Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
How Dogs Domesticated Humans (with Laura Hobgood)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes—the podcast where we explore the terrain of human connection, breaking down borders as we go. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about our canine companions is Professor Laura Hobgood.
CLIP FROM LAURA HOBGOOD: Through this slow process, together, we formed this kind of bond. So we're becoming human and they're becoming dogs simultaneously. The process of them becoming domesticated—which is a behavioral process—expressed itself in all of these physical ways as well. The floppy ears, the curly tail, all of those things started happening over the course of generations. And then eventually, we just are working together.
BLAIR HODGES: Twenty-six thousand years ago, in what we now call France, a child lit a torch to guide their way through a darkened cave. We can't be sure if they were excited or frightened, but we know they weren't alone, because pressed into the mud beside the child's steps are the little paw prints of a dog-like wolf, a companion into the deep.
That companionship still shapes humans today. In fact, even if you don't like dogs—or maybe you're just allergic—Dr. Laura Hobgood suggests you still owe them a debt of gratitude. While we were domesticating dogs down through the millennia, these animals were also domesticating us, shaping human evolution in ways we're only beginning to fully understand.
Laura Hobgood is Chair of Religion and Environmental Studies at Southwestern University, and she joins us to talk about her book, A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans.
Dogs of Our Heart – 02:03
BLAIR HODGES: Laura Hobgood, welcome to Relationscapes.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Thank you. It's good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
BLAIR HODGES: I noticed in your acknowledgments page that the very first people you thank there are your family dogs down through the years. You say that dogs have always been part of your family since the day that you were born, and I thought that was so sweet. I think this is the only book I saw that started off with a tip of the cap to the dogs.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, I can't imagine a life without dogs. The few times I've ended up away for work or for whatever reason, I’ve come back home and my dogs are still at a dog sitter somewhere, and the house is void of dogs. It just doesn't feel like home.
BLAIR HODGES: And I know this is sort of like asking about favorite children, but are there any dogs from this family history that you miss the most? Like the dog of your heart?
LAURA HOBGOOD: You know, as long as the four dogs sitting around here right now don't understand what I'm saying, I will say that there's Bogart, a dog who I adopted when I was 21. My first dog as an adult who was my dog. He went through years with me: through graduate school, through my first positions as a faculty person, through a marriage and divorce. He was even included in that whole process as shared custody for a little while.
But I remember when I lost him after 16 years, I almost couldn't function for about a week because he'd just been with me through so much and had been the constant that whole time. He'll always hold a special place.
BLAIR HODGES: That's sweet. And it feels so short. I mean, that's a big chunk of life. A lot of living happened in those years. But then when they're gone, it turns out it was so fast. They really aren't with us for very long.
LAURA HOBGOOD: They're not. And that's one of the things that people end up asking me the most, I think. There's a podcast I did in the fall with the Catholic Review, and the question was, do dogs go to heaven? And one of the big parts of that conversation is that we lose them all too frequently. Some of them live five years, some of them live 15 if we're lucky.
BLAIR HODGES: That's right. My own favorite—Chicken Delicious. She was the dog of my heart. And kind of like you, this was my first dog that was my dog, not a family dog. My partner and I got her when we first got married, and she was there as we were newlyweds, as we went through school and got our degrees and moved out of state.
She was there through so much, and so I definitely feel what you're feeling when you talk about that sweet dog of yours.
Okay, let's talk about the book. It's a short book, but it spans 30,000 years of history. And that's an estimate of about how long dogs and humans have been domesticating each other, as you put it in the book. Talk about framing it that way—as this domestication that dogs and humans went through together.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, it seems that as soon as humans settle down—and the time frame for how long dogs have been dogs is kind of shifting sands. When I started teaching a course on dogs 20-plus years ago, the time frame was more like maybe 10 to 15,000 years. Then some mitochondrial DNA studies came out that pushed it back to 100,000 years.
So it's shifting. The science is shifting on how long dogs have been dogs, but 30,000 years seems to be where most of the evidence lies now. And that's really about the same time that we started settling down a little more in certain places in the world.
It seems that in several places, close to the same time, when we settled down, these proto-dogs—who were not really wolves anymore, but not really dogs yet—were also settling down with us, or had been kind of slowly. I think it was a pretty slow process, where the ones who were at the bottom of their wolf pack sort of found this new food source. And that was us. That was our trash, our scraps.
We probably, at the same time, were kind of using these not-yet-dogs to help us hunt and maybe to alert us to things at night. And through this slow process together, we formed this kind of bond where they were helping us and we were helping them.
Then the process of them becoming domesticated—which is a behavioral process—expressed itself in all of these physical ways as well. The floppy ears, the curly tail, the piebald coloring, all of those things started happening over the course of generations. And then eventually, we just are working together.
I don't think we could have domesticated other animals without having dogs. We can't run fast enough to catch a mountain goat. But with dogs still doing the things they would do as wolves—to circle around prey animals—we ended up being able to then also catch and domesticate these other animals, too.
So together we became who we are. I posit that I don't think we would be here—I think we'd be a slightly different species, at least—if we hadn't had dogs around us for these millennia.
BLAIR HODGES: Let's picture an alternate reality where that didn't happen. Like, what's the difference you could foresee?
LAURA HOBGOOD: I don't think we could very easily have domesticated pigs, goats, sheep. That domestication process would have been very, very different. I don't know that we could have gotten into arctic climates, into cold places. Dogs basically pulled us in there.
There's a fascinating theory about how humans basically inhabited North and South America as quickly as we did. And that theory is that there's evidence that dogs were with us. We not only got from the Bering Straits to the bottom of South America really quickly, but we also seemed to populate North and South America very quickly.
Which means female humans were having more and more infants more and more frequently. Could we do that because we threw the two-year-old baby on the sled so we didn't have to lug that baby around anymore, and the dog pulled that baby so we could have another one?
There are all sorts of very interesting speculative theories about the ways dogs have helped us both populate other parts of the world and change our relationship with other animals as well. So we would be different. It's hard to say how, but I think we would be different if we didn't have dogs.
From a Carthage Cemetery to Outer Space – 08:13
BLAIR HODGES: Great. We'll dig more into this history as we go. But the first two dogs that you introduce to us in the book show us the amazing lengths that the relationship between humans and dogs has really gone to. First, there's Laika, who is a famous dog from Cold War Russia. Tell us a little bit about Laika and why you started the book off with her.
LAURA HOBGOOD: It's interesting to think about the ways that we have used dogs, and Laika is one of those examples. Right. Laika is a dog who is sent into space and doesn't survive. Right. But dogs have sacrificed themselves, without knowing that that's what they were doing, to us with some frequency.
