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Coronavirus Disease 2019
Dogs in the Time of COVID-19
Shelters are reporting an uptick in animal adoptions.
Posted June 8, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Several years ago, Markham Heid, a writer working on a special edition of Time: How Dogs Think, contacted me with what he thought I would find a strange request: Would I be willing to engage in a bit of forward-thinking and speculate about the fate of dogs in a world from which humans were suddenly absent? They would have to disappear without a trace, a rule that negated the likelihood that a fair number would feast on the remains of their beloved human companions—a not inconsiderable amount of food. Even without human corpus delecti, there would be countless tons of food in public and private storage just waiting for clever, lock-busting dogs or dog-trained bears to liberate.
But this was to be a world without people, meaning the dogs would be left to their own desires with regard to breeding, no longer subject to human whims and fashion.
Other people Heid interviewed were Marc Bekoff, a world-renowned ethologist; Raymond Pierrotti at the University of Kansas, author with Brandy R. Fogg of the book The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved; and Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us. Perhaps not surprisingly, we all shared the view that after a period of adjustment that was not without peril, dogs would survive.
Weisman was convinced they would lack the skill to do much more than survive on a few larger islands. Most thought that after a period of sorting under the rule of natural selection, dogs would emerge that were different from the sometimes fragile purebreds we know today, but more suitable to their ecosystems. Dingoes provide a prime example of dogs who, after being abandoned in a land of strange animals and odd plants, remade it and themselves. After his interview with Heid, Bekoff extended his contemplations and is now completing a book with his longtime collaborator Jessica Pierce examining the kind of world dogs would inhabit were we to disappear. We can all look forward to their detailed analysis.
Long ago I came to the conclusion that trying to predict the future is a fool’s game because the thing you least expect is sure to jump up and bite you on the arse. Little did I suspect that just a year after Heid’s piece appeared dogs and people would awake to a dramatically changed world, one under assault from Coronavirus and its pathological offspring COVID-19.
I was interested in the effects of this pandemic on dogs and other animals since often in cases of social disruption and economic hardship, many animals are abandoned and left to fend for themselves. Indeed, it seems that was the case in Wuhan, China, when people were forced to abandon their homes on a moment’s notice. But on the whole, something quite different happened, and people suddenly forced to stay at home by the dictates of quarantines and layoffs began adopting dogs and cats at what would appear to be a record pace. Reports from animal shelters around the country were that they were having difficulty keeping up with the demand for animals.
Many cases seem to involve people volunteering merely to serve as foster companions—we don’t yet know how many of those animals will wind up with homes, although anecdotally, the number of permanent adoptions seems to be high. Andrew Rowan, who has studied the trends in adoptions and dog populations for decades, told me that the final figures may not be far different from those year to year, but the trend has been in favor of adoption and fostering. Possibly, what we’re seeing is the continuation of a larger trend of households acquiring animals.
It is more interesting to note that while dogs and cats are finding new homes, other wildlife is thriving. Many people have predicted over the years that if you stop hunting and otherwise killing animals (e.g., by hitting them with cars), they will flourish. Thus, there have been reports since the onset of the pandemic of wild animals roaming the streets of virtually traffic-free cities.
While Coronavirus has not produced anything as dramatic as a world without people, it has nonetheless presented us with a dramatic life-altering moment. I would like to think that this particular moment in history will produce a cleaner, fresher, more just and equitable world, but there have been times like this before and they’ve brought more disappointment than lasting change.
Further on Farmed Foxes
The Proceedings of the Royal Society B recently carried an article speculating that foxes around London were self-domesticating. Evidence for this included phenotypic differences between urban and rural foxes. Primary among them were the muzzle and cranium sizes, with one consequence being weaker jaw strength among urban foxes. The measurements led first author, Kevin Parsons, to argue that the urban foxes were undergoing domestication because the changes he recorded were similar to those produced by the Belyaev fur fox experiment. Parsons and his colleagues seem to be drawing conclusions that don’t match their evidence.
As other research has shown, such phenotypic changes are common in zoo animals and others that do not rely so heavily on the bone-crushing ability of their bites and other attributes, such as brain size necessary for surviving in the wild. The size increase in urban foxes could well be due to an improved diet. Foxes have been found in association with people for tens of thousands of years. They are easily tamed, which is not the same as being domesticated. Even Parsons admits that he and his team have not found underlying genetic mutations for the physical changes they observed. For further discussion, see Marc Bekoff’s post here.
