The Journey of Dogs with Humans

The war. The original ancestors of our dogs. More than 15,000 years of human tinkering, first by accident and later by design, has created one of the most varied looking species on earth. The From the start, we have shaped dogs to help make our lives easier. This is the story of how wolves and humans forged a bond that changed them, us, and the world forever. Our story begins as the great ice sheets were advancing over the northern hemisphere, turning the world colder and drier. This was the Ice Age. And it belonged to the war. This vast landscape was their backyard. There were millions of wolves roaming the continents of the northern hemisphere. And whether they lived in the Arctic or the desert, they lived in packs. Our ancestors would have feared and admired the wolf's speed, stamina, and superior senses. The wolf pack was the perfect killing machine. Once they sniffed out prey, it was already too late. Working together, they were able to take down animals far larger than themselves. Wolf packs have a strict social order, led by an alpha male and alpha female. And the alphas got the choice bits, but the pack got its share too. And only the alpha female had pups. But just as it took the pack to bring down prey, the pack helped raise the young. A wolf pack was a family. And in that sense, they were just like us. Clan loyalty held us together too, and kept us alive against tremendous Ice Age odds. Because for thousands of years, we trespassed in a world that was... ...was not ours. Back then there were less than 1 million people on the entire planet. And if our ancestors felt like they were always being watched, it's because they were. Wolves, like us, are curious animals. For a carnivore with a nose a hundred times more sensitive than ours, the smell of cooking meat would have been an irresistible lure. They followed their noses to the edge of our camps and discovered an unexpected prize. Our garbage. Even for this top predator, hunting was hard work that often went unrewarded. The most curious, least aggressive wolves discovered that there were rewards to be had living close to us. Our scraps became a new kind of fast food. And the camp wolf was born. Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Dr. Robert Wayne, is the senior author of a new genetic analysis of wolves and dogs. I think it was initially a loose association. Wolves started following humans because they provided a resource and then kind of adopted the human niche and those wolves by just by the nature of that new habit. That is, they were no longer territorial, they were not hunting territorial prey, they were following humans. There was some kind of reproductive divergence. In time, the camp wolves living close to humans became genetically isolated from the wolves of the forests and wilderness. Eventually, in locations across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, a new social order dawned. And the most curious humans and wolves were taking one small step toward the creation of the dog. This first timid contact... began a dance between our two species that will change our world forever. There must have been something special about wolves which predisposed them towards domestication. And I think the real inkling of that is wolves were the only large carnivore that humans ever domesticated. Camp wolves became a familiar presence around our campsites. And we became more comfortable with them. These were perilous times for our ancestors. They were surrounded by animals bigger, stronger, and faster than us. When night fell, we huddled around our fires, wary of the danger from predators lurking in the darkness. you In protecting her own young, this camp wolf unintentionally protected the human. But now her pups were orphaned. The Klan mothers could never have known that the cries of the wolf pups would trigger their brain chemistry. urging them to nurse for these babies just as they did their own. This brain chemical, oxytocin, is made by all mammals and it's released through suckling and by warmth and repetitive touch. That night around the campfire, no pup or clan member was immune to the powerful connective chemistry being unleashed. Today we are just beginning to understand how such simple acts of kindness can ignite the social brain chemistry that makes us less fearful and willing to develop social ties. The Pops and Klan members first felt this bond more than 32,000 years ago. As new generations from these orphaned pups were born, the camp wolf evolved into the proto-dog, the precursor to man's best friend. And with each new litter, our ancestors kept the tamest pups and shunned the rest. Early on, any wolf that hinted at aggression, or a protodog that hinted at aggression towards humans, especially our children, would have been immediately removed and killed. The ones that successfully integrate with humans are the ones that tend to be more docile. instead of natural selection guiding evolution human intervention changed the very nature of the proto dogs long before there was a word for it our ancestors became geneticists and they created the wolf that didn't bite and set the stage for all of our dogs There is no history of dogs without humans solidly at their side. Dogs exist because we needed them. We needed them to protect us and to help us hunt. To gather our herds, haul our stuff, and later even heal us. And they do all this for us because they need us too. We humans have become their ecological niche. Our mutual need for nurturing and companionship keeps dogs near and dear to us in the 21st century. A recent genetic study provides clues of how all dog breeds are related and how they're all related to wolves. We compared all our markers in the dog genome to the same markers in the wolf genome. And we asked, Foot markers are very divergent and we find that the primary signal in the dog genome of origin is from Middle Eastern wolves. Genetic evidence points to Middle Eastern wolves as the original ancestors of our dogs. The genetic contributions from other wolf populations all occurred at later points in dog evolution. But when did the human-dog partnership begin? Our earliest archaeological evidence is a canine skull found not in the Middle East, but at Goyer Cave in Belgium. When it was discovered in 1870, it was believed to be the skull of a wolf. But in 2007, Dr. Mita Jemompre reexamined the skull and found something quite different. These skulls were discovered more or less 140 years ago and they remained in the world. the museum since then. They were excavated in two different caves in the Belgian Ardennes. This skull as you can see is very gracile, very slender compared to this wolf skull. It has quite a short snout and this is typical for domestic dogs. Its teeth are still quite large so this is not typical for recent dogs but it's a sign that it's really an old dog. This skull has been carbon dated as being over 31,000 years old, twice as old as the oldest dog skull previously found. This is the most compelling evidence that long before the end of the Ice Age, environmental and human influences had given rise to the dog. And it may have looked something like this. But was it tame? Tameness means to me docility, that is. An animal that will not harm you generally and will be submissive to your needs. Domestication to me means much more than that. That is, if you open the gates for your dog, it may go out for a walkabout, but it's still going to come back to you for food and shelter and even for companionship. It's part of human society and dependent upon it. The Goye skull at 31,000 years ago is indeed a very old dog. And it really does suggest that domestication occurred on the order of tens of thousands of years ago. Other evidence of humans and dogs has been found in Israel, Western Russia, and Germany. But perhaps the most intriguing find is in southern France. Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994, contains the earliest cave paintings in Europe. Perhaps the most important discovery was not found on the cave walls, but in the damp clay floor. Here, archaeologists found footprints of a child that appears to have been accompanied by a dog. Unlike wolf tracks, these have the shorter middle toe of a dog's. Carbon dating of the child's torch marks. swiped on the cave wall, tell us he and this ancient dog may have taken their walk together 26,000 years ago. The archaeological record is tantalizing, but sparse. And genetic research can tell us where dogs came from, but not how closely they may have looked like the dogs in our living rooms today. In this analysis, we're looking at lineages, in a sense. We're tracing backwards in the family tree. We're not necessarily saying how that dog looked 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. We're asking what its ancestry was. So the dog that we see today and recognize as a Samoyed or a Chow Chow, its ancestors might have looked far different than that. Our relationship may go back over 30,000 years, but what our dogs look like today is a fairly recent creation. Something on the order of 80% of our dogs probably derived from selective breeding practices in the last few hundred years with the Victorian era. 11,000-12,000 years ago, there wasn't anywhere near the strict breeding regime that exists today. So an individual may have had a whole mixture of dogs, small to large, with various abilities, and tried to select amongst them. But there was nowhere near the rigid types that we see today. The last cold snap of the Ice Age turned Western Europe both cooler and drier. As climate changed, our ancestors had to adapt. And for hunter-gatherers, hunger was an everyday occurrence. and primitive hunting could be very much hit and miss our ancestors discovered their dog Dogs could flush and kill game more efficiently than they could. Dogs had the keen ears and noses to find game, big and small. And the speed and agility to run it down. Wolves were specialists in cooperative hunting. Our ancestors learned that some dogs retain the wolf's instinct to hunt and to share their food with us, their pack. We began the process of selective breeding by mating only pairs of good hunting dogs. Our ancestors were literally creating the perfect partners for the hunt. This is the modern-day Saluki. It's a living relic of one of man's earliest shaping of a good hunting dog into a great one. A Saluki-like dog skeleton was found in a burial mound in northwest Iraq that dates back to 5,500 years ago. 3,300 years ago, this fan was made for King Tutankhamen, showing the young king hunting ostriches with a dog, the spitting image of a Saluki. Salukis are sighthounds. Over millennia, Salukis were carefully bred and trained to spot and chase game across the hottest deserts. They aren't the fastest dogs humans created, but at 33 miles per hour, they're fast enough. Their real talent is being able to hold that speed for up to two miles to exhaust their prey, something even a wolf will rarely do. A Saluki's long legs can cover nearly 12 feet in a single stride. At two points in their gallop, all four paws are off the ground. This efficient gait contributes to their incredible endurance. Wolves can run around 30 miles per hour. At top speed, a wolf's stride is 6 to 8 feet. Salukis do not track by scent. Odors dissipate in the dry desert winds. Instead, Salukis rely on their vision to spot prey in the open landscape. Sight is generally considered one of the weaker of a dog's senses, but the long-skulled sighthounds have binocular vision like we do, and a very wide field of vision, 270 degrees. That's 110 degrees wider than ours. Selective breeding gave Salukis a powerful visual streak that runs through their retina. This is believed to make moving objects on the horizon, like prey, highly visible. From these first sighthounds came Afghans, Bourgeois, Irish Wolfhounds, and the fastest of all, the Greyhounds. But some hunting dogs are at their best when standing perfectly still. This is the pointer, a distant relative of the greyhound, crossed with scent hounds to produce a dog with good legs, a great nose, and terrific self-control. It's bred to find game hiding at our feet. Pointers not only sniff out hidden prey, they freeze on a dime before scaring it off, and point the presence of a bird out to its owner. The German short-air pointer was bred for the common person in Germany. They wanted a dog that would track and hold game and they didn't have guns back then when these dogs were around, so they would use Raptors and the dog would hold the bird on point and they would release their raptors and the hawk or the peregrine or whatever they had at the time would come in and grab the prey and they're mesmerized by the bird they they want to find it and then once they do they want it but there's something that holds it back and that's that breeding when he's not working for the u.s forest service brian dirks trains pointers in northern california heal up heal up place your heel up Good girl. Boy. Heel. Today, most of us no longer need dogs as hunting partners and simply enjoy these popular breeds as cherished family members. Humans harness the wolf's natural impulse to feed the pack and created retrievers. Retrievers are bred to recover prey and return it to the hunter without damage. Field trials with these dogs have become a popular sport for many dog owners. Retrievers are equally at home on land or water. Their double-layered coats insulate against all kinds of weather. And webbed feet help propel them through the water. Food holes are rarely used for retrieving anymore. It's a treat to see these hunting dogs doing what they were originally bred for. Wolves will charge into water in pursuit of prey. And our dogs are a chip off that old block. Retrieving breeds are bred for soft mouths. This refers to the willingness of the dog to carry game in its mouth without biting into it. A wolf's jaw has a bite force of 1,500 pounds per square inch of bone-crushing pressure. Even with prey in his mouth, a retriever can suppress that urge to bite, and they can recover a downed bird as gently as they would a lost pup. Whether they're pets or hunting partners, it's really our dog's affection we cherish most. Because without it, all the physical and sensory superiority we bred into them would mean nothing. And without our love, they would still be wolves. For thousands of years, humans migrated with the great herds, taking only what they could carry. But the end of the Ice Age scrambled the old world order. Some species died out, but clever humans were not so limited. Our ancestors had their versatile canine partners to help them exploit new opportunities. One of those opportunities took us across the land bridge from Asia and into North America. On the vast North American plains, humans discovered a way to lighten their load when they turned to their dogs. Wolves are not beasts of burden, but their natural inclination is to stick with the pack. Hauling a load was a strange new burden for our dogs, but luckily for us, their loyalty was as strong as their backs. We don't know the exact date this all happened, but the ancestors of the Ute Indians used dog-powered travoy to carry their belongings for thousands of years. When it comes to hauling, nothing beats the power of the pack. Since ancient times, most large breeds of dogs were used as draft animals. Even in the early 20th century, draft dogs hauled people and goods and also took on chores when horses weren't available. Thanks to technology, most working dogs are unemployed. But besides just being pets, many working dog breeds today enjoy keeping some old traditions alive. Dogs have been hauling us over snow and ice for hundreds of years. These are original Arctic sled dogs, the Malamute and Siberian Husky. But ever since mixed breeds started winning the 1150 mile Iditarod and other sled dog races, they've ruled. Traditional sled dogs have been bred with greyhounds, setters, pointers, hounds, mastiffs, St. Bernards, and Newfoundlands to create a And sled dogs don't run because the musher cracks the whip. They run because they love to. So strong is the desire to run with the team that the worst thing that can happen to a sled dog is to be left behind when the team pulls out. Spotting a dog's talents and knowing how to use them has helped humans turn these muttly crews into Iditarod gold. In this last remnant of the Ice Age, one thing has never changed. The ultimate arctic compliment was always, and still is, You are good with dogs. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were always at the mercy of climatic and seasonal changes. We can only imagine our ancestors surprise and delight when they first saw their dogs doing this herding Little did they know they were witnessing the beginning of the end of life as they had always known it With dogs like this, herds could be gathered and contained, not followed. Game could be kept, not stopped. Thanks to dogs, wild animals became livestock, and we humans were on our way to becoming herders and farmers. Herding dogs remain ready to work whenever asked, and their enthusiasm and devotion still wins our admiration and our hearts. Even today, Jerry Williams needs a bit of wolf to help him get the job done. My name is Jerry. I'm a rancher in the San Jose Valley. I couldn't even imagine ranching without a dog. Jerry runs a thousand head of cattle on his 2,500 acre ranch. It's an idyllic life made possible by some very good dogs. The big thing about the Border Collie dog is that they are the smartest dog in the world. They know their job and they do it damn well. Get in. Just look around. Just look around. Just way out. We've always used Border Collies day in, day out. And if I didn't have these dogs, I would have to have one to two more employees to help run our family operation. It would probably take me two to three times as long to get the work done. Jerry's Border Collies have retained their wolf's herding savvy, but are focused on a completely different goal. When wolf packs hunt, they work together to separate their intended prey from the herd. When this wolf-like pack stalks the herd, it's not to divide and conquer, but to keep them moving together. This inhibition of the killer instinct may seem un-wolf-like, but it isn't. A good herding dog has the right balance of boldness, excitability, and a desire to herd. Jerry won't introduce his young dogs to the herd until they're old enough to stare down a cow. This predatory behavior emerges when they're about seven months old. This is the first step in a series of stalking and chasing behavior, and what Jerry looks for before beginning to train his dogs to herd. When all these genetic talents are in sync, these dogs can move a mountain of meat. And the Border Collie's legendary trainability is also encoded in their DNA, which has allowed their masters to run their herds by remote control. Things happen out here so fast, there's not enough time for me to control every movement. They have to think on their own. Once you show them something once, they've got it and everything. And they have the heart, the desire, and the ability to do just about anything. Jerry's border collies are as highly attuned to his every whim and move as they are to the herd's. The dogs love to do what they do. They'll work their heart out and do anything for me. They're the most loyal animals I've ever been around in my life, I'll be honest with you there. They're just like our family and best friends. We have to work with our best friends every day. Handling livestock in the confines of a farmyard is a different job that needs a different dog. Vicki Northway's corgis help her handle all the livestock on her spread. While Border Collies excel at open range herding, it's the little Corgi that is most adept at these close order drills. It's the little chore work that she's really best at. I wouldn't send her out on the other side of the field to bring in 250 head of sheep. But when I have to move the ducks from a pen or I have to put the sheep up so I can doctor them, Helen's right there. And they know what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to control the stock. You know, they're in total command of animals that are two, three, you know, ten times their size. Corgis, in both behavior and height, are healers, a kind of herding dog bred to nip the hocks of livestock to drive them forward. The Pembroke Welsh Corgi was bred in Wales at a time when farmers were grazing their stock in big open areas. It was kind of the Corgi's job to have like an imaginary fence line, and when other neighbor's stock would come close to their stock, they'd They'd push them back. That's a good thing for Vicki, because it can be very dangerous working with large animals. My cows are pretty gentle. Most people will breed for good temperament in cows. What'll get you hurt is when they group together and they start shoving and fighting each other for feed. And people get killed by stock all the time. So it's Hella's job to watch my back. And she's right there pushing them away from me and keeping an eye. That's my girl! Hit! Hit! Hit! Hit! Hit! Good girl! Good girl! Good girl! Walk up! Walk up! Walk up! Walk up! You got it! You got it! That's my girl! That's my girl! They're really like little policemen. At heel height, they are perfectly positioned for their job and low and fast enough to avoid the occasional kick. She's not a farm implementer. She's a family member. She's just working for a living like I do. In the Corgi, man created the perfect blend of intelligence, speed, and oversized canine boldness. For the first time in human existence, we began to put down roots. Wild animals had become our livestock, our wealth. And our ancestors relied on this domesticated livestock as much as on farming. And we relied on our dogs to protect our precious herds from predators of all kinds. We bred dogs with the nose and ears to best sense danger, but also had the muscle to deal with it. Just as a wolf loyally defends its pack and territory, we created dogs who would loyally defend their human pack. Our dog's natural ability to recognize friend from foe, hear a distant gate creak, sound the alarm and attack an intruder, became essential to protecting our property as much as ourselves. Even today, there are places where flocks still need to be protected. Jerry Williams has his border collies to move his cattle, but he also has 300 goats, and they need a different kind of dog. The Pyrenees dogs were new to us in the last four years, and we got introduced to the Pyrenees when we bought goats. to help control our brush problems on the ranches. We couldn't do control burns anymore. This is Miller, one of Jerry's three great Pyrenees dogs. We have a real problem with coyotes and lions in our area. We've had lions seen in with our goats three different times. And we have had zero predation from lions or anything else, as long as the Pyrenees are with the goats. Come on, Miller. Hey, buddy. You ready to go to work? Great Pyrenees are livestock guards, and they develop this protective instinct due to an unusual childhood. The Pyrenees are born with the goats and are raised up with the goats their whole life. No matter what, they want to be with the goats. It's fun to watch them on the field because they'll go ahead of the goats and check an area out and the goats will head out there to where they're at. You see how comfortable the goats are eating and putting their heads down and grazing and he's got his head up watching everything. Because the Pyrenees pups are raised with the goats from such an early age, hormones influence the dogs to see the goats as their herd. Just as wolves watch over their territories, the Pyrenees vigilantly watch over their herd, protecting them from predators. These Pyrenees have taught me so much. They've taught us how to be around them. I've made mistakes with them with the fact of thinking I was going to bring them in to give them some time off and put them in a dog kennel and get these blood-curdling howls from them and everything. realizing no matter what, they want to be with the goats. I mean, their loyalty to their friends, to their goats, is absolutely amazing. Jerry sleeps well at night, knowing his dogs will not leave even one goat up on the mountain alone. When we bring the goats in, we count the dogs, not the goats. Because if we have all of our dogs, we know we have all of our goats. See how he greets them when they come in? There's no way any other way of controlling coyotes or lions with these goats would work, besides these dogs. They're worth their weight in gold, without a doubt. Dogs have protected our herds and homes. for thousands of years. Many Roman homes had mosaic panels like this one from the ruins of Pompeii with the Latin inscription cave conum literally meaning beware of dog proclaiming that a guard dogs on duty. For many of us today dogs bred originally to be guards are both family members and loving companions. Italy's beautiful mountain lakes and coastline attract millions of swimmers and boaters year-round. If you get into trouble in Italian waters, this is what you want to see. The Protezione Civile. The first and only organization of its kind in the world. The Italian Coast Guard counts on this unique, highly trained volunteer corps of civilians and their dogs to help them keep the water safe. These are Newfoundland Retrievers. Water dogs of legendary strength and swimming ability. Originally bred to haul in the nets of Newfoundland's fishermen. But it's not just Newfies. Other water dogs, like Labs, are rescue swimmers too. The Protezione Civile was the brainchild of Ferruccio Pallegna. Twenty years ago, he decided to combine his dog's affinity for the water with his dog's. an idea for public service and founded the Italian water rescue dog school. In Italy we have 300 dogs that are ready to work with Coast Guard. Ferruccio worked closely with the Italian Coast Guard and Air Force Search and Rescue Units to create the curriculum for the program. So far this year, 10 people have been rescued by this unconventional partnership. And this is the first step in getting Italian dogs approved for duty. Teamwork is key between the civilian volunteers and their dogs. Each team must first be able to swim over a mile. The owner and dog have different skills to master. The person grasps a hold of the drowning victim, and the dog... tows them both to safety. The next level of training is to learn to perform a rescue from a speeding boat. The training program can take as long as three years to complete. The dogs are trained in a gentle and supportive process that develops profound trust in their owners. And they are never forced to do anything they're not willing to do. All this training, trust and confidence is put to the test when the dogs and their owners face their final exam. It's time for The Big League. And if the dog is not ready, it's okay. They're never forced to jump. And there's always next year. Once they prove their pluck, these citizens and their dogs are ready to work alongside the Coast