And so it seems interesting to me to think about the ways that we have both used dogs, and they, in certain instances, have willingly offered themselves to us. And so that story just kind of touches the heart, I think. It seemed appropriate to start with that story.
BLAIR HODGES: I felt bad for Laika when I very first heard of her. This is a dog in 1957. This is a dog that the Russians sent up to orbit Earth. You know, they were basically like, we don't know exactly how this is going to go, so we'll send Laika up there.
She was three years old, and I just—my—oh, I feel kind of bad just thinking of how terrifying it probably was for her. She spent maybe five to seven hours up there, and there was no expectation that she'd ever come back.
LAURA HOBGOOD: No. No expectation she'd return.
BLAIR HODGES: Poor Laika. The second dog that we meet in the intro doesn't have a name. This is a small Pomeranian-type dog from about 2,000 years ago. This dog was found lovingly buried at the feet of a young woman in a cemetery in Carthage, Rome. Tell me about this dog.
LAURA HOBGOOD: One of the things that fascinates me as well is how long we have been co-interring ourselves with dogs. Some of the earliest hard evidence of dogs and humans being that kind of closely—emotionally, religiously, spiritually—connected are these co-interments.
The really sweet thing about this little Pomeranian is that, obviously, this dog was a pet at a time when very few dogs were pets. And so this person was probably a more upper-class person who was buried. But also, the dog was old, so it had been well cared for.
We can tell by the remains that the dog was an old dog and maybe died about the same time that this young woman died. Maybe it was her companion as she was dying from whatever killed her. Or it may have been a sudden death for her—who knows?
But there was a close enough connection that whoever buried her realized that this companion of hers needed to be buried alongside her. Burying a dog at the feet is a pretty common pattern that we see both in artwork. There are a number of sarcophagi that have a dog underneath the feet in the artwork on the sarcophagus.
It also suggests to me that at that point in time, you would bury grave goods—things that people would need in the afterlife. So burying this little dog with her suggests that there is an idea that the two of them will be sharing the afterlife together.
So there's just so much there with humans and dogs being buried together. There's another story of archaeological evidence—not just a story—of a woman buried on her side. Frequently, in the Mediterranean world, humans and dogs would be buried in a kind of fetal position.
So a woman buried on her side with her hand under her head, and underneath her hand is a small dog, also buried on the dog's side. So again, another story of kind of a tender death moment, and then this idea of an afterlife together.
BLAIR HODGES: I like how you framed the book with these two stories, because the first one shows we've been perfectly willing to blast a dog off into space—the furthest away that a dog could be from us—to use a dog for learning or exploration. But then we also have these dogs that couldn't be any closer to us, that we've actually buried with us in the ground.
And so we see the great distances and uses dogs have been put to, but also the intimacy we've had with these animals.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yes. And I think that's part of the relationship that is both harsh sometimes, but also very tender sometimes. Not that much different than the relationships we have with other humans, right? We have that same kind of span of interactions—both very violent and very loving—with other humans, too.
Partners in the Hunt and Herd – 12:53
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the earliest days in your book. You talk about dogs as partners "in the hunt and in the herd." Chapter one takes us to this cave in southwestern Europe that has evidence of ancient peoples being there about 30,000 years ago or so. There are hundreds of paintings on the walls of this cave.
You talk about the animals that are there—horses, bison, owls, rhinoceros, lions. But there are no dogs or wolves there. However, archaeologists found something else in that cave. They found these footprints of a small child and a canine together.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, it's interesting, and actually, since I wrote this book, I've been able to go into some of those caves. They're even more amazing when you are actually in them than they are as beautiful imagery that folks can see of these caves in southern France.
It's the Magdalenian period when you have amazing artwork done in all these caves, but not really many images at all of humans, unless we're sort of human-animal combinations. And no images that I've seen of dogs. There are a couple of animals that might be dogs—they're kind of a little more interpretive—but images of all these animals who we would probably hunt.
But they're not hunting scenes. These are sacred places. These are amazingly sacred places that people created. And luckily for us now, the composition of the landscape, of the artwork, and of the climate preserved these.
There may well have been caves like this in many other places globally, but they either haven't been discovered or, just perchance, the climate didn't allow for them to end up being so luckily preserved.
There's an intriguing—and of course, it would have to go back thousands of years to actually prove that this is the story—but an intriguing example where there are footprints of a human, likely an adolescent human from the size of the foot, and a footprint of a wolf-dog, so a proto-dog.
Wolves set their feet more on their toes without that pad down. If you look at a wolf, you can tell that their feet don't plant quite the way a dog's feet do. And the footprint for the proto-dog is kind of in between where a wolf and a dog would be.
They're not running. You can tell the stride is much bigger if you're running than if you're walking. But these footprints go along for quite a distance, walking side by side. So obviously the human wasn't chasing this animal, and this animal wasn't chasing the human.
They were walking side by side. And also probably a little boy, again because of the way the foot plants with the hip structure. Someone is just swinging their torch along the wall and leaving a carbon print from that torch swinging along the wall, and it matches with the footprints that are going along.
So that's the way we really are able to date these preserved footprints—is the torch along the wall. It seems that at this point, this young human and this almost-dog, but still kind of wolf, are walking together into this cave.
And again, luckily, we just have these imprints that are saved. So that's kind of an example of the in-between that there was probably quite a long period of in-between when we're becoming humans.
I think that this cave art is one of the first examples of us thinking in a way that might be called religious, or expressing ourselves in that kind of artwork. So we're becoming human, and they're becoming dogs simultaneously.
That kind of walking into the cave together, metaphorically, seems to me—and then dogs will very much become one of our symbols of the afterlife, which in many early generations of humans was thinking about what is the underworld, at least in Mediterranean cultures.
So that whole idea of us walking into that cave together just bears a whole lot of meaning when you think about what's going on there.
Domestication Around the World – 17:01
BLAIR HODGES: And I think people can pick up on this. It's been difficult for researchers to pinpoint the origin of the dog. You've talked about proto-dogs because there's this time when they're not quite, as you said, not quite wolves, not quite dogs. And so it's been tough to pinpoint the origin.
It also seems like there are multiple origin points. There's a multiple-origin theory that some people have—that it wasn't necessarily the case that wolves were domesticated and became dogs in one particular area and then were exported or taken throughout the world.
