Dogs: Man's best friend? It was women who made them family pets

Men used working dogs but women made family pets of them, says study. Photo / 123RF

While kings, poets and philosophers have repeated the adage "a dog is a man's best friend", a new study argues that it was women who first created the bond between canines and humans.

In one of the first anthropological studies of its kind, researchers at Washington State University revealed while men may have used dogs for hunting or herding, it was women who gave them names and treated them with affection in the way humans do today.

Although dogs are one of the oldest and most widespread domesticated animals, very few anthropological studies have directly focused on the human relationship with canines.

Anthropologists at the university examined earlier studies on 144 ancient communities worldwide where there was evidence of dogs being kept, as well as thousands of mentions of dogs in the Human Relations database.

The earliest example found is in Greek mythology. When Odysseus returns home to Ithaca after 10 years of fighting at Troy and another decade at sea, only the faithful hound Argos recognises the dishevelled former king.

Asking his old friend Eumaios why Argos is lying among the mule and cattle dung outside a stable, Eumaios answers: "He has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him."

In the earliest human settlements where dogs were associated with women, they were given names, allowed to sleep indoors with people and mourned when they died.

This bond also allowed the dogs to be more easily trained and thus their usefulness to humans also increased as they were used more for hunting.

Conversely, when food production increased, due to advances in crop growing and herding of livestock, the "utility" of dogs diminished.

Jaime Chambers, lead author of the study, said: "Humans were more likely to regard dogs as a type of person if the dogs had a special relationship with women. They were more likely to be included in family life, treated as subjects of affection and, generally, people had greater regard for them.

"We found that dogs' relationships with women might have had a greater impact on the dog-human bond than relationships with men."

The team also discovered that the warmer the climate the less useful dogs tended to be.

Robert Quinlan, a professor of anthropology and co-author of the report in the Journal of Ethnobiology, said: "Relative to humans, dogs are really not particularly energy efficient.

"Their body temperature is higher than humans, and just a bit of exercise can make them overheat on a hot day. We saw that they had less utility to humans in warmer environments."

Although there were some exceptions to this, with a few dog-loving cultures in the tropics, it was a fairly consistent trend, he added.

The findings add evidence to the evolutionary theory that dogs and humans chose each other, rather than the older theory that humans sought out wolf pups to raise on their own.

Chambers said: "Dogs are everywhere humans are. If we think that dogs are successful as a species if there are lots of them, then they have been able to thrive.

"They have hitched themselves to us and followed us all over the world. It's been a very successful relationship."