Darwin's Dogs: How Darwin's Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution

  • Emma Townshend
Frances Lincoln: 2009. 144 pp. $14.95, £8.99 9780711230651 | ISBN: 978-0-7112-3065-1

Even the most ardent fan of Charles Darwin might be feeling weary as his anniversary year draws to a close. Publishers have seemingly explored every corner of Darwin's life: his youth, his marriage, his attitudes to slavery and religion. Emma Townshend adds a fascinating angle — Darwin's love of dogs. Dogs were Darwin's constant companions from boyhood to old age. They were also the animals closest to hand when he explored the implications of his theories. It is surely not coincidental that Darwin's credo was “it's dogged as does it”.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN BURTON.

In Darwin's Dogs, Townshend adds little new to the Darwin biography. Yet her close reading of his correspondence, filtered to references to the family's dogs, produces a warmer, more intimate portrait than others so far. She plausibly claims that, aside from his years at boarding school and on the aptly named ship HMS Beagle, Darwin spent every day of his life in the company of dogs.

Motherless at eight years of age and packed off to boarding school, the young Darwin had, by his own admission, a “passion” for dogs, and his letters home to his three older sisters are packed with affectionate banter about the animals. Writing of how much he missed his family's dogs, and in turn being told by his sisters how much the dogs missed him, was a face-saving way for a young man to admit his homesickness and exchange affection without embarrassment.

On his first morning back home after five years on the Beagle, Darwin went straight to the stables to see how his old “savage” dog, “averse to all strangers”, would react to his return. Would the dog treat Darwin peaceably as befitted someone familiar, or would it growl at him showing that it had forgotten its master? As Darwin later recalled in The Descent of Man, the dog, “obeyed me, exactly as if I had parted with him only half an hour before. A train of old associations, dormant during five years, had thus been instantaneously awakened in his mind.”

As Darwin's thoughts turned to 'transmutation' of species, the actions of dog breeders intrigued him. By carefully selecting those animals best suited to their purposes to form the parents of the next generation, breeders offered Darwin a metaphor — artificial selection — from which he could derive his great guiding principle of natural selection. Dog breeders were especially important to Darwin in trying to understand the sources of phenotypic variability and how varieties bred true to type — questions that were resolved long after Darwin's death.

The other major issue with which Darwin grappled on his return to the United Kingdom was that of finding a wife. There too, canine thoughts were never far from his mind. When he listed for himself the pros and cons of a married life, he noted the companionship of a wife to be “better than a dog, anyhow”. In Townshend's narrative, we can see in this comment affectionate praise rather than insult.

On the Origin of Species opens with a discussion of domesticated animals. When Darwin came to his magnum opus on humankind, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, dogs again have centre stage. Dogs, for Darwin, know happiness and sadness, grumpiness, kindness and loyalty. They understand language — Darwin pressed his neighbour, Sir John Lubbock, into testing the latter's dog's vocabulary — and they have a sense of humour. The concept of property ownership, Darwin argued, “is common to every dog with a bone”. With a directness and candour that still shocks today, Darwin mused that a dog's “deep love ... for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings” prefigures human feelings of religious devotion.

Townshend shows a deft touch with a considerable body of Darwin scholarship. However, her simplified account of how scientific attitudes to dog behaviour have changed since Darwin is less secure. She mainly blames “behaviourists” in animal psychology for ruling inadmissible Darwin's sympathetic attribution of human qualities to dogs, noting that anthropomorphism has been reinstated in recent years by “cognitive psychologists”. However, the rejection of anthropomorphism was not limited to behaviourists and encompassed all forms of animal-behaviour study in the mid-twentieth century. Debate over the degree to which scientific terms used to describe human behaviour can be applied to animals continues to this day.

All in all, Darwin's Dogs is thoroughly entertaining and informative. It is the ideal antidote to Darwin fatigue.