Rather, it seems like wolves sort of became dogs at different places at different times, even independently, in independent cultures and different peoples. So that this was happening in different—
LAURA HOBGOOD: —places throughout the world, which is super fascinating, right? To our knowledge, at least. We may find something different at some point. But at least right now, science suggests that all other domesticated animals were domesticated in one place, at one point, and then culturally shared.
So cows are domesticated in one place. Goats are domesticated in far western Asia, in what we would now call the Middle East. Right. Then shared. So there are goats in a lot of other places. Llamas in South America. Right. And then shared.
Dogs—there have been various places that scientists would say, oh, this is where the dog came from. Modern-day China, so in East Asia, in Siberia, in western Europe. I mean, there are different places that have, oh, this is the first dog.
And then we find out that it looks like they were happening in all those places and not culturally shared. So there's something about the connection that happened between us and those wolves—proto-dogs, dogs—that was happening more than once.
That co-evolution was taking place in different geographical locations, which again, to me, would just suggest that it was not in a way that was by design, but it was kind of meant to happen. That it was very natural. Yeah. It was fate that we ended up together with dogs.
The other thing that that gave us was this really big gene pool, where we had quite a few different subspecies of gray wolf from whom dogs emerged, who they evolved from.
So then we end up with this gene pool that today gives us—once we really start intentionally shifting the way dogs look and behave—we're able to have a three-pound adult dog and an almost 300-pound adult dog.
Because we have this huge gene pool that we are working with that allows, when we're doing intentional selection, allows us to basically create a diversity of dogs unseen in any other species in the history of the planet, in terms of the variety of sizes and sort of morphological outputs that we have with dogs.
BLAIR HODGES: I want to come back to that, but how long did this process take you? You talk about the theories about this—that this was happening before the Ice Age, and that there was a long time in between then and then some rapid changes that happened. So give us a sense of the timeline.
You’ve taken us back about 30,000 years. How long did it take to kind of get to where we are more today?
LAURA HOBGOOD: The first really hard evidence of dogs as we would completely distinguish them from wolves—even though they can still breed today, right. So how do you define a species?—but when we can really distinguish them is some burials that are probably about 15,000 years old.
So did it take 15, 20, 25,000 years? It probably was stop and start. We’d have some groups of dogs—groups of proto-dogs—who were living with humans in different places. Then maybe something happened, and a few of those dogs who’d really gotten close to us all die, or we do. You know, you never know the stops and starts.
The most fascinating study to me that shows the possibilities of rapid change is this farm fox study that was conducted in Russia on some silver fox farms. These were foxes who were being contained and bred for fur coats, basically. So you want a coat that is all the same color—which foxes have, which wolves have—sort of that blank kind of coat.
And there was a scientist there who just thought, oh, it’d be interesting to study some of the behaviors of these foxes. Some of the foxes would run up a little closer in the cage than others. So, long story short, he started breeding the ones that seemed most likely for tameness—not for appearance at all, just for tameness.
And within a relatively short, amazingly short timeframe in terms of evolution—within 40 generations—by just selecting for that tameness, those foxes have become domesticated. They showed all the signs of domestication. They could be pets. They could be snuggled.
You do not want to snuggle a fox. The vast majority of these foxes would bite your fingers off if they could. But these foxes were ready to be snuggled. Their tails were curling. Their coats had changed. Their ears had flopped. Their muzzles had gotten shorter. All of the signs that we see with dogs. That’s a really short evolutionary timeframe for a large mammal like that to go from being wild to being not only tame, but domesticated—which are different things.
So it could have happened in a fairly short timeframe. Not in a single human lifetime like these foxes were, since that was a very deliberate experiment. But it could have happened over the course of several human generations, which would have been quite a few dog generations. They could have ended up becoming more and more tame and eventually domesticated.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And that does a great job of telling us what it means to become domesticated and the kind of shifts that we see in these animals—the physical shifts in their size and color and how they look. The curly tails, the floppy ears, color changes, even what they prefer to eat.
And also those are physical shifts and then behavioral shifts—how they interact with humans, how they interact with other animals. Can they be trained? Can they learn? And so that does a great job of summing up what that looks like.
Made For Each Other – 23:13
BLAIR HODGES: What factors made this such a likely pairing? You talked about the multiple-origin theory and how this seemed almost fate or inevitable. What are the factors that you think explain that—that it happened to be dogs that we teamed up with like this?
LAURA HOBGOOD: We have a lot in common with wolves anyway. We live in groups. We are omnivores. Dogs are more carnivorous than we are, but we might have been a little more carnivorous at that point. Anyone who thinks paleo diet.
In the areas where we overlapped with wolves, we hunt in very similar ways. We have hierarchical systems. Even though those hierarchies differ in different human cultures, we still tend to live in hierarchical systems. And so our kind of groupings mirrored each other. And the way that we wandered and hunted mirrored each other.
So we probably had multiple generations where, if there were more humans with some weapons around and there were wolves, and a group of wolves had just killed an animal, we could run them off from that animal and then we would take it. We were scavengers.
They would probably do the same. You have a human who’s killed an animal and a pack of wolves come, and that human’s going to take off and give that food over to those wolves. And so we could have easily followed each other in the hunt for generations.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s more of a frenemy relationship than best buddies.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Oh, for sure. For sure. I think that’s probably the way it started.
But then as we settle down and start throwing off—well, we create trash piles as soon as we settle down. We’re really good at that. And so the wolves that are at the bottom of a wolf pack don’t fare well. Neither do the humans who are at the bottom of a human pack.
And so the ones who are at the bottom of that wolf pack—sometimes they’d even get completely kicked out and need a place to go—and they would come and start eating our scraps. So I think those are the first ones, the ones who would eat our scraps.
A big old alpha wolf, male and female, they don’t care to be around us. They’re going to keep their distance. But these wolves who had no other choice just saw a new little ecological niche to stick themselves into.
And then if those start reproducing—in a wolf pack they would never be allowed to reproduce, right? But if those started kind of reproducing, then the pups they had would just sort of be hanging around.
That was one of the earliest theories, that humans just went and grabbed some wolf pups. But no wolves are going to let you just go and grab their pups. Right? But eventually, when those pups are born right in that ecological niche around humans, then they start to come up and get to know us a little better. And they’re cute as they can be, wolf pups.
And so I can imagine we’d just go ahead and start playing around with those. So I think that we just had so much in common in terms of where we were and how we got food that we kind of were—I like the idea of being frenemies at first.
