Why Did English Colonizers Call Native Dogs Wolves?
An encounter in 1621 illustrates the history of domesticating native animals, which colonial accounts have obscured.
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As described on Wikipedia, what is believed to be one of the first recorded wolf attacks in North America occurred on January 19, 1621. Mayflower colonist John Goodman went out for a walk around Plymouth Colony with a spaniel, one of two dogs that also traveled on that famous ship. "Little Spinel" was frightened when two large border hounds approached, but Goodman, in the words of Mort, an early chronicler of the colony, fended them off with a "plank bed."
Then, curious, the big canines "both sat down on their tiles, grinned at him for a while, and went on their way." The problem here, as the historian Strother E. This, Roberts points out, is nothing like the behavior of wolves. Roberts argues that these two canines were not wolves, but dogs, domesticated Native American dogs whose ancestors came from Asia along with the ancestors of the first peoples of the Americas.
Goodman's mistake was perhaps the first of "an almost universal tendency among English writers to misidentify native dogs as wolves or a separate race of wild dogs."
Rather than seeing a contrast between European domestication and the American wilderness, Goodman saw the reunification of two branches of the domesticated dog family separated from each other for thousands of years.
Goodman's error is perhaps the first "almost universal" error among English writers, misidentifying native dogs as wolves or a separate race of wild dogs. This trend has continued. Roberts refers to the 2004 History of Wolves in North America where the Goodman incident is once again related.
It is true that native dogs were not like European dogs. Domestication in Europe usually resulted in dogs with floppy ears and shorter muzzles and muzzles, classic signs of domestication as beautification. American dogs had straight ears and a longer muzzle, giving them a wolf-like appearance, the common ancestor of all domestic dogs. Native dogs were also great hunters.
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Perhaps more importantly, settler colonists recognized that dogs living among native peoples as companions, guards, and hunters had been domesticated. The British believed that Indians could not domesticate animals because domestication was a civilized art and Indians were the opposite of civilized. Claiming that dogs are tamed wolves fulfills the ