The Dog Ate My Thesis: A Co-evolutionary History of Humans and Dogs in the Southwest

Abstract

The co-evolution of dogs and people extends further back than can be absolutely determined through historical archives or material remains. Few animal-human relationships are celebrated and more storied than that the relationship between human beings and canines. Dogs stand between societies’ concepts of nature and civilization, and in American culture, represent the push and pull humans experience living in an ordered and highly constructed urban habitat and one that is “natural.” If constructing a human identity is a process of defining what is not human, dogs serve as a natural counterweight: an ever present and non-articulating companion that we perceive as a foil to our humanity. Dogs express that which is civil and uncivil, nature versus nurture, domesticity juxtaposed with barbarism. Dogs parallel and reflect our perceptions of what it means to be human, their survival as dependent on acculturation and imposed identity based on their keeper. This thesis posits that all dogs residing in the West underwent various social and physical co-evolutionary processes in response to late nineteenth and twentieth century colonization and urbanization. Colonization exerted pressures on the canine and human population forcing social and physical changes. Dogs are the oldest domesticated animal, and for this reason they are the perfect case study in examining changing human-animal relationships over the longue durée. This thesis agrees with Frederick Brown in contending that dogs had a type of agency; however, I contend that this agency has been reduced and eroded over time, particularly in urban settings. Dogs not only reflect our desire to exert control over another species’ physical form as we see fit, but they reflect our own social evolution, our own social constructions, and allow us to act out our Darwinian fantasies, while adapting a form of co-evolution and interspecies dependency that deepens as we continue to transform the environment. Companion and working dogs in the West were subjected to a process of genetic, behavioral, and social evolution with humans, adapting to a colonized, and increasingly urbanized Western landscape. There is a trifurcation between working dogs, performance dogs ,and companion dogs in process which will further shape the co-evolution of humans and canines into the twenty-first century.