But then the ones who kind of started to live together and bond just ended up forming our own pack.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Talk about how there's even some record in some cultures of women breastfeeding dogs. You mentioned the cute factor, because puppies are cute, and there has been some record of even really close relationships here. And the cute factor—I mean, it's got to play some kind of role. They're so cute.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Oh, I think so. I mean, and they're gorgeous, right? Wolves are gorgeous. Dogs are gorgeous. And puppies just— I just finished fostering a litter of puppies. I’m picking up some bottle-baby puppies this afternoon from the shelter, actually.
And you should see, when I take puppies into the classrooms at school, the students—their faces just completely change, right? They just melt, and they just want to hold them. And then they sit there holding the puppies during class. I don't know how much they're learning, but it doesn't really matter. It's probably better for stressed 19- and 20-year-olds to hold puppies.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAURA HOBGOOD: And so they're with their little fat puppy bellies. And the wolf pups look the same, right? Cute as they can be.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That's Laura Hobgood, the Elizabeth Root Peyton Chair in Religion and Environmental Studies at Southwestern University. And we're talking about the book A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans.
All Dogs Go to the Underworld (Ancient) – 27:24
BLAIR HODGES: All right, Laura, let's look at the next chapter, which we've talked about a little bit already. This is a chapter about the afterlife. It's tempting to think of dogs as tools—that they served a purpose for humans. And we also want to think about the emotional connections.
There's evidence dating way back that humans did see dogs as more than just tools. As you've mentioned, about 14 or 15,000 years ago, we start to see dogs being buried alongside humans, as we've described. And the popularity of this dog burial comes and goes.
So let's talk about Greek and Roman dog burials and what we learn from those.
LAURA HOBGOOD: There are a number of burials, even in huge cemeteries, that aren't just humans and dogs, but are just for dogs. The one that is most striking to me is located in current-day Ashkelon, Israel.
That cemetery had at least 700 dogs buried, all in the same position—on their right side, in a kind of fetal position. Dogs of all ages. It does not look from the archaeological evidence like these dogs were sacrificed. They seem to have died natural kinds of deaths.
Some puppies—then again, we have puppies die from disease all the time—some older dogs, but all buried in this one huge dog cemetery, probably from the seventh or eighth century BCE.
So we have that kind of evidence around the Mediterranean world in Greek and Roman times. Then we also have—though that's a little pre–Alexander the Great, so kind of pre-Greek—we also have dogs who are buried with grave goods.
One lovely burial in Greece is of a dog buried in the same position as those dogs in Ashkelon, but with grave goods. So a bone, a bowl—things that the dog would need in the afterlife.
There’s also lots of evidence in Egypt of the mummification of dogs, and cats as well. And that’s a lot of effort to mummify someone after they have died. There is evidence of the sacrifice of dogs. There’s a new finding in Egypt still sort of looking at what’s going on with that.
One involves scores of puppies who were buried and mummified, probably in some kind of religious ritual. But more often than not, these burials look like very intentional burials for dogs, because we must have thought that there was some kind of afterlife for them.
That's the only reason you would very intentionally and carefully bury someone at that point: so that they would be ready for the afterlife.
Then you have the three-headed dog, Cerberus, who is the Greek guardian of the underworld. But that idea sort of travels globally—that you have dogs as these guides into the underworld.
You have to remember, at that point, there was no— in a Greek mythological conception, heaven was where the gods and goddesses lived. All humans go to the underworld after you die. So it's not hell; it's just where you all go.
And so Cerberus is not guarding the gates of hell or anything. Cerberus is guarding the path to the underworld where we all go.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's mostly about keeping people from leaving there, right? Like, the idea was Cerberus would be like, y’all gotta stay in here, rather than, like, you can’t enter.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: And you say this happens around the globe too, right? So Greek and Roman, but also examples in Japan and China.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yep. There are all sorts of early human myths where dogs are the ones who are taking you across the river into whatever the afterlife is.
Of course, when we have different East Asian religions and East and Southeast Asian religions develop that include the transmigration of souls, dogs are just one of the many different animals into whom our souls can transmigrate.
So they're not different in that sense. But in cultures that have an idea of a linear kind of timeline where you go to an afterlife, frequently dogs are present as one of the ones helping you get there—leading you through, not in a bad way, but in a good way.
But you also had, by the time the idea of Cerberus comes around, some pretty big dogs being selected to be big guard dogs. And there's lots of evidence of some of those big guard dogs, or big war dogs—the age of giants, giant dogs in Greek and Roman culture.
So that's where you start to see the first really big dogs. And you can see the kind of creation of a dog who's guarding something this big—three-headed, and three being a very important number. So the three-headed dog guarding Hades.
One of the cutest little pictures I've ever seen is these three little fluffy puppies who’ve all managed to stick their heads through a hole in a fence, so it looks like a little three-headed dog. And the caption goes, “Guardian of the gates of heck.” Little three-headed puppies. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Perfect.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah.
All Dogs Go to Heaven (Modern) – 32:29
BLAIR HODGES: Well, dog burials obviously have continued up to the present. But there was a time when the pet cemetery was really sort of founded in the modern era. This was in the late 1800s, in the Victorian age in England. This was the first modern pet cemetery.
Take us there. What was happening culturally that led to this new Victorian pet cemetery?
LAURA HOBGOOD: It's the time period in England—the Victorian era—where you had this kind of fascination not just with sanity, things being clean, so sanitized, but you also had this growing fascination with spirits, with spiritual life.
It's the era of séances. It's the era when people are trying to connect with those who have already died. So this whole Victorian period in England—
BLAIR HODGES: Sure. It's like a scientific kind of effort to figure out spirits.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, indeed. Yep, indeed. And so it becomes an age of cemeteries.
And so again, while dogs, as you stated, have been interred with humans and carefully placed for generations, off and on, in this particular era we see the growth of these huge cemeteries that have lovely inscriptions and headstones.
We've kind of passed that now. So many more people are being cremated, as are our dogs. And if there are cemeteries, you have more of that flat marker.
But we have a good century where there are these lovely, huge headstones both for humans and for dogs. And there's a wonderful cemetery in London, and there's a wonderful cemetery in Paris.
I got to go to that one a couple years ago. It's the cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried. There are huge cemeteries in various places in the U.S.
I actually randomly lived right next to a dog cemetery when I was in grad school in St. Louis. The largest was probably a big one outside of New York City.
BLAIR HODGES: Is that the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery?
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yes. The Hartsdale Pet Cemetery.
BLAIR HODGES: That was 1896. And it's still there?
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yep. The majority of the animals buried there are dogs, even though there are other animals as well.
The one in Paris also has some ponies and some cats and some birds. Right. You have some other animals there, too.
But some of the headstones are just very touching. Some of them will say, “We will meet you on the other side. We know you're still waiting for us.”