Guard, patrolling Italy's lakes and beaches, from Venice to Sardinia. Whether it's in the water or on land, there are so many ways dogs protect our lives. Who can forget U.S. Airways Flight 1549's crash landing into the Hudson River? A perfectly good plane, struck down by a flock of geese. The FAA Wildlife Strike Database has recorded over 108,000 wildlife strikes on commercial and military flights in the United States between 1990 and 2009. But how can we keep flocks of big birds from nesting at our airports and flying into our planes? Just whistle. That'll do, good girl! Come on! This is Dr. Nick Carter, the director of the Bird Strike Control Program. His organization uses border collies, like Vassie here, to do what nothing else can. Change the migratory habits of Canada geese. Come on! They're gone, come on! Today nature calls them to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas. And this is what he and Vassie have come here to protect. What we're doing is introducing a predator back into a predator-free environment. Airports and airbases have walled off their airfields and prevented anybody from coming in, any animals, anybody else, and so birds find a nice safe haven. And we're basically reintroducing a wolf into that environment. You can chase off birds with anything. I mean, you can go out there and wave your arms up and down and they'll fly away, but the problem is they come right back. And that's because bird DNA doesn't recognize loud noises or giant airplanes as serious problems. We're working with a million years of evolution. They understand what a furry thing coming at them from the grass means. It means move and don't come back. That's all we're doing is giving them a choice between a field somewhere else that doesn't have a predator in it and now this field that's close to the base with a predator in it. An evolutionary no-brainer for the birds, but a very different story for the dogs. We train the dogs to go against their instinct of going out and around them when we train them to go out. ...straighter towards the birds. So we're doing sort of the opposite of herding. We're actually trying to get them to frighten the birds away rather than bring them back slowly like they would with sheep. These are hard lessons for a Border Collie to learn and only about 5% of the dogs that enter the year-long training program will graduate. The dogs are very, very effective. In fact, they're unbelievably effective. Here, for example, at Meccano Air Force Base, they've had a 30% reduction in bird strikes, and there hasn't been a single damaging strike since we started over three years ago. In Israel, where we've had them working for over a decade now, they've gone from $10.5 million in damage to $8,000 in damage. The dogs can clear tens of thousands of geese and birds off of a mile or two of open land. I'm not sure I'd want to do the job without the dog because you can have 10 or 20 people trying to do the same thing that a dog can do in literally five minutes. They're all about work and that's all they care about. They work for the love of the work itself. It's no wonder that the Border Collie is the fastest growing form of bird control on airports, military airbases, and golf courses. And this completely non-lethal program uses only rescue dogs. So the birds are saved, the dogs have great homes and jobs, and the skies are safer for everyone. All because this dog is smart, adaptable, and willing to tackle any task we point her to. Be humans change the size, shape, and heart of our dogs. The one wolf feature that came through evolution unscathed was the wolf's incredible sense of smell. Wolves, in favorable conditions, can detect a scent up to one and three quarter miles away. And from the earliest days of our relationship with dogs, we've put their noses to work for us. We rely on keen vision to navigate our world, which is fine in open, well-lit places. But the dog's nose can smell what can't be seen. Animal behaviorist Alexandra Horowitz says to know the dog, you must know its nose and the ways it experiences the world. As we see the world, dogs smell the world. You know, we open up our eyes and there's the world visually in front of us. Dogs, you know, come into consciousness and take a big sniff, essentially. So we can kind of imagine that the entire geography of this world is redrawn for them in odors. And every sniff tells a vivid story. You watch a dog's nose for any length of time, they're doing terrific gymnastics. The sniff of a dog is not like our clumsy sniff. It looks like the dog is turning his head to see, but really he's turning his head to sniff first. Whether it's big, round, and the palest pink, or small, pointy, and glossy black, all dogs have highly sensitive noses. Humans are likely to discern one scent at a time, whichever is strongest. However, a dog can sort through a myriad of scents simultaneously. So if we smell a stew cooking, dogs smell each ingredient of the stew and the cook. This is smelling guys. What am I doing over here? Tatters, we got something special for you here. There you go. Oh yeah, tatters. Oh, what's your favorite? Carrots are really good. Carrots are the best. Aren't they? Aren't they funny? Aren't carrots the best? Does this smell good to you, huh? Good dog. It's going to be really good. Dogs can move one nostril at a time, permitting them to perceive the direction of a scent. Once they pick up the scent, it dissolves on their wet nose. These liquefied molecules are then pushed further back into the snout. The dog devotes 40 times more of its brain power to smell than we do. A dog's nose contains about 60 square inches of scent receptors, called the epithelium. That's about the size of an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper. If you compared our scent receptor area, you would find it is a little smaller than a postage stamp. Amazingly, we've managed to take the great wolf nose and make it better. Yeah, they're on the move out there, by the way. scent discrimination is part of obedience trials. Send your dog. Using its incredible sense of smell, the dog's task is to locate the one object on the field that its owner has handled. Careful breeding. We created the bloodhound nose complete with 300 million olfactory sensors. Even the dachshund has 125 million and the beagle packs in 225 million scent receptors in its nose. We have 96 different breeds of scent hounds. Dogs specifically created by us over the years for their exceptional sense of smell. And today, people use a dog's keen sense of smell in many ways. If an object has an odor, a dog can be trained to identify it and find it. And Dr. Giovanni Morciani's dogs do just that. I like to present you the king of the table, the truffle. You can see how magnificent they are, that bowl of... white and black truffle that the Lagotto Romagnolo find here in Bagnara di Romagna. It turns out that a dog's keen sense of smell is perfectly suited for sniffing out these subterranean delicacies. And the dog of choice for Italian truffle hunters is the Lagotto Romagnolo. They nearly died out as a breed, but in the 1970s, Dr. Morciani was one of four Italian dog lovers that brought the dogs back from the edge of extinction. Truffle hunting dogs have been used for centuries to sniff out and find truffles in Italy and France. Truffles can sell for thousands of dollars. The record price was set in 2007 when a truffle weighing a little over 3 pounds was sold for $330,000. Truffles have been collected for at least 3,600 years. Their attraction is a tantalizing taste and aroma, and it is said that once experienced, can never be forgotten. Historically, both pigs and dogs have been used to find truffles. In Italy, dogs are preferred, because pigs will eat truffles. Dogs won't. Every year, truffle hunters in Italy take to the woods, hoping that the sensitive noses of their trained dogs will lead them to buried treasure. Finding truffles is a game for the dogs, and they're given a treat each time they find one. The night before a truffle hunt, the dogs aren't fed, so they'll be eager to find truffles for the treats. When hunting for truffles, a good dog proceeds slowly, sniffing and backtracking. Suddenly, it will drop its nose to the ground, inhale deeply, and then dig in with its front paws. Many dog owners experience the frustration of their dog leaving the backyard looking like a moonscape. Here, dogs are rewarded for being diligent diggers. The handler stops his dog before its nails ruin the truffles. Truffle hunting dogs are so prized that competing human truffle hunters sometimes dog nap them. Anything to get an edge. This basket holds about $10,000 worth of truffles. Not bad for an afternoon's outing. And now we are going to eat a very, very special food. Pasta. Tortelloni Romagnoli with truffles. When it comes to plucking this musty jewel, nothing beats the power of the nose. Next to smell, the sense of hearing is the most acute of a wolf's senses. Wolves can hear as far away as six miles in the forest and ten miles in the open. Our modern dogs inherited their great sense of hearing from the wolf. As newborns, a puppy's ear flaps are not movable and their ear canals are sealed. They are deaf. Their ears don't begin to open until they're about two weeks old. By the end of the first month, the puppy's hearing is acute. They are able to detect the direction that a sound comes from. And just like us, they learn to screen out a lot of background noise. These are important skills because, as adults, these dogs will sleep through blaring stereos or honking cars. But open a bag of dog food and they're wide awake. Dog ears come in an amazing variety. Extremely long and floppy. Small, soft and perked. Or folding elegantly alongside the face. It's the pinna that's the outer, visible part of a dog's ear. Dogs are able to tilt, turn, raise and lower their ears to locate not only the sound, but pinpoint the exact origin and accurately interpret whether it is threatening or not. The frequencies that dogs hear are nearly twice what we do, and they can pick up and distinguish sounds roughly four times the distance we can. At the outer edge of the ear is the ear flap. The flap funnels the sound through the ear canal to the tympanic membrane or eardrum. Inside the eardrum are three small bones that increase the intensity of sound vibrations. The vibrations enter the spiral-shaped cochlea, which converts them into signals that are then delivered to the brain. And all this happens in six hundredths of a second. But what has proved to be the most important thing a dog can hear is the sound of the human voice. Okay, step. Dogs'ears are exquisitely tuned to the tone, pitch, and rhythm of our voices. These are non-verbal cues that reveal our emotions and intentions to our dogs. Up, switch. Nice, very nice. Ready? Let's go. Okay, Becky, pull. That ability to understand us allows companion dogs to enhance the independence and quality of life of their disabled partners. Becky, stop. And this partnership is built on the human voice. But just understanding our voice might not mean much without a dog's willingness to do things for us. Dogs have not only learned to listen to our voice, today there are some that can feel the emotion of our hearts. The Golden Retriever is one of the breeds we originally created to help us hunt. And even though most of us no longer hunt, the Golden has never stopped wanting to please us. Today, they're often found in service as companion dogs. This is Tuesday and his best friend, Luis Montalvan. Luis is a former army captain and decorated veteran who served two tours in Iraq. For four years, he was surrounded by violence and death. When you're in the profession of combat arms, you're expected to be tough and deal with it and take care of your soldiers. And I really neglected to take care of myself. Luis came home with a serious spinal injury and psychic scars that tormented him day and night. You know, transitioning out of the military can be a difficult thing. I mean, I'd been in the military a long time, and coming to New York, I'd never lived in New York. This is a, I mean, it's New York. Trying to rebuild his life on his own. was a real challenge. In 2008, the promise of help arrived in an email from the Wounded Warrior Project, which offered to pair veterans with mental and physical disabilities with trained service dogs. Well, the latter portion of 2008 I got Tuesday, and he has been, I mean, a godsend. Tuesday, stand. Good boy. Look, get my shoes. That's it. Good boy, bring it here. Tuesday's retrieval talons spare Louis painful bending and lifting. Good boy. Look, go get the other one. Such a good boy. Oh, good boy. Yes, yes. You're so good. Such a good puppy. He helps me with balance. I've had some issues with balance where before I got him, I fell. I fell down a flight of subway steps. It was pretty bad. So he offers me a sense of equilibrium as I walk that's tremendously helpful. Easy step. Good boy. And once in the subway, Tuesday helps Luis keep his mental balance. There are a lot of people around and it's unnerving because it reminds me of some incident in Iraq. Psychiatric service dogs are trained to recognize changes in a person's breathing, perspiration, or scent that can signal the onset of a flashback or panic attack. He'll tilt his head back and look at me and sort of smile and maybe lick me and ask me to pet him. And it takes me out of the past and it brings me into the present. I feel better about going out. By keeping Luis from dwelling on memories of Iraq and in the