How To Behave So Your Dog Behaves Analysis

When raising or working with an animal, people often mistakenly treat the animal like they would a person, a not very bright person but a person nonetheless. This isn’t the best approach to training an animal and it’s an issue that Sophia Yin addresses in her book, “How to Behave So Your Dog Behaves”. Yin covers everything from the domestication of dogs to different techniques that can be used to teach dogs various tricks like sit- and down- stay. Dogs, it is learned as one reads the book, are much more complicated then we might realize. Research has shown that dogs have the same brainpower and level of understanding as a 2 year old human does (Smarter Than You’d Think, 2009). This might lead a person to think that if they treat a dog like …show more content…
In this case, many people look at wolves to help teach them why a dog acts the way it does and to also help understand how to properly train these animals. This, Yin explains, is not a good way of learning about dogs. Dogs, after all, are not wolves. A wolf kept with humans reacts a lot differently in nearly every situation then a dog would. Many consider the dog to be inferior to the wolf due to its inability to survive in the wild but they also need to consider that wolves are not well adapted to living with humans. In this section of her book, Yin stresses the meaning and the differences behind domestication and tameness. Domestication occurs in the species as a whole while tameness is an individual. Feral dogs and cats could still be considered domestic animals but they are by no means tame animals. Animals that know no fear of humans, such as those who have had generations of human free living, could be considered tame but they would not be domesticated. Once the idea of domestication and tameness has been addressed, Yin goes on to talk about how dogs were domesticated. There is no right answer to this, as there are no written records. Some believe that dogs evolved by people taking a wolf pup from the wild and raising it among humans. This idea isn’t that great, however, as even in today’s world wolf pups raised with humans can be very unstable and unpredictable. A better idea is that certain wolves could overcome their fear of humans and would steal food from around human villages. In times of hardship, these wolves would thrive thanks to their extra food source while others would die. Eventually, more and more wolves were able to adapt to live with humans and later the domestic dog arose. From there people would have bred certain traits into the animal to help preform different jobs to benefit humans. This leads the subject of tameness. To be domestic, Yin writes, an animal needs