And so you have this indication on these headstones that the people really did think—really did believe—that the dogs were in heaven waiting for them.
One of the culturally popular ideas now about that is the whole Rainbow Bridge idea, that they are waiting for us on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. And so that has become a fairly popular way for people who feel very close to their dogs to share the idea of what will happen after they die.
But yeah, that age of cemeteries just provides a really touching look into what people were thinking about their dogs and where they thought they were. One of my favorite ones is this headstone for Grumpy. He's really cute. Sometimes they even have the dog's image carved onto the headstone.
BLAIR HODGES: Is Grumpy on Grumpy's headstone?
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yes. Yeah, he's very cute.
BLAIR HODGES: I'll put that out on our social media.
You mentioned the Rainbow Bridge. This is a poem that a lot of dog lovers will share to mark the death of their companions. It's this poem about dogs having gone over this Rainbow Bridge, kind of waiting for us on the other side.
And it really helps us explore human grief—the grief that we can have at the loss of a dog, and how close we can get. There's something you share in the book from a person who had lost their dog companion, and I'll read this. It says:
“I lost my dog, Shaman. He taught me to sit. I mean, I taught him to sit, but he taught me to sit, too. With his nose in the air and his eyes half closed, just taking in everything. I would just smile because everything made sense.
He wasn't my child. He wasn't my parent. He wasn't my partner. He was my dog. And that's much more than you know. And we just don't have words for that.”
That resonated so much with me—just that image of the dog sitting out in the breeze, putting their nose in the air and just taking in the world. I've watched my own dogs do that. And yes, they teach us to sit as well, if we pay attention to them.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah. That's lovely. Thanks for reading that.
I think they do a lot of things like that for us. They teach us to sit and just to be there. One of my dogs, in particular, loves just laying in the warm sun for a while and just being there—and that's all that you need.
One of my other dogs, his favorite thing is a car ride, but it's just going slowly. So I find little neighborhood roads where we can go slowly. And he hangs his head out the window and just breathes in and smells everything.
They also teach us to walk. Right. So one of the things with dogs today—there are multiple studies that show that people with dogs get up and move more, because we sit too much, too.
And so they get us moving. If you've got a dog, you've got to get up and let that dog out. Right. They keep us moving around.
So there are all sorts of gifts they give us as they become pets. They give us all these other gifts.
Healing and Saving – 37:49
BLAIR HODGES: This brings us right to the next chapter, Laura, about healing and saving. This explores how dogs have been companions for us that heal and save for thousands of years. They were present at healing temples in Mesopotamia, and today they're found in therapy settings. They can be assistants to people with disabilities. They can even detect cancers when they're trained to do that.
So going way back in time, there's Gula, the goddess of healing in Mesopotamia, and she's often pictured with a dog. Dogs have been associated with healing for a really long time.
LAURA HOBGOOD: They have been, yeah.
So Gula, whose star was the dog star as well, is frequently pictured with dogs. Small statuettes of dogs have been found in this Mesopotamian healing goddess’s temple. The dogs I mentioned earlier from Ashkelon, who were all buried in that big cemetery, may well have been part of a healing temple, too.
There’s Asclepius, the Greek god whose symbol is still connected with current medical professionals. There’s some etymological connection between Ashkelon and Asclepius, so maybe those dogs were part of a healing temple there as well. There’s a saying that comes across in a number of different ancient languages about a dog’s lick healing. And so the lick of a dog will heal you.
BLAIR HODGES: This reminded me of the Bible. We see dogs licking wounds in the Bible, and I used to think that was just this gross image—that it was supposed to show how degraded and awful the situation was. But no, the dogs were probably thought to be helping with healing, or tending to people. It wasn’t necessarily meant to be this gross scene.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Exactly. Yeah. And we see that with saints, too. One of the saints who’s known as a healer of people who had the plague in Italy—St. Roch—is frequently pictured with his dog. The story is that his dog was bringing him bread when he himself had the plague and had to separate himself.
But you have a dog accompanying this healer of the plague and the bubonic plague, which produced disgusting, awful, tragic wounds—boils on people. So a dog is still associated there with healing. And now it seems we’ve come full circle, where we’re realizing how many healing properties dogs have.
Whether it’s emotional support dogs—we have so many emotional support dogs now, which is wonderful—or the scientific research being done with them in terms of their incredible sense of smell, which is about 10,000 times more sensitive than ours. It makes you feel sorry for them sometimes. But they find some things smelling very interesting that we might find disgusting.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. They have this long organ in their snout that gives them space for detecting way more smells. That’s why dogs are constantly sniffing everything.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Constantly sniffing. And it’s not just the present moment of sniffing—it’s almost like a story for them. They can smell where another dog or animal has come by and judge the time span. It’s telling them a history, too, something we don’t get. The scent trail. It’s pretty amazing what they can smell.
BLAIR HODGES: And there are dogs that are companions for autistic folks, obviously seeing-eye dogs. There’s evidence that dog ownership seems to decrease the likelihood of heart attacks. And then emotional therapy dogs.
There were dogs present in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing who were then also taken to Sandy Hook after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. These were the same therapy dogs. And as you point out in the book, they really are involved. They can actually get emotionally fatigued. This is work.
This isn’t just dogs casually showing up. They can be deeply attuned to human emotion and can get worn out themselves by grief and sorrow.
LAURA HOBGOOD: They certainly can. One of the most touching examples is dogs who are trained to search for humans buried in rubble. Handlers see the dogs really wearing down when they’ve only found deceased humans.
So a handler will sometimes get themselves kind of buried so the dog can find a live human—because that’s what they’re trained to do. They get emotionally worn out if all they’re finding are people who are already dead. They’re very much connected to trying to save the human who’s alive. And if they can’t do that, they either feel like they’ve failed or they’re just sad.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the emotional connection goes both ways. Dogs and humans can truly have love for each other. We can’t sit down and interview dogs to understand their psychology exactly, but we can tell from their reactions and interactions that there are real feelings involved.
LAURA HOBGOOD: They’ve been doing some really fascinating MRI studies with dogs recently. They carefully train dogs—not forcing them, because that would skew the results—using lots of hot dogs to encourage them to get into the MRI machine and lie still.
They put big headphones on them so they don’t hear the loud thumping, and then they scan their brains. One of the popular headlines about this research was, “My Dog Really Does Love Me.”
They found that when a dog is given a Q-tip with the scent of an unknown human, the dog’s brain doesn’t react much. But when the scent is from the human who feeds them and walks them, the part of the dog’s brain that lights up is the same part of our brain that lights up when we see someone we love.