present, Tuesday gets him to the VA and to his graduate journalism classes at Columbia. But Tuesday is far more than a well-trained therapist. He's a great dog. And just by being a great dog, he can unleash oxytocin in all who return his loving gaze. Tuesday is beloved at Columbia. and he's beloved at the VA. Veterans love to see him. He says hello and he has a remarkable way of changing their disposition. I may even just say that, you know, I feel so much better now. Down. Belly. Oh, you ain't gonna watch I'm very drunk. He has allowed me to get out of my apartment. You know, where I used to spend an inordinate amount of time alone, stewing in my thoughts. He, you know, he's a dog. He needs to go out. And at the end of their long days, Tuesday even reminds Luis to take his medicine. Good boy. With Tuesday curled up next to him, Luis is able to fall into a healing sleep, knowing that Tuesday will wake him at the slightest hint of a nightmare. And so, our long, long journey with the dog finds us back at the beginning, when they protected us from dangers beyond our campfires. Only now, we're asking them to protect us from enemies within. The camp wolves that gambled on humans made a very good bet. Here in the United States, we share our homes with over 70 million dogs. Wolves have not fared as well. It is estimated that their population has dwindled from millions at the end of the Ice Age to only 200,000 worldwide today. It's from the genetic palette of the wolf We humans have created dogs to be our partners and companions. We selected the best noses, eyes, muscles, and heart. Mixing and matching till we had created over 400 breeds of dogs. From those first proto-dogs, our ancestors could never have imagined it would have led to dogs that fit in a teacup or take up a bed. But what's really surprising is that most of the breeds that we're all familiar with are little more than a century old. Dr. Robert Wayne has studied the genetic background of all dog groups. The selective breeding that was very controlled, very strict, really became much more popular during the Victorian era. Standards were erected. Your breed could only look like this. And you bred to that standard. And you didn't out-cross with other breeds. And those processes, I think, lead to closed gene pools. And along the way, breeding for fashionable traits has created unforeseen consequences. Many dog breeds have developed significant health problems. Over 500 genetic defects have been cataloged in purebred dogs, and more continue to come to light, threatening the health of entire breed populations. Veterinarian Dr. Meredith Kennedy regularly treats dogs with inherited health problems. The bulldog basically is a genetic mutation. And the two genetic mutations that we see in the bulldog, chondodystrophy, which means dwarfism, and that's where you get kind of the bow-legged stance, you get that short back, you get the little corkscrew tail, and they are also brachycephalic. Brachycephalic means short face. So basically, this is actually an abnormal dog. These are genetic mutations that people find desirable, and then you start breeding for those things, exaggerating those particular characteristics, you end up with a dog that cannot walk properly, they're at greater risk. of death by asphyxiation from just normal things like going for a walk in slightly warm weather and they need surgery just in order to be able to breathe like a normal dog and this really hurts the dogs in the 1970s breeders and veterinarians began to address these problems by crossbreeding several types of dogs that possess qualities that people liked in the english bulldog the result the old english bulldog blend of the english bulldog the mastiff The American Bull Terrier and the American Bulldog. The Old English Bulldog is an effort to create a healthier bulldog. You have a short-faced dog, but it's not quite as short-faced. There's a little bit more breathing room in the nasal passages, and these dogs don't tend to have the problem with the upper airway obstructive syndrome, the brachycephalic airway syndrome that we see with the very extreme English Bulldogs. An example of how breeders combat inherited health problems is happening here at the Palm Springs Dog Show. These are Samoyeds. Kathy De La Garza is judging them to their official breed standard for gait, appearance, temperament, and health. These are the potential mothers of many important litters. They're champions. It's important that they get bred to the right dogs with the right health checks, and that's how we do things. Like many large breeds, these dogs carry genes that can cause joint deformities. These are what we call Braille dogs. You have to feel everything because these dogs are a tool. They're our beloved companions, but they were bred for a job and they should be able to do it, even though we don't ask them to. Everything is functionality, not just beauty on these dogs. This is a high-stakes competition. The winning dog will be highly sought after for breeding the next generation of Samoyed champions. Puppies with a championship pedigree can go for as much as $2,000 to $3,000. But responsible breeders also want to ensure that no potentially harmful traits are passed on to the next generation. Okay, you're my best of breed. You're my best of winners. You're my best of opposite. You're an award of merit. You're an award of merit. You're an award of merit. Chase has won enough points to finish his championship. But now he must... another judge. His owner, Ken Granacchi, takes him to a mobile vet clinic to be examined for congenital defects. Okay, we got it. Are we doing elbows? Yes. His hips look good, by the way. Tell me when. We're looking at the right elbow right now. We're looking for elbow dysplasia. It's a digital image of his left elbow and we're able to manipulate that to determine whether or not he has it, which in this particular case he does not. He's got very good elbow conformation. In the case of the hip joint, we're evaluating this area right here. This bone right here, that's the ball and socket joint of the hip. And in the case of hip dysplasia, that's an underdeveloped area, and the ball doesn't fit well in the socket. And in that case, instead of a ball, moving like this as it should you get movement like this and in those cases you'll get abnormal tugging of the soft tissues which will put strains on the tissues and cause arthritis it's what we're trying to breed against it's the reason everybody comes in and gets these x-rays. There's a very high incidence of hip dysplasia in most dogs, in particular large breed dogs, and these hips are going to come back as a good. Yes. The good news, as a breeder, that's what we look for. Chase has aced this exam, and Ken will be given a certificate to verify that this champion has been ...in joints that he can pass on to all the little chases to come. Scientists believe that during the domestication process, dogs were selected for their unique ability to communicate with humans. But they understand far more of our language than we do of theirs. One essential talent that dogs have that seems to owe little to their wolf ancestry is their willingness to look us in the eye. One of the things that's unique about dogs is that they'll look you in the eyes. They'll gaze at you the way humans gaze at us. This is something a lot of other animals don't do. Wolves avert their eyes from directly gazing into ours, and they show little interest in what we look at or where we point. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, show little interest in our point of view. But dogs soon discovered that looking deep into our eyes would give them the key to our thoughts and maybe even our soul. It certainly provided a reliable way to communicate and bond with us. Those deep longing looks also release brain chemicals that deepen our bond to each other and make us throw that ball just one more time again and again. But beyond our dog's ability to understand us, we bring actual measurable joy to one another. I think the human-dog bond is particularly profound. There's a lot of research that shows that just by petting a dog, our cortisol stress hormone levels go down, blood pressure levels go down. In many cases, dogs get the same effect. They also get a therapeutic effect from being petted by humans. It's these connections between us, looks, petting and close physical contact that release the hormone oxytocin in both of us. It's the same hormone that forms the powerful bond between mothers and their infants in all mammals. It turns out oxytocin has a powerful anti-stress effect on both of our species, making us calmer and more receptive to the non-verbal messages that pass between us. This hormone connection gave our dogs a welcome place at our ancestors'campfires. And later in millions of our homes across the planet. But not every dog is feeling the love. Humans have become the dog's environmental niche. So what happens when we turn our backs on dogs? In St. Louis alone, over 40,000 dogs live on the street. Many have recently been abandoned. And others have lived their entire lives there. Here you go. That's a good girl. Here we go. What a good girl. Now take the leap of faith. I want you to eat this out of my hand, okay? That was a very good girl. Randy Grimm runs Stray Rescue of St. Louis. a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the lives of stray and feral dogs. You in there okay? Yeah. Man created this entire problem, and I just feel it's up to all of us to do something about it. And that's kind of what I do is rescue, work with them, and try to reintroduce them into the human pack. With his limited resources, he supports those he can and tries to rescue those that are sick. For over 20 years, Randy has fed and tried to socialize these abandoned dogs. He rescues 2,000 dogs a year. His dream is to eventually be able to rescue all of the dogs and find loving homes for them. Yes, you're like the hell with the dog food. Give me the good stuff. Every day. He has heartbreaking choices to make. The guy in the very back, his eyes are going soulless on me. He's not himself. He would be here with everybody else. I could pet him on any given day. And he's staying back. He's not with the rest of the group. He's sick. You've got to triage everyone. You know, if you look good like him, I have to leave you behind. You know, say a little prayer and then... Tomorrow morning, hopefully we can get him and get him to a vet. We're going to get you tomorrow. So you just hang in there. Because he can't get every dog, like Red, off the street, Randy supports them as best he can. The hard part for me to understand is that we bred the instinct out to hunt. They can still chase a bird, they can still chase an animal, but they don't eat it. They still need me to bring dog food. Come on guys! I've been wondering where you've been. Let me see what you look like. Oh, honey, somebody beat you up. Yeah, somebody beat you up. However, when a dog becomes very ill or badly injured, he will take them to a vet. This is the hot dog through the loop trick. Yeah, get your hot dog. Okay. There we go. And good boy. Trust me. You're much better off. Good boy. Randy's organization spends over a million dollars a year on vet bills, saving lives, and rehabilitating these dogs so they can be put up for adoption. Here's Echo. This is a friend of ours. I mean, the dog is our buddy. True to his word, the next morning, Randy's priority is to see how Red is. If he died, I'll never forgive myself. What, is he dead? It's my fault. Don't! I'm sorry, I should have got you yesterday. Let's make it a priority. I'm getting these three guys out of here. Okay? Yep. I don't care if we don't have space. I don't care. You guys, you guys are being rescued this week. It's over. I'm never coming here again. Come here, sweetheart. Here, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm sorry your buddy's gone. I'm gonna get you out of here. get you out of here. I know. I'll get you guys out of here. I promise, okay? The following day, Randy makes good on his promise. Believe it or not, these guys turn around and become wonderful house pets. People think I work miracles, but it's called love. Okay, I'm glad I got you guys out of here. Let's go. I'm so glad this is over. Although he's worked alone for many years, Randy now has a staff of seven, 300 volunteers and 200 foster homes in and around St. Louis. Randy will soon be moving his restaurant operation into a state-of-the-art facility that combines a veterinary clinic, a no-kill shelter, and an adoption center. This whole building means nothing to me but the word hope. Man created a dog and now look what we're doing to him. We got a responsibility. Over the years, Randy has brought thousands of animals back from the brink of death and found them new homes and families. But many more are waiting for their chance at a new lease on life. We must give thanks to our ancient ancestors who looked into the eyes of a wolf and saw the promise of a friend. And to all those people that came before us that found they had a way with dogs. and helped to create the dogs we can no longer live without. Imagine the world if we had not befriended each other. It's nearly impossible, as their footsteps have always shadowed ours. This is, however, a story without an end, an evolving tale of two species connected by thousands of yesterdays to innumerable tomorrows. What is it we will ask of our dogs next? Whatever it is, they will happily comply. Because that's who we made them to be.

