼大脑运作方式相同。实际上，狗对人类和其同类都友好和善，与狼对本群之外的其他动物怀有的恐惧和攻击心理形成鲜明对比。布拉德肖说在书中写道：“驯化是一个漫长复杂的过程，如今每一只狗都是这个过程的产物。比如灰狼曾经是一种野外群居犬科动物，现在已经在这个过程中彻底改变，形成了一种新的独特物种。”如果说狗与犬科动物确有相似性，那么也只是像未成年而非成年犬科动物。这种类似发育停滞的现象可以解释狗为何一生都如此依赖主人。

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.

布拉德肖认为，近来某些研究中的狼都是生活在人工色彩极重的环境中的豢养狼，是不可以作为研究对象的，这让狗狼相似理论变得尤其具有误导性。野生狼群常常以数个家庭为单位，祖孙三代共同生活。第一窝狼崽的父母顺理成章地成为狼群领袖，但狼群之内行为模式是以合作为主的，而非统治与服从。然而生物学家关于狼群等级统治的结论是建立在非自然聚合的豢养狼群之上。布拉德肖说：“同狼相比，野狗或者说土狗与如今宠物狗的祖先关系要近得多，野狗个体之间非常宽容，狗群的组织方式与野生和豢养的狼也完全不同。”