So they’re starting to find scientific evidence that’s really fascinating in that area—much of which has come out since I wrote this book.
BLAIR HODGES: Cool. That’s Laura Hobgood, and we’re talking about the book A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans. Dr. Hobgood earned her PhD from Saint Louis University and also has a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University. She’s currently at Southwestern University.
Dogs of War – 44:26
BLAIR HODGES: Let’s talk about war. This is a chapter I didn’t anticipate. You introduce us to a dog named Cairo who took an active part in the raid that captured and killed Osama bin Laden. This chapter covers the difficult history of dogs and war.
So what does Cairo represent in this overall story of dogs and humans’ relationships?
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, you know, it's hard because a lot of it—certainly a lot of it—is classified. But the information that did come out about Cairo was that Cairo went in on the raid and had already been trained to find the scent of Osama bin Laden and to identify that that was who was there.
And so Cairo was one of the many tools that was used to positively identify that they had actually found Osama bin Laden. In that sense, Cairo was one of the heroes of that day.
Dogs have been used as tools of war. Part of the reason for writing that chapter, for including that information, is that our history with dogs is wonderful and loving and positive in many ways, but it also has a tragic side.
Dogs have been used against other humans. A bloodhound is called that for a reason. Bloodhounds were used to chase down other humans—particularly people who were enslaved—and bring them back. It’s a reason that some people are scared of dogs.
Dogs have also been used as tools for law enforcement in both very good ways. Dogs can be used to keep officers from having to pull out their guns. If you see one of those dogs coming at you, you’re going to say, “Okay, come get me. Please get that dog away from me.” So they’ve been used to keep violence down, but they’ve also been used as tools of violence.
They’ve saved scores of soldiers’ lives by being bomb-detection dogs or by searching in front of humans for booby traps. So they’ve saved many human lives. We send them out in the field in front of us, and sometimes we lose the dogs to artillery and bombs.
But if anyone’s ever seen the movie Gladiator, they see Russell Crowe going into battle with his huge dog running out with him. That dog’s going to attack people. That dog is not going just to say hi to the enemy.
BLAIR HODGES: He’s not going to play fetch with the enemy.
LAURA HOBGOOD: That dog’s going to take them down.
BLAIR HODGES: They didn’t have Frisbees yet. If they had Frisbees, then maybe.
LAURA HOBGOOD: You never know. Yeah. If the enemy had dog treats on board. But dogs have been used as weapons as well—tools in various ways.
Stubby was a dog, the most decorated dog in U.S. military history. He’s stuffed now and in the Smithsonian, but he lived a long, happy life. And apparently after World War I, he was also in parades and things that honored returning soldiers.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this was Stubby, the pit bull in World War I. And this was before the U.S. had an active military dog program. Other countries had dog programs at the time, but the U.S. during World War I didn’t. What was the hesitation on the United States’ part, and how did that change so that by World War II there was an active military dog program?
LAURA HOBGOOD: I’m not sure what the hesitation was, because we’d had dogs that were very much used during the Civil War. There are several Civil War monuments that include the dog that was part of that particular platoon or troop. The dog is in the military cemetery from the Civil War.
I just don’t think we were that prepared, actually. We hadn’t been doing the preparation appropriately with dogs.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And the U.S. was sort of resisting getting involved anyway.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Right, right, right. Yeah. We were trying to stay out of World War I. We were trying to stay out of World War II for a long time as well.
But by World War II, we had been training dogs. And then there are several military actions where the dogs did not fare well. The dogs didn’t come back. Vietnam is probably the most touching one.
There are a number of soldiers who returned from Vietnam who were dog handlers and who very much lamented that they had to leave their dogs behind. Dogs were classified as war material, like a tank, not like a living being at that point. So they were left behind with the other war material.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I was sad to read that. I hadn’t heard this story—that we had military dogs in Vietnam. For all the problems of the Vietnam War, this was just another one. We had these dogs, and then the military said, “Nope, we’re leaving them behind.” And who knows what happened to them.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, who knows? I doubt very many good outcomes.
By the most recent wars, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, dogs are classified differently, and they did get to come home. So we have changed that policy, thankfully, so those dogs get to come home.
Obviously, when the dogs were left behind, it was horrible for the dogs, but equally horrible for the people who loved those dogs and had to leave them behind.
There are stories from Vietnam War soldiers who talk about dogs who saved their lives and saved many other lives, and yet they couldn’t save the dogs’ lives when it came time to leave. Luckily, we’ve changed that policy, and now dogs do get to come home. Many are recognized as heroes and decorated as such.
BLAIR HODGES: This chapter is really important. As you point out, there are a lot of ethical questions around dog–human relationships.
Dogs have been used to oppress people. Frederick Douglass famously described these hellish hounds that were used to terrorize and abuse enslaved people. Dogs have been used to fight Indigenous people.
There are images from the civil rights era of dogs being sicced on protesters, and up to the present, when police dogs have been involved in inequalities that tend to happen within public policing.
So it’s a complicated history. There’s companionship and beautiful stories of burial and the Rainbow Bridge and therapy—and then there’s also war and violence connected with these dogs.
Hot Dogs? – 50:25
BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you took time to point that out. I don't think there was a part of the book where you talked about dogs as food, though. I wondered if you had thought about including that at all, and maybe why that didn't make an appearance.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, I did think about it. There's not a whole lot of ancient evidence of dogs being used as food. There is some, though. For example, I mentioned earlier dogs sort of pulling us into the Arctic. They were also a food source when needed—if hunting didn't work. If you couldn't hunt.
I think they were only used as food at that point if they had to be, because they were too valuable as a living tool to eat them. But they were a food source if they had to be.
One of the transitions that's happening now that's quite interesting is that dogs become pets as you gain a middle class, right? Otherwise, dogs have to work for their living, or they're a pet of the—
BLAIR HODGES: —elite, because otherwise they're costing you money, right?
LAURA HOBGOOD: They're costing you money. And so again, we see, as the middle class arises in Europe, it was kind of a sign that you had attained that level if you could have a pet dog that you could afford to feed, but that dog wasn't really working for you.
We've been seeing that transition happen because dogs are still food in parts of the world. Particularly in East Asia, they're a major food source. But there's a lot of debate now, particularly in China, because as we've seen the middle class rise, we've also seen dogs becoming pets.
We're starting to see different areas in China where dogs are being banned as a food product. And so it's kind of a transition. Some cultures have used dogs as food more than other cultures, and some still do. But as we see dogs transition in terms of their positionality with us, they kind of stop becoming food and become pets.