The war. The original ancestors of our dogs. More than 15,000 years of human tinkering, first by accident and later by design, has created one of the most varied looking species on earth.

The From the start, we have shaped dogs to help make our lives easier. This is the story of how wolves and humans forged a bond that changed them, us, and the world forever. Our story begins as the great ice sheets were advancing over the northern hemisphere, turning the world colder and drier.

This was the Ice Age. And it belonged to the war. This vast landscape was their backyard. There were millions of wolves roaming the continents of the northern hemisphere.

And whether they lived in the Arctic or the desert, they lived in packs. Our ancestors would have feared and admired the wolf's speed, stamina, and superior senses. The wolf pack was the perfect killing machine. Once they sniffed out prey, it was already too late. Working together, they were able to take down animals far larger than themselves.

Wolf packs have a strict social order, led by an alpha male and alpha female. And the alphas got the choice bits, but the pack got its share too. And only the alpha female had pups. But just as it took the pack to bring down prey, the pack helped raise the young.

A wolf pack was a family. And in that sense, they were just like us. Clan loyalty held us together too, and kept us alive against tremendous Ice Age odds. Because for thousands of years, we trespassed in a world that was... ...was not ours.

Back then there were less than 1 million people on the entire planet. And if our ancestors felt like they were always being watched, it's because they were. Wolves, like us, are curious animals.

For a carnivore with a nose a hundred times more sensitive than ours, the smell of cooking meat would have been an irresistible lure. They followed their noses to the edge of our camps and discovered an unexpected prize. Our garbage. Even for this top predator, hunting was hard work that often went unrewarded.

The most curious, least aggressive wolves discovered that there were rewards to be had living close to us. Our scraps became a new kind of fast food. And the camp wolf was born. Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Dr. Robert Wayne, is the senior author of a new genetic analysis of wolves and dogs. I think it was initially a loose association.

Wolves started following humans because they provided a resource and then kind of adopted the human niche and those wolves by just by the nature of that new habit. That is, they were no longer territorial, they were not hunting territorial prey, they were following humans. There was some kind of reproductive divergence.

In time, the camp wolves living close to humans became genetically isolated from the wolves of the forests and wilderness. Eventually, in locations across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, a new social order dawned. And the most curious humans and wolves were taking one small step toward the creation of the dog.

This first timid contact... began a dance between our two species that will change our world forever. There must have been something special about wolves which predisposed them towards domestication.

And I think the real inkling of that is wolves were the only large carnivore that humans ever domesticated. Camp wolves became a familiar presence around our campsites. And we became more comfortable with them.

These were perilous times for our ancestors. They were surrounded by animals bigger, stronger, and faster than us. When night fell, we huddled around our fires, wary of the danger from predators lurking in the darkness.

you In protecting her own young, this camp wolf unintentionally protected the human. But now her pups were orphaned. The Klan mothers could never have known that the cries of the wolf pups would trigger their brain chemistry.

urging them to nurse for these babies just as they did their own. This brain chemical, oxytocin, is made by all mammals and it's released through suckling and by warmth and repetitive touch. That night around the campfire, no pup or clan member was immune to the powerful connective chemistry being unleashed.

Today we are just beginning to understand how such simple acts of kindness can ignite the social brain chemistry that makes us less fearful and willing to develop social ties. The Pops and Klan members first felt this bond more than 32,000 years ago. As new generations from these orphaned pups were born, the camp wolf evolved into the proto-dog, the precursor to man's best friend. And with each new litter, our ancestors kept the tamest pups and shunned the rest.

Early on, any wolf that hinted at aggression, or a protodog that hinted at aggression towards humans, especially our children, would have been immediately removed and killed. The ones that successfully integrate with humans are the ones that tend to be more docile. instead of natural selection guiding evolution human intervention changed the very nature of the proto dogs long before there was a word for it our ancestors became geneticists and they created the wolf that didn't bite and set the stage for all of our dogs There is no history of dogs without humans solidly at their side.

Dogs exist because we needed them. We needed them to protect us and to help us hunt. To gather our herds, haul our stuff, and later even heal us.

And they do all this for us because they need us too. We humans have become their ecological niche. Our mutual need for nurturing and companionship keeps dogs near and dear to us in the 21st century.

A recent genetic study provides clues of how all dog breeds are related and how they're all related to wolves. We compared all our markers in the dog genome to the same markers in the wolf genome. And we asked, Foot markers are very divergent and we find that the primary signal in the dog genome of origin is from Middle Eastern wolves.

Genetic evidence points to Middle Eastern wolves as the original ancestors of our dogs. The genetic contributions from other wolf populations all occurred at later points in dog evolution. But when did the human-dog partnership begin? Our earliest archaeological evidence is a canine skull found not in the Middle East, but at Goyer Cave in Belgium. When it was discovered in 1870, it was believed to be the skull of a wolf.

But in 2007, Dr. Mita Jemompre reexamined the skull and found something quite different. These skulls were discovered more or less 140 years ago and they remained in the world. the museum since then. They were excavated in two different caves in the Belgian Ardennes.

This skull as you can see is very gracile, very slender compared to this wolf skull. It has quite a short snout and this is typical for domestic dogs. Its teeth are still quite large so this is not typical for recent dogs but it's a sign that it's really an old dog.

This skull has been carbon dated as being over 31,000 years old, twice as old as the oldest dog skull previously found. This is the most compelling evidence that long before the end of the Ice Age, environmental and human influences had given rise to the dog. And it may have looked something like this. But was it tame? Tameness means to me docility, that is.

An animal that will not harm you generally and will be submissive to your needs. Domestication to me means much more than that. That is, if you open the gates for your dog, it may go out for a walkabout, but it's still going to come back to you for food and shelter and even for companionship.

It's part of human society and dependent upon it. The Goye skull at 31,000 years ago is indeed a very old dog. And it really does suggest that domestication occurred on the order of tens of thousands of years ago. Other evidence of humans and dogs has been found in Israel, Western Russia, and Germany.

But perhaps the most intriguing find is in southern France. Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994, contains the earliest cave paintings in Europe. Perhaps the most important discovery was not found on the cave walls, but in the damp clay floor.

Here, archaeologists found footprints of a child that appears to have been accompanied by a dog. Unlike wolf tracks, these have the shorter middle toe of a dog's. Carbon dating of the child's torch marks.

swiped on the cave wall, tell us he and this ancient dog may have taken their walk together 26,000 years ago. The archaeological record is tantalizing, but sparse. And genetic research can tell us where dogs came from, but not how closely they may have looked like the dogs in our living rooms today. In this analysis, we're looking at lineages, in a sense. We're tracing backwards in the family tree.

We're not necessarily saying how that dog looked 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. We're asking what its ancestry was. So the dog that we see today and recognize as a Samoyed or a Chow Chow, its ancestors might have looked far different than that.

Our relationship may go back over 30,000 years, but what our dogs look like today is a fairly recent creation. Something on the order of 80% of our dogs probably derived from selective breeding practices in the last few hundred years with the Victorian era. 11,000-12,000 years ago, there wasn't anywhere near the strict breeding regime that exists today. So an individual may have had a whole mixture of dogs, small to large, with various abilities, and tried to select amongst them. But there was nowhere near the rigid types that we see today.

The last cold snap of the Ice Age turned Western Europe both cooler and drier. As climate changed, our ancestors had to adapt. And for hunter-gatherers, hunger was an everyday occurrence.

and primitive hunting could be very much hit and miss our ancestors discovered their dog Dogs could flush and kill game more efficiently than they could. Dogs had the keen ears and noses to find game, big and small. And the speed and agility to run it down. Wolves were specialists in cooperative hunting. Our ancestors learned that some dogs retain the wolf's instinct to hunt and to share their food with us, their pack.

We began the process of selective breeding by mating only pairs of good hunting dogs. Our ancestors were literally creating the perfect partners for the hunt. This is the modern-day Saluki. It's a living relic of one of man's earliest shaping of a good hunting dog into a great one.

A Saluki-like dog skeleton was found in a burial mound in northwest Iraq that dates back to 5,500 years ago. 3,300 years ago, this fan was made for King Tutankhamen, showing the young king hunting ostriches with a dog, the spitting image of a Saluki. Salukis are sighthounds.

Over millennia, Salukis were carefully bred and trained to spot and chase game across the hottest deserts. They aren't the fastest dogs humans created, but at 33 miles per hour, they're fast enough. Their real talent is being able to hold that speed for up to two miles to exhaust their prey, something even a wolf will rarely do. A Saluki's long legs can cover nearly 12 feet in a single stride. At two points in their gallop, all four paws are off the ground.

This efficient gait contributes to their incredible endurance. Wolves can run around 30 miles per hour. At top speed, a wolf's stride is 6 to 8 feet. Salukis do not track by scent. Odors dissipate in the dry desert winds.

Instead, Salukis rely on their vision to spot prey in the open landscape. Sight is generally considered one of the weaker of a dog's senses, but the long-skulled sighthounds have binocular vision like we do, and a very wide field of vision, 270 degrees. That's 110 degrees wider than ours. Selective breeding gave Salukis a powerful visual streak that runs through their retina.

This is believed to make moving objects on the horizon, like prey, highly visible. From these first sighthounds came Afghans, Bourgeois, Irish Wolfhounds, and the fastest of all, the Greyhounds. But some hunting dogs are at their best when standing perfectly still.

This is the pointer, a distant relative of the greyhound, crossed with scent hounds to produce a dog with good legs, a great nose, and terrific self-control. It's bred to find game hiding at our feet. Pointers not only sniff out hidden prey, they freeze on a dime before scaring it off, and point the presence of a bird out to its owner. The German short-air pointer was bred for the common person in Germany. They wanted a dog that would track and hold game and they didn't have guns back then when these dogs were around, so they would use Raptors and the dog would hold the bird on point and they would release their raptors and the hawk or the peregrine or whatever they had at the time would come in and grab the prey and they're mesmerized by the bird they they want to find it and then once they do they want it but there's something that holds it back and that's that breeding when he's not working for the u.s forest service brian dirks trains pointers in northern california heal up heal up place your heel up Good girl.

Boy. Heel. Today, most of us no longer need dogs as hunting partners and simply enjoy these popular breeds as cherished family members.

Humans harness the wolf's natural impulse to feed the pack and created retrievers. Retrievers are bred to recover prey and return it to the hunter without damage. Field trials with these dogs have become a popular sport for many dog owners.

Retrievers are equally at home on land or water. Their double-layered coats insulate against all kinds of weather. And webbed feet help propel them through the water.

Food holes are rarely used for retrieving anymore. It's a treat to see these hunting dogs doing what they were originally bred for. Wolves will charge into water in pursuit of prey.

And our dogs are a chip off that old block. Retrieving breeds are bred for soft mouths. This refers to the willingness of the dog to carry game in its mouth without biting into it. A wolf's jaw has a bite force of 1,500 pounds per square inch of bone-crushing pressure. Even with prey in his mouth, a retriever can suppress that urge to bite, and they can recover a downed bird as gently as they would a lost pup.

