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detailed manual of canine genetics, the penultimate chapter addresses the underlying principles that breeders should be following, emphasizing what it is about pedigree breeding that directly affects dogs’ well-being.
    In the final chapters of the book, I look at how science can help dogs to adjust to twenty-first-century life. Currently, most of the attention given to dogs’ breeding has focused on endowing them with superficial, rather than practical, traits. Many pet dogs are essentially breeders’ rejects, deemed unlikely to reach the perfection demanded by the breed standard; puppies who look as though they’re never going to become champions in the show-ring are the ones who become pets. Surely the needs of the pet dog deserve more attention than that? As dog owners and dog lovers, we need to think constructively about how to breed dogs whose primary purpose is not to herd sheep, retrieve game, or win prizesat dog shows but, rather, to be rewarding, obedient, healthy, happy family pets.
    In writing this book, I have tried to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the special place that dogs hold in human society. If these aims can be achieved, they should go a long way toward sustaining and reinforcing our relationship with our beloved companions as the next decades unfold.

CHAPTER 1
Where Dogs Came From
    â€œ T he wolf in your living room”—a powerful image that reminds dog owners that their trusted companion is, under the skin, an animal, not a person. Dogs are indeed wolves, at least as far as their DNA is concerned; the two animals share 99.96 percent of their genes. Following the same logic, you might just as well say that wolves are dogs—but, surprisingly, no one does. Wolves are generally portrayed as wild, ancestral, and primeval, whereas dogs tend to be cast in the role of the wolf’s artificial, controlled, subservient derivatives. Yet dogs, in terms of sheer numbers, are far more successful in the modern world than wolves are. So, what do we gain from knowing that wolves and dogs share a common ancestor? Many books, articles, and TV programs about dog behavior have claimed that understanding the wolf is the key to understanding the domestic dog. I disagree. My view is that the key to understanding the domestic dog is, first and foremost, to understand the domestic dog, and it’s a view I share with an increasing number of scientists worldwide. By analyzing the dog as its own animal rather than as a lesser version of the wolf, we have the opportunity to understand it—and refine our dealings with it—as never before.
    To be sure, it’s undeniable that dogs share many of their basic characteristics with other members of the Dog family (the Canidae) of which the wolf is a part. Dogs evolved from canids, and they owe such qualities as their basic anatomy, their refined sense of smell, their ability to retrieve, and their capacity to form lasting social bonds to thisevolution. To some extent, then, comparing dogs to their wild ancestors can be illuminating—but when the wolf is taken as the only available point of reference, our understanding of dogs suffers.
    At the most fundamental level, dogs are distinguished by the fact that, unlike wolves or other canids, they have adapted to live alongside human beings, the result of the process of domestication. As dogs have been altered by domestication, many of the subtleties and sophistications of wolf behavior appear to have been stripped away, leaving an animal that is still recognizably a canid but no longer a wolf. Domestication has altered the dog considerably, more than any other species. It’s self-evident that dogs come in a wide range of shapes and sizes; indeed, there’s more size variation among domestic dogs than in the whole of the rest of the Dog family put together. Yet this is by no means the only profound effect of domestication. Perhaps the most important one, for both us and