The Invention of Purebred Dogs – 52:11
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. I'm glad you mentioned this—the rise of the middle class—because you say breeding dogs, selecting for size and for particular tasks or for appearance, really started taking off in the Middle Ages. Some economic changes started to make that possible, but it really exploded during the Industrial Age in the 1800s.
And that's when the idea of a purebred dog was invented. The idea of a purebred dog wasn’t around before then. Purebred dogs are an invention. Talk about that invention.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah. And another fraught one, right? Because we see purebred dogs and the idea of which humans are also “pure” kind of rising at the same time, particularly in Europe.
Dogs have been selected for behavior and for size for thousands of years. I mentioned the age of the giants—big dogs—a couple thousand years ago in the Mediterranean world. And we see dogs who are lap dogs for royalty—think Tibetan spaniels—in many parts of the world for several thousand years.
But suddenly, particularly again in this Victorian period, we start to see this idea of a purebred dog, where you select for very specific traits—not just general size or general behavior. You select for a dog who will become a German shepherd, or a dog who will eventually be the American bulldog, or a dog who will be a collie.
So we start seeing very specific family trees for dogs, where you have to have one purebred and another purebred to create these lines of purebred dogs. And it’s probably not been good for dogs that we’ve done this.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Why not?
LAURA HOBGOOD: We start narrowing the gene pool. And so you start to amplify whatever in that particular gene pool might lead to problems. Like 25 percent of Bernese Mountain dogs dying of a certain kind of cancer, because you’ve narrowed the gene pool so much.
You start to see dogs like bulldogs—stunning bulldogs, big, beautiful bulldogs—but their noses are so short that they have a hard time breathing.
BLAIR HODGES: We had a bulldog. Yeah. Love them. Cookie. And she snored like you wouldn’t believe.
LAURA HOBGOOD: That’s a real physical problem, right? One of the ways dogs cool themselves is through that longer snout bringing air in. Those dogs overheat very quickly because they don’t have a way to cool the air down.
We also see dogs with cute big eyeballs—some of the little dogs with those big bug eyes.
BLAIR HODGES: Like pugs, yeah.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, the only reason they have big bug eyes is because the eye socket is so shallow that the eye is sticking out. That’s why they get dry eye frequently and their eyes sometimes pop out.
So we start to select for appearance, not as much for a solid, healthy dog and not as much for particular behaviors, but just for the way we want the dog to look. And that’s kind of what purebred dogs have come to mean.
Though we do have breeders now, and enough critiques of that system, that it’s starting to back off a little. People are starting to say, okay, you’re right—we’ve probably overdone this in terms of selecting for certain appearances, and we need to pull back a bit.
But the idea of having a purebred dog is still very appealing to some people. Maybe for the same reasons that having a pet dog at all was appealing to the middle class. That’s where the term “mutt” becomes kind of derogatory.
If you’ve got a mutt, that can imply you couldn’t afford to buy a purebred dog—you adopted a dog from somewhere, got a dog off the street. So purebred dogs become very much a status symbol in a lot of cases.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. And without as much attention to the dog’s health.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Exactly. Without much attention to their health. You see a lot fewer health problems in mixed-breed dogs than you do in purebred dogs, usually.
BLAIR HODGES: And you say this is an era of the Frankensteinization of dogs, even.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yes. And one of the things that was happening for a while—though I haven’t heard as much about it recently—is people trying to clone a particular dog that they loved.
So we started to see dogs being used in those kinds of scientific ways.
BLAIR HODGES: I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about this with Chicken Delicious. I’d have these visions of somehow—because she was such a unique dog. She was a mutt, a very unique dog. And boy, I loved who she was, and I wanted something as close to that as possible.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah. And so we have people spending tens of thousands of dollars to have their beloved dog cloned. That’s just a whole other kind of ethical and scientific mess there.
Just Say No to Puppy Mills – 56:39
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Maybe spend just another moment talking about the rise of puppy mills, too, and where we’re at with that. It seems like it used to be more common to find a bunch of puppies at pet stores, like dogs being produced everywhere. What’s the state of things today with where people are getting their dogs and how that process is working?
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah. So I think the era of pet stores—I’m hoping—is kind of going away. At least that’s my sense, just in terms of seeing what’s around. I think word about puppy mills got out.
There are people who breed dogs who could be called very ethical breeders. They might have one particular breed of dogs. They don’t breed them very frequently. They would invite you into their home to see this one litter of dogs, if you want to buy a purebred dog.
But then you would see puppy stores that would have 20 different breeds of puppies in there. Most of those would have come from mass breeding facilities that are just horrible. You’d have female dogs having litters every time they went into heat, kept in horrible conditions. And you would usually have very unhealthy dogs coming from those huge puppy mills.
A lot of those have been shut down, but they’re still out there. And so many people who still buy purebred dogs—if they haven’t gone on site to see where those dogs are coming from—could likely be getting them from these mass dog-production facilities.
They’re not illegal, though. They have to be stamped by the USDA. But they are very questionable, and the dogs there do not fare well—particularly the mama dogs who have to stay there.
BLAIR HODGES: Are there regulations about how many litters a dog can have, or how much space they can have? I mean, when I’m buying eggs at the store, there’s all this information on egg packages about cage-free or free-range, and the differences between those. Are there regulations like that for dog breeding?
LAURA HOBGOOD: There are, but whether they’re enforced or not is kind of the issue. They’re the same basic regulations you’d have for how you have to treat your own dogs.
Dogs have a different status in different states. In Texas, they’re property. In California, I think they’re classified as companions. So it’s different in every state.
In most states, dogs you own as property are regulated at the municipal level—how many dogs you can have, things like that. But in rural areas, dogs can be classified the same as any other agricultural animal.
So if you have 20 adult female dogs that are your property and you’re not regulated in terms of numbers, you can pretty much do whatever you want with them. There are very basic regulations like food, water, and shelter—but even those aren’t usually enforced.
Appreciating Doggies Today – 59:28
BLAIR HODGES: In your last chapter, here’s a quote from you. You say humans owe it to dogs to recognize and reclaim the history of their longest-standing partner. What are people today overlooking about this history that could address some of the problems you’ve mentioned?
LAURA HOBGOOD: I think today we’re seeing a lot of movements that recognize dogs as integral beings who deserve our respect. Some of that is what’s called the no-kill movement.
In the last 20 to 30 years, more and more municipalities have tried to create animal shelters and adoption facilities that function differently than they did 20 or 25 years ago, when they were more like animal control—when you’d have 80 percent of dogs that went into the system being killed and not rehomed.