Whether they're pets or hunting partners, it's really our dog's affection we cherish most. Because without it, all the physical and sensory superiority we bred into them would mean nothing. And without our love, they would still be wolves.

For thousands of years, humans migrated with the great herds, taking only what they could carry. But the end of the Ice Age scrambled the old world order. Some species died out, but clever humans were not so limited.

Our ancestors had their versatile canine partners to help them exploit new opportunities. One of those opportunities took us across the land bridge from Asia and into North America. On the vast North American plains, humans discovered a way to lighten their load when they turned to their dogs. Wolves are not beasts of burden, but their natural inclination is to stick with the pack.

Hauling a load was a strange new burden for our dogs, but luckily for us, their loyalty was as strong as their backs. We don't know the exact date this all happened, but the ancestors of the Ute Indians used dog-powered travoy to carry their belongings for thousands of years. When it comes to hauling, nothing beats the power of the pack.

Since ancient times, most large breeds of dogs were used as draft animals. Even in the early 20th century, draft dogs hauled people and goods and also took on chores when horses weren't available. Thanks to technology, most working dogs are unemployed. But besides just being pets, many working dog breeds today enjoy keeping some old traditions alive. Dogs have been hauling us over snow and ice for hundreds of years.

These are original Arctic sled dogs, the Malamute and Siberian Husky. But ever since mixed breeds started winning the 1150 mile Iditarod and other sled dog races, they've ruled. Traditional sled dogs have been bred with greyhounds, setters, pointers, hounds, mastiffs, St. Bernards, and Newfoundlands to create a And sled dogs don't run because the musher cracks the whip. They run because they love to. So strong is the desire to run with the team that the worst thing that can happen to a sled dog is to be left behind when the team pulls out.

Spotting a dog's talents and knowing how to use them has helped humans turn these muttly crews into Iditarod gold. In this last remnant of the Ice Age, one thing has never changed. The ultimate arctic compliment was always, and still is, You are good with dogs. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were always at the mercy of climatic and seasonal changes.

We can only imagine our ancestors surprise and delight when they first saw their dogs doing this herding Little did they know they were witnessing the beginning of the end of life as they had always known it With dogs like this, herds could be gathered and contained, not followed. Game could be kept, not stopped. Thanks to dogs, wild animals became livestock, and we humans were on our way to becoming herders and farmers.

Herding dogs remain ready to work whenever asked, and their enthusiasm and devotion still wins our admiration and our hearts. Even today, Jerry Williams needs a bit of wolf to help him get the job done. My name is Jerry. I'm a rancher in the San Jose Valley.

I couldn't even imagine ranching without a dog. Jerry runs a thousand head of cattle on his 2,500 acre ranch. It's an idyllic life made possible by some very good dogs. The big thing about the Border Collie dog is that they are the smartest dog in the world. They know their job and they do it damn well.

Get in. Just look around. Just look around.

Just way out. We've always used Border Collies day in, day out. And if I didn't have these dogs, I would have to have one to two more employees to help run our family operation. It would probably take me two to three times as long to get the work done. Jerry's Border Collies have retained their wolf's herding savvy, but are focused on a completely different goal.

When wolf packs hunt, they work together to separate their intended prey from the herd. When this wolf-like pack stalks the herd, it's not to divide and conquer, but to keep them moving together. This inhibition of the killer instinct may seem un-wolf-like, but it isn't.

A good herding dog has the right balance of boldness, excitability, and a desire to herd. Jerry won't introduce his young dogs to the herd until they're old enough to stare down a cow. This predatory behavior emerges when they're about seven months old. This is the first step in a series of stalking and chasing behavior, and what Jerry looks for before beginning to train his dogs to herd. When all these genetic talents are in sync, these dogs can move a mountain of meat.

And the Border Collie's legendary trainability is also encoded in their DNA, which has allowed their masters to run their herds by remote control. Things happen out here so fast, there's not enough time for me to control every movement. They have to think on their own. Once you show them something once, they've got it and everything.

And they have the heart, the desire, and the ability to do just about anything. Jerry's border collies are as highly attuned to his every whim and move as they are to the herd's. The dogs love to do what they do.

They'll work their heart out and do anything for me. They're the most loyal animals I've ever been around in my life, I'll be honest with you there. They're just like our family and best friends.

We have to work with our best friends every day. Handling livestock in the confines of a farmyard is a different job that needs a different dog. Vicki Northway's corgis help her handle all the livestock on her spread. While Border Collies excel at open range herding, it's the little Corgi that is most adept at these close order drills.

It's the little chore work that she's really best at. I wouldn't send her out on the other side of the field to bring in 250 head of sheep. But when I have to move the ducks from a pen or I have to put the sheep up so I can doctor them, Helen's right there. And they know what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to control the stock.

You know, they're in total command of animals that are two, three, you know, ten times their size. Corgis, in both behavior and height, are healers, a kind of herding dog bred to nip the hocks of livestock to drive them forward. The Pembroke Welsh Corgi was bred in Wales at a time when farmers were grazing their stock in big open areas.

It was kind of the Corgi's job to have like an imaginary fence line, and when other neighbor's stock would come close to their stock, they'd They'd push them back. That's a good thing for Vicki, because it can be very dangerous working with large animals. My cows are pretty gentle. Most people will breed for good temperament in cows. What'll get you hurt is when they group together and they start shoving and fighting each other for feed.

And people get killed by stock all the time. So it's Hella's job to watch my back. And she's right there pushing them away from me and keeping an eye.

That's my girl! Hit! Hit! Hit!

Hit! Hit! Good girl! Good girl! Good girl!

Walk up! Walk up! Walk up! Walk up!

You got it! You got it! That's my girl! That's my girl!

They're really like little policemen. At heel height, they are perfectly positioned for their job and low and fast enough to avoid the occasional kick. She's not a farm implementer.

She's a family member. She's just working for a living like I do. In the Corgi, man created the perfect blend of intelligence, speed, and oversized canine boldness. For the first time in human existence, we began to put down roots.

Wild animals had become our livestock, our wealth. And our ancestors relied on this domesticated livestock as much as on farming. And we relied on our dogs to protect our precious herds from predators of all kinds.

We bred dogs with the nose and ears to best sense danger, but also had the muscle to deal with it. Just as a wolf loyally defends its pack and territory, we created dogs who would loyally defend their human pack. Our dog's natural ability to recognize friend from foe, hear a distant gate creak, sound the alarm and attack an intruder, became essential to protecting our property as much as ourselves. Even today, there are places where flocks still need to be protected. Jerry Williams has his border collies to move his cattle, but he also has 300 goats, and they need a different kind of dog.

The Pyrenees dogs were new to us in the last four years, and we got introduced to the Pyrenees when we bought goats. to help control our brush problems on the ranches. We couldn't do control burns anymore. This is Miller, one of Jerry's three great Pyrenees dogs. We have a real problem with coyotes and lions in our area.

We've had lions seen in with our goats three different times. And we have had zero predation from lions or anything else, as long as the Pyrenees are with the goats. Come on, Miller. Hey, buddy. You ready to go to work?

Great Pyrenees are livestock guards, and they develop this protective instinct due to an unusual childhood. The Pyrenees are born with the goats and are raised up with the goats their whole life. No matter what, they want to be with the goats.

It's fun to watch them on the field because they'll go ahead of the goats and check an area out and the goats will head out there to where they're at. You see how comfortable the goats are eating and putting their heads down and grazing and he's got his head up watching everything. Because the Pyrenees pups are raised with the goats from such an early age, hormones influence the dogs to see the goats as their herd. Just as wolves watch over their territories, the Pyrenees vigilantly watch over their herd, protecting them from predators. These Pyrenees have taught me so much.

They've taught us how to be around them. I've made mistakes with them with the fact of thinking I was going to bring them in to give them some time off and put them in a dog kennel and get these blood-curdling howls from them and everything. realizing no matter what, they want to be with the goats.

I mean, their loyalty to their friends, to their goats, is absolutely amazing. Jerry sleeps well at night, knowing his dogs will not leave even one goat up on the mountain alone. When we bring the goats in, we count the dogs, not the goats. Because if we have all of our dogs, we know we have all of our goats.

See how he greets them when they come in? There's no way any other way of controlling coyotes or lions with these goats would work, besides these dogs. They're worth their weight in gold, without a doubt. Dogs have protected our herds and homes. for thousands of years.

Many Roman homes had mosaic panels like this one from the ruins of Pompeii with the Latin inscription cave conum literally meaning beware of dog proclaiming that a guard dogs on duty. For many of us today dogs bred originally to be guards are both family members and loving companions. Italy's beautiful mountain lakes and coastline attract millions of swimmers and boaters year-round.

If you get into trouble in Italian waters, this is what you want to see. The Protezione Civile. The first and only organization of its kind in the world. The Italian Coast Guard counts on this unique, highly trained volunteer corps of civilians and their dogs to help them keep the water safe. These are Newfoundland Retrievers.

Water dogs of legendary strength and swimming ability. Originally bred to haul in the nets of Newfoundland's fishermen. But it's not just Newfies. Other water dogs, like Labs, are rescue swimmers too. The Protezione Civile was the brainchild of Ferruccio Pallegna.

Twenty years ago, he decided to combine his dog's affinity for the water with his dog's. an idea for public service and founded the Italian water rescue dog school. In Italy we have 300 dogs that are ready to work with Coast Guard. Ferruccio worked closely with the Italian Coast Guard and Air Force Search and Rescue Units to create the curriculum for the program. So far this year, 10 people have been rescued by this unconventional partnership.

And this is the first step in getting Italian dogs approved for duty. Teamwork is key between the civilian volunteers and their dogs. Each team must first be able to swim over a mile.

The owner and dog have different skills to master. The person grasps a hold of the drowning victim, and the dog... tows them both to safety. The next level of training is to learn to perform a rescue from a speeding boat.

The training program can take as long as three years to complete. The dogs are trained in a gentle and supportive process that develops profound trust in their owners. And they are never forced to do anything they're not willing to do. All this training, trust and confidence is put to the test when the dogs and their owners face their final exam. It's time for The Big League.

And if the dog is not ready, it's okay. They're never forced to jump. And there's always next year. Once they prove their pluck, these citizens and their dogs are ready to work alongside the Coast Guard, patrolling Italy's lakes and beaches, from Venice to Sardinia.

Whether it's in the water or on land, there are so many ways dogs protect our lives. Who can forget U.S. Airways Flight 1549's crash landing into the Hudson River? A perfectly good plane, struck down by a flock of geese.

The FAA Wildlife Strike Database has recorded over 108,000 wildlife strikes on commercial and military flights in the United States between 1990 and 2009. But how can we keep flocks of big birds from nesting at our airports and flying into our planes? Just whistle. That'll do, good girl!

Come on! This is Dr. Nick Carter, the director of the Bird Strike Control Program. His organization uses border collies, like Vassie here, to do what nothing else can.

