First Friend A History Of Dogs And Human Essay

First Friend: A History of Dogs and Humans, by Katherine Rogers, articulates the history of the relationship that exists between dogs and humans. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, investigates if and how dogs exhibit morality amongst each other. In both books, anecdotes are used to adequately portray instances of dogs’ displaying cooperation, empathy, altruism and by extension, morality. So from these books, how might we describe the capacity for sociality of dogs? In order to properly describe a dog’s capacity for sociality, it is necessary to have a clear definition of sociality. Sociality is the ability to form long term relationships with members of same or other species. Therefore, it would be safe to say that love, trust, cooperation and a sense of justice are reasonable indicators of a dog’s sociality.
From early on in First Friend it is clear that human beings share a certain level of trust with dogs.
Such cooperation is evident in the case of hunting dogs (pg. 45). While it is true that the hunters owned the dogs, it’s possible the dogs didn’t see the hunters as their masters as both the dogs and the hunters benefitted from the hunt. The hunters got partners to take down game and received upward social mobility just by owning a hunting dog and the dogs got to take down a prey that they wouldn’t be able to take down on their own. The hunters may have assumed that the dogs partook in the hunt because the hunters told them to, but it’s just as possible that the dogs participated in the hunt because they needed the help of the hunters. Rogers uses the phrase, “Hunting was a partnership between men and hounds” (pg.45) and in the case of a partnership, both parties benefit. This could mean that the dogs had no emotional attachment to the hunters, but solely cooperated with them to form a long term commensalistic