We’ve seen that shift, though I will tell you this has been a tough year. More and more places are questioning whether they can maintain that no-kill ideal because they’re having a hard time getting dogs adopted into homes.
But I think we did leap one hurdle by even getting that no-kill idea out there—that if a dog is physically healthy and behaviorally stable, that dog deserves to be placed in another home and not euthanized just because there’s not enough space.
So figuring out ways to make space for dogs until they find another home. I think we’re doing better at that than we were, but we’re still not quite there in terms of recognizing the full significance of dogs.
I think another area where we’re seeing that significance recognized is the growth of emotional support dogs and therapy dogs. That’s being acknowledged as something that has always been there, and now we’re putting an official stamp on that designation.
BLAIR HODGES: That means we can be more deliberate about it, too. We can study it. We can see what the relationship is, how it benefits people, and how to do this ethically with dogs.
It seems like we can recognize the history and then say, okay, what went wrong in the past, and how can we do things better now? We can be more deliberate.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yes, indeed. Yeah. And I think part of that current idea goes hand in hand with the growth of our own acceptance of mental health issues and addressing those mental health issues for humans. Dogs are part of that whole bundle of ways of addressing mental health.
BLAIR HODGES: And maybe just say a word about your own work with dogs. You work closely with dogs. You mentioned some puppies you’d just been with. Tell us a little bit about your activism with dogs.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Yeah, thank you. For years I’ve been a foster. I primarily foster. If a pregnant mama dog lands at a municipal animal shelter, I’m one of the people the local shelters will reach out to and ask if I’ll bring her home.
So she can have her puppies in a peaceful place, and I’ll keep the puppies and the mama together until they’re eight weeks old and ready to go to their own homes. I’ve got the last mama dog now. Her puppies all went to homes on Monday, and she’s laying in a big lounge chair close to me right now.
BLAIR HODGES: What’s her name?
LAURA HOBGOOD: That’s Benita. She’ll stay with me until she finds a home. And this afternoon I’ll run over to the shelter because they have some orphans—bottle babies—who came in and couldn’t be kept with their mom. So I’ll go pick those up and do some bottle-baby feeding. I’m picking up three of those today.
So yeah, just a whole series. I’ve also fostered dogs who are seniors or who are hospice dogs as well—just trying to get some of the load out of the shelter system. And I have to say, I love it. It’s a pleasure to do.
Though when the puppies are eight weeks old, I am ready for them to go to their homes. It’s like, go on. Their mama usually is, too. She’s like, please, enough of you.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I don’t think I ever want to do a puppy again. I’d forgotten how much time they take. We got our first dog back when we were first married, and it seems like we just had a lot more time back then.
And then, like, 15 years later, we’ve got two kids, we both have jobs, and we get our new puppy, Pickle. We got her from this nonprofit, no-kill place in Park City called Nuzzles & Co. And it was pretty intense for a few months there. It was a lot of work.
LAURA HOBGOOD: It is. I tell people who come to meet the puppies I’m fostering that I foster puppies, but I will not adopt one once they’re eight weeks old. I’m ready for them to go away.
There are so many people who foster and who go to shelters and walk dogs, spending hours doing that. My partner is a wonderful dog photographer. We team-taught that dog class for years, and he gets wonderful pictures of dogs that we can post.
Many dogs get adopted because of social media. Good pictures of dogs out there in the Facebook world and the Instagram world—that’s the way many dogs get adopted. Someone falls in love with that face.
So he’s spent hours doing that kind of work. All sorts of hands stirring the big pot to try to get dogs into forever homes.
BLAIR HODGES: I love that. Love that. By the way, Chicken Delicious was one of these dogs whose mom was pregnant with her and her litter and was in danger at that time. I don’t think Utah was a no-kill shelter state at that point.
And so this person volunteered to take dogs like that home and help the mom have the puppies. That’s how Chicken Delicious came into our lives. And without a volunteer like that, we wouldn’t have had this incredible relationship with such a beloved family member.
So the work that you do really is beautiful, and I think it really makes a difference in people’s lives. It certainly made a difference for my family.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, thank you. I’m glad you got Chicken Delicious.
BLAIR HODGES: I miss her. I really do.
Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:05:38
BLAIR HODGES: That’s Laura Hobgood, Elizabeth Root Peyton Chair in Religion and Environmental Studies at Southwestern University. And we talked about her book, A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans. It’s a really fun book, and I highly recommend it.
Let’s conclude with our final segment here. Laura, this is Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises. This is an opportunity for you to talk about something you wish you had added to the book, something that was most challenging in putting it together, or something that surprised you in the course of researching it and changed who you are or how you view dogs. You can speak to one, two, or all three of those things.
LAURA HOBGOOD: I would say one of the regrets is that I can’t just rewrite it every three or four years, because we’re learning so much more about dogs so quickly. I wish I could include things like what we talked about earlier with the MRI images. We know a lot more about dogs now than we did when I wrote this book.
Things about dogs have surprised me over the last 20 years as I’ve been teaching about them and learning about them. One of the things I wish could be conveyed in a piece like this—and this is both a regret and a challenge—is how much of a difference individual dogs make in individual lives.
Dogs really can save people, and people can get a lot of meaning out of saving dogs. Unless and until someone has really been connected with a dog like that, it’s hard to articulate how important we can be for each other.
So I wish there were a good way to convey that, especially for folks who’ve never had a dog, to encourage them to take that leap—to go adopt one and see what a difference it can make.
BLAIR HODGES: You’re a big dog advocate, for sure.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, you know, we have more households in the U.S. now that have pets—mostly dogs—than households with children under 18 at home. Sixty-one or sixty-two million households in the U.S. have dogs alone.
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
LAURA HOBGOOD: So they really are making a huge difference.
BLAIR HODGES: That’s Laura Hobgood, and we talked about her book, A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans. Laura, thanks for this conversation. Thanks for all your work with dogs. This has been really fun.
LAURA HOBGOOD: Well, thank you for doing this podcast. It really is very interesting, and it’s been my pleasure.
Outro – 01:07:53
BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. And if anybody out there has a recommendation for a cat’s history of the world, I’m all ears. I haven’t been able to find a good cat book yet, so if you’ve got one, let me know.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, I hope you’ll take a second to rate and review it in Apple Podcasts. I know I ask in every episode, but the past two episodes I haven’t seen any new ratings come in—so this is your time. This is your movie moment to go do that.
I love getting that feedback, and it also helps grow the audience and lets possible guests know what the show’s like. You can rate the show in Spotify as well.
Mates of State provides our theme music. I’m your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.