Change the migratory habits of Canada geese. Come on! They're gone, come on!

Today nature calls them to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas. And this is what he and Vassie have come here to protect. What we're doing is introducing a predator back into a predator-free environment. Airports and airbases have walled off their airfields and prevented anybody from coming in, any animals, anybody else, and so birds find a nice safe haven.

And we're basically reintroducing a wolf into that environment. You can chase off birds with anything. I mean, you can go out there and wave your arms up and down and they'll fly away, but the problem is they come right back. And that's because bird DNA doesn't recognize loud noises or giant airplanes as serious problems.

We're working with a million years of evolution. They understand what a furry thing coming at them from the grass means. It means move and don't come back.

That's all we're doing is giving them a choice between a field somewhere else that doesn't have a predator in it and now this field that's close to the base with a predator in it. An evolutionary no-brainer for the birds, but a very different story for the dogs. We train the dogs to go against their instinct of going out and around them when we train them to go out. ...straighter towards the birds.

So we're doing sort of the opposite of herding. We're actually trying to get them to frighten the birds away rather than bring them back slowly like they would with sheep. These are hard lessons for a Border Collie to learn and only about 5% of the dogs that enter the year-long training program will graduate.

The dogs are very, very effective. In fact, they're unbelievably effective. Here, for example, at Meccano Air Force Base, they've had a 30% reduction in bird strikes, and there hasn't been a single damaging strike since we started over three years ago.

In Israel, where we've had them working for over a decade now, they've gone from $10.5 million in damage to $8,000 in damage. The dogs can clear tens of thousands of geese and birds off of a mile or two of open land. I'm not sure I'd want to do the job without the dog because you can have 10 or 20 people trying to do the same thing that a dog can do in literally five minutes. They're all about work and that's all they care about.

They work for the love of the work itself. It's no wonder that the Border Collie is the fastest growing form of bird control on airports, military airbases, and golf courses. And this completely non-lethal program uses only rescue dogs.

So the birds are saved, the dogs have great homes and jobs, and the skies are safer for everyone. All because this dog is smart, adaptable, and willing to tackle any task we point her to. Be humans change the size, shape, and heart of our dogs. The one wolf feature that came through evolution unscathed was the wolf's incredible sense of smell. Wolves, in favorable conditions, can detect a scent up to one and three quarter miles away.

And from the earliest days of our relationship with dogs, we've put their noses to work for us. We rely on keen vision to navigate our world, which is fine in open, well-lit places. But the dog's nose can smell what can't be seen. Animal behaviorist Alexandra Horowitz says to know the dog, you must know its nose and the ways it experiences the world.

As we see the world, dogs smell the world. You know, we open up our eyes and there's the world visually in front of us. Dogs, you know, come into consciousness and take a big sniff, essentially. So we can kind of imagine that the entire geography of this world is redrawn for them in odors.

And every sniff tells a vivid story. You watch a dog's nose for any length of time, they're doing terrific gymnastics. The sniff of a dog is not like our clumsy sniff.

It looks like the dog is turning his head to see, but really he's turning his head to sniff first. Whether it's big, round, and the palest pink, or small, pointy, and glossy black, all dogs have highly sensitive noses. Humans are likely to discern one scent at a time, whichever is strongest.

However, a dog can sort through a myriad of scents simultaneously. So if we smell a stew cooking, dogs smell each ingredient of the stew and the cook. This is smelling guys. What am I doing over here?

Tatters, we got something special for you here. There you go. Oh yeah, tatters. Oh, what's your favorite?

Carrots are really good. Carrots are the best. Aren't they?

Aren't they funny? Aren't carrots the best? Does this smell good to you, huh?

Good dog. It's going to be really good. Dogs can move one nostril at a time, permitting them to perceive the direction of a scent.

Once they pick up the scent, it dissolves on their wet nose. These liquefied molecules are then pushed further back into the snout. The dog devotes 40 times more of its brain power to smell than we do.

A dog's nose contains about 60 square inches of scent receptors, called the epithelium. That's about the size of an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper. If you compared our scent receptor area, you would find it is a little smaller than a postage stamp.

Amazingly, we've managed to take the great wolf nose and make it better. Yeah, they're on the move out there, by the way. scent discrimination is part of obedience trials. Send your dog. Using its incredible sense of smell, the dog's task is to locate the one object on the field that its owner has handled.

Careful breeding. We created the bloodhound nose complete with 300 million olfactory sensors. Even the dachshund has 125 million and the beagle packs in 225 million scent receptors in its nose. We have 96 different breeds of scent hounds. Dogs specifically created by us over the years for their exceptional sense of smell.

And today, people use a dog's keen sense of smell in many ways. If an object has an odor, a dog can be trained to identify it and find it. And Dr. Giovanni Morciani's dogs do just that.

I like to present you the king of the table, the truffle. You can see how magnificent they are, that bowl of... white and black truffle that the Lagotto Romagnolo find here in Bagnara di Romagna.

It turns out that a dog's keen sense of smell is perfectly suited for sniffing out these subterranean delicacies. And the dog of choice for Italian truffle hunters is the Lagotto Romagnolo. They nearly died out as a breed, but in the 1970s, Dr. Morciani was one of four Italian dog lovers that brought the dogs back from the edge of extinction.

Truffle hunting dogs have been used for centuries to sniff out and find truffles in Italy and France. Truffles can sell for thousands of dollars. The record price was set in 2007 when a truffle weighing a little over 3 pounds was sold for $330,000. Truffles have been collected for at least 3,600 years.

Their attraction is a tantalizing taste and aroma, and it is said that once experienced, can never be forgotten. Historically, both pigs and dogs have been used to find truffles. In Italy, dogs are preferred, because pigs will eat truffles. Dogs won't.

Every year, truffle hunters in Italy take to the woods, hoping that the sensitive noses of their trained dogs will lead them to buried treasure. Finding truffles is a game for the dogs, and they're given a treat each time they find one. The night before a truffle hunt, the dogs aren't fed, so they'll be eager to find truffles for the treats. When hunting for truffles, a good dog proceeds slowly, sniffing and backtracking. Suddenly, it will drop its nose to the ground, inhale deeply, and then dig in with its front paws.

Many dog owners experience the frustration of their dog leaving the backyard looking like a moonscape. Here, dogs are rewarded for being diligent diggers. The handler stops his dog before its nails ruin the truffles.

Truffle hunting dogs are so prized that competing human truffle hunters sometimes dog nap them. Anything to get an edge. This basket holds about $10,000 worth of truffles. Not bad for an afternoon's outing.

And now we are going to eat a very, very special food. Pasta. Tortelloni Romagnoli with truffles. When it comes to plucking this musty jewel, nothing beats the power of the nose.

Next to smell, the sense of hearing is the most acute of a wolf's senses. Wolves can hear as far away as six miles in the forest and ten miles in the open. Our modern dogs inherited their great sense of hearing from the wolf.

As newborns, a puppy's ear flaps are not movable and their ear canals are sealed. They are deaf. Their ears don't begin to open until they're about two weeks old. By the end of the first month, the puppy's hearing is acute.

They are able to detect the direction that a sound comes from. And just like us, they learn to screen out a lot of background noise. These are important skills because, as adults, these dogs will sleep through blaring stereos or honking cars.

But open a bag of dog food and they're wide awake. Dog ears come in an amazing variety. Extremely long and floppy. Small, soft and perked.

Or folding elegantly alongside the face. It's the pinna that's the outer, visible part of a dog's ear. Dogs are able to tilt, turn, raise and lower their ears to locate not only the sound, but pinpoint the exact origin and accurately interpret whether it is threatening or not.

The frequencies that dogs hear are nearly twice what we do, and they can pick up and distinguish sounds roughly four times the distance we can. At the outer edge of the ear is the ear flap. The flap funnels the sound through the ear canal to the tympanic membrane or eardrum.

Inside the eardrum are three small bones that increase the intensity of sound vibrations. The vibrations enter the spiral-shaped cochlea, which converts them into signals that are then delivered to the brain. And all this happens in six hundredths of a second.

But what has proved to be the most important thing a dog can hear is the sound of the human voice. Okay, step. Dogs'ears are exquisitely tuned to the tone, pitch, and rhythm of our voices. These are non-verbal cues that reveal our emotions and intentions to our dogs.

Up, switch. Nice, very nice. Ready?

Let's go. Okay, Becky, pull. That ability to understand us allows companion dogs to enhance the independence and quality of life of their disabled partners. Becky, stop. And this partnership is built on the human voice.

But just understanding our voice might not mean much without a dog's willingness to do things for us. Dogs have not only learned to listen to our voice, today there are some that can feel the emotion of our hearts. The Golden Retriever is one of the breeds we originally created to help us hunt.

And even though most of us no longer hunt, the Golden has never stopped wanting to please us. Today, they're often found in service as companion dogs. This is Tuesday and his best friend, Luis Montalvan. Luis is a former army captain and decorated veteran who served two tours in Iraq. For four years, he was surrounded by violence and death.

When you're in the profession of combat arms, you're expected to be tough and deal with it and take care of your soldiers. And I really neglected to take care of myself. Luis came home with a serious spinal injury and psychic scars that tormented him day and night. You know, transitioning out of the military can be a difficult thing. I mean, I'd been in the military a long time, and coming to New York, I'd never lived in New York.

This is a, I mean, it's New York. Trying to rebuild his life on his own. was a real challenge.

In 2008, the promise of help arrived in an email from the Wounded Warrior Project, which offered to pair veterans with mental and physical disabilities with trained service dogs. Well, the latter portion of 2008 I got Tuesday, and he has been, I mean, a godsend. Tuesday, stand.

Good boy. Look, get my shoes. That's it.

Good boy, bring it here. Tuesday's retrieval talons spare Louis painful bending and lifting. Good boy. Look, go get the other one. Such a good boy.

Oh, good boy. Yes, yes. You're so good.

Such a good puppy. He helps me with balance. I've had some issues with balance where before I got him, I fell.

I fell down a flight of subway steps. It was pretty bad. So he offers me a sense of equilibrium as I walk that's tremendously helpful. Easy step.

Good boy. And once in the subway, Tuesday helps Luis keep his mental balance. There are a lot of people around and it's unnerving because it reminds me of some incident in Iraq.

Psychiatric service dogs are trained to recognize changes in a person's breathing, perspiration, or scent that can signal the onset of a flashback or panic attack. He'll tilt his head back and look at me and sort of smile and maybe lick me and ask me to pet him. And it takes me out of the past and it brings me into the present. I feel better about going out.

By keeping Luis from dwelling on memories of Iraq and in the present, Tuesday gets him to the VA and to his graduate journalism classes at Columbia. But Tuesday is far more than a well-trained therapist. He's a great dog.

