Author Aminatta Forna recommends a canine history by Konrad Lorenz, and Karen Joy Fowler’s novel about a family that raises a chimp, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
A pack of wolves follows a sled, picking off the sled dogs and then the occupants one by one, to the last man. So begins Jack London’s White Fang, published in 1906. The wolf pack is led by a wolfdog, Kiche. The ensuing story is told from the viewpoint of Kiche’s wolf pup, White Fang, through whose gaze we view the violence of the parallel worlds of animals and humans. White Fang is the narrative mirror of London’s earlier The Call of the Wild, in which a pet dog, kidnapped and used as a sled dog, runs away to join the wolves. Wildness is the true nature of animals, though the challenges of survival in the wilderness can also turn man into a beast, London seems to say. White Fang ends up enjoying domesticity with his new master, many miles away from the Yukon. Humans have triumphed over nature, but nature is still out there.
In 1952 Konrad Lorenz, a former member of the Nazi party who would later repent and go on to win a Nobel, published King Solomon’s Ring in English. A chapter imagines the start of the relationship between humans and canines. A pack of jackals followed Stone Age man’s hunting expeditions and surrounded his settlements, and were tolerated, accepted and ultimately encouraged, for the warning barks they gave at the approach of predators, and their tracking skills. The jackals, which initially followed the hunters in the hope of scraps, began to take the initiative, running before instead of behind the hunter, bringing to bay larger animals. And so was created the covenant: food and warmth in exchange for protection.
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