And just by being a great dog, he can unleash oxytocin in all who return his loving gaze. Tuesday is beloved at Columbia. and he's beloved at the VA.

Veterans love to see him. He says hello and he has a remarkable way of changing their disposition. I may even just say that, you know, I feel so much better now.

Down. Belly. Oh, you ain't gonna watch I'm very drunk. He has allowed me to get out of my apartment.

You know, where I used to spend an inordinate amount of time alone, stewing in my thoughts. He, you know, he's a dog. He needs to go out. And at the end of their long days, Tuesday even reminds Luis to take his medicine.

Good boy. With Tuesday curled up next to him, Luis is able to fall into a healing sleep, knowing that Tuesday will wake him at the slightest hint of a nightmare. And so, our long, long journey with the dog finds us back at the beginning, when they protected us from dangers beyond our campfires.

Only now, we're asking them to protect us from enemies within. The camp wolves that gambled on humans made a very good bet. Here in the United States, we share our homes with over 70 million dogs.

Wolves have not fared as well. It is estimated that their population has dwindled from millions at the end of the Ice Age to only 200,000 worldwide today. It's from the genetic palette of the wolf We humans have created dogs to be our partners and companions. We selected the best noses, eyes, muscles, and heart.

Mixing and matching till we had created over 400 breeds of dogs. From those first proto-dogs, our ancestors could never have imagined it would have led to dogs that fit in a teacup or take up a bed. But what's really surprising is that most of the breeds that we're all familiar with are little more than a century old. Dr. Robert Wayne has studied the genetic background of all dog groups.

The selective breeding that was very controlled, very strict, really became much more popular during the Victorian era. Standards were erected. Your breed could only look like this.

And you bred to that standard. And you didn't out-cross with other breeds. And those processes, I think, lead to closed gene pools. And along the way, breeding for fashionable traits has created unforeseen consequences.

Many dog breeds have developed significant health problems. Over 500 genetic defects have been cataloged in purebred dogs, and more continue to come to light, threatening the health of entire breed populations. Veterinarian Dr. Meredith Kennedy regularly treats dogs with inherited health problems. The bulldog basically is a genetic mutation. And the two genetic mutations that we see in the bulldog, chondodystrophy, which means dwarfism, and that's where you get kind of the bow-legged stance, you get that short back, you get the little corkscrew tail, and they are also brachycephalic.

Brachycephalic means short face. So basically, this is actually an abnormal dog. These are genetic mutations that people find desirable, and then you start breeding for those things, exaggerating those particular characteristics, you end up with a dog that cannot walk properly, they're at greater risk.

of death by asphyxiation from just normal things like going for a walk in slightly warm weather and they need surgery just in order to be able to breathe like a normal dog and this really hurts the dogs in the 1970s breeders and veterinarians began to address these problems by crossbreeding several types of dogs that possess qualities that people liked in the english bulldog the result the old english bulldog blend of the english bulldog the mastiff The American Bull Terrier and the American Bulldog. The Old English Bulldog is an effort to create a healthier bulldog. You have a short-faced dog, but it's not quite as short-faced.

There's a little bit more breathing room in the nasal passages, and these dogs don't tend to have the problem with the upper airway obstructive syndrome, the brachycephalic airway syndrome that we see with the very extreme English Bulldogs. An example of how breeders combat inherited health problems is happening here at the Palm Springs Dog Show. These are Samoyeds. Kathy De La Garza is judging them to their official breed standard for gait, appearance, temperament, and health. These are the potential mothers of many important litters.

They're champions. It's important that they get bred to the right dogs with the right health checks, and that's how we do things. Like many large breeds, these dogs carry genes that can cause joint deformities.

These are what we call Braille dogs. You have to feel everything because these dogs are a tool. They're our beloved companions, but they were bred for a job and they should be able to do it, even though we don't ask them to. Everything is functionality, not just beauty on these dogs. This is a high-stakes competition.

The winning dog will be highly sought after for breeding the next generation of Samoyed champions. Puppies with a championship pedigree can go for as much as $2,000 to $3,000. But responsible breeders also want to ensure that no potentially harmful traits are passed on to the next generation. Okay, you're my best of breed. You're my best of winners.

You're my best of opposite. You're an award of merit. You're an award of merit. You're an award of merit. Chase has won enough points to finish his championship.

But now he must... another judge. His owner, Ken Granacchi, takes him to a mobile vet clinic to be examined for congenital defects.

Okay, we got it. Are we doing elbows? Yes. His hips look good, by the way.

Tell me when. We're looking at the right elbow right now. We're looking for elbow dysplasia.

It's a digital image of his left elbow and we're able to manipulate that to determine whether or not he has it, which in this particular case he does not. He's got very good elbow conformation. In the case of the hip joint, we're evaluating this area right here. This bone right here, that's the ball and socket joint of the hip.

And in the case of hip dysplasia, that's an underdeveloped area, and the ball doesn't fit well in the socket. And in that case, instead of a ball, moving like this as it should you get movement like this and in those cases you'll get abnormal tugging of the soft tissues which will put strains on the tissues and cause arthritis it's what we're trying to breed against it's the reason everybody comes in and gets these x-rays. There's a very high incidence of hip dysplasia in most dogs, in particular large breed dogs, and these hips are going to come back as a good. Yes. The good news, as a breeder, that's what we look for.

Chase has aced this exam, and Ken will be given a certificate to verify that this champion has been ...in joints that he can pass on to all the little chases to come. Scientists believe that during the domestication process, dogs were selected for their unique ability to communicate with humans. But they understand far more of our language than we do of theirs. One essential talent that dogs have that seems to owe little to their wolf ancestry is their willingness to look us in the eye. One of the things that's unique about dogs is that they'll look you in the eyes.

They'll gaze at you the way humans gaze at us. This is something a lot of other animals don't do. Wolves avert their eyes from directly gazing into ours, and they show little interest in what we look at or where we point. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, show little interest in our point of view.

But dogs soon discovered that looking deep into our eyes would give them the key to our thoughts and maybe even our soul. It certainly provided a reliable way to communicate and bond with us. Those deep longing looks also release brain chemicals that deepen our bond to each other and make us throw that ball just one more time again and again.

But beyond our dog's ability to understand us, we bring actual measurable joy to one another. I think the human-dog bond is particularly profound. There's a lot of research that shows that just by petting a dog, our cortisol stress hormone levels go down, blood pressure levels go down.

In many cases, dogs get the same effect. They also get a therapeutic effect from being petted by humans. It's these connections between us, looks, petting and close physical contact that release the hormone oxytocin in both of us.

It's the same hormone that forms the powerful bond between mothers and their infants in all mammals. It turns out oxytocin has a powerful anti-stress effect on both of our species, making us calmer and more receptive to the non-verbal messages that pass between us. This hormone connection gave our dogs a welcome place at our ancestors'campfires.

And later in millions of our homes across the planet. But not every dog is feeling the love. Humans have become the dog's environmental niche.

So what happens when we turn our backs on dogs? In St. Louis alone, over 40,000 dogs live on the street. Many have recently been abandoned.

And others have lived their entire lives there. Here you go. That's a good girl.

Here we go. What a good girl. Now take the leap of faith. I want you to eat this out of my hand, okay? That was a very good girl.

Randy Grimm runs Stray Rescue of St. Louis. a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the lives of stray and feral dogs. You in there okay?

Yeah. Man created this entire problem, and I just feel it's up to all of us to do something about it. And that's kind of what I do is rescue, work with them, and try to reintroduce them into the human pack.

With his limited resources, he supports those he can and tries to rescue those that are sick. For over 20 years, Randy has fed and tried to socialize these abandoned dogs. He rescues 2,000 dogs a year. His dream is to eventually be able to rescue all of the dogs and find loving homes for them. Yes, you're like the hell with the dog food.

Give me the good stuff. Every day. He has heartbreaking choices to make. The guy in the very back, his eyes are going soulless on me. He's not himself.

He would be here with everybody else. I could pet him on any given day. And he's staying back. He's not with the rest of the group. He's sick.

You've got to triage everyone. You know, if you look good like him, I have to leave you behind. You know, say a little prayer and then...

Tomorrow morning, hopefully we can get him and get him to a vet. We're going to get you tomorrow. So you just hang in there.

Because he can't get every dog, like Red, off the street, Randy supports them as best he can. The hard part for me to understand is that we bred the instinct out to hunt. They can still chase a bird, they can still chase an animal, but they don't eat it. They still need me to bring dog food. Come on guys!

I've been wondering where you've been. Let me see what you look like. Oh, honey, somebody beat you up.

Yeah, somebody beat you up. However, when a dog becomes very ill or badly injured, he will take them to a vet. This is the hot dog through the loop trick. Yeah, get your hot dog.

Okay. There we go. And good boy.

Trust me. You're much better off. Good boy.

Randy's organization spends over a million dollars a year on vet bills, saving lives, and rehabilitating these dogs so they can be put up for adoption. Here's Echo. This is a friend of ours. I mean, the dog is our buddy.

True to his word, the next morning, Randy's priority is to see how Red is. If he died, I'll never forgive myself. What, is he dead? It's my fault.

Don't! I'm sorry, I should have got you yesterday. Let's make it a priority. I'm getting these three guys out of here. Okay?

Yep. I don't care if we don't have space. I don't care.

You guys, you guys are being rescued this week. It's over. I'm never coming here again.

Come here, sweetheart. Here, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm sorry your buddy's gone. I'm gonna get you out of here.

get you out of here. I know. I'll get you guys out of here. I promise, okay? The following day, Randy makes good on his promise.

Believe it or not, these guys turn around and become wonderful house pets. People think I work miracles, but it's called love. Okay, I'm glad I got you guys out of here. Let's go.

I'm so glad this is over. Although he's worked alone for many years, Randy now has a staff of seven, 300 volunteers and 200 foster homes in and around St. Louis. Randy will soon be moving his restaurant operation into a state-of-the-art facility that combines a veterinary clinic, a no-kill shelter, and an adoption center.

This whole building means nothing to me but the word hope. Man created a dog and now look what we're doing to him. We got a responsibility.

Over the years, Randy has brought thousands of animals back from the brink of death and found them new homes and families. But many more are waiting for their chance at a new lease on life. We must give thanks to our ancient ancestors who looked into the eyes of a wolf and saw the promise of a friend. And to all those people that came before us that found they had a way with dogs.

and helped to create the dogs we can no longer live without. Imagine the world if we had not befriended each other. It's nearly impossible, as their footsteps have always shadowed ours.

This is, however, a story without an end, an evolving tale of two species connected by thousands of yesterdays to innumerable tomorrows. What is it we will ask of our dogs next? Whatever it is, they will happily comply.

Because that's who we made them to be.

Transcript for:The Journey of Dogs with Humans

Transcript for:
The Journey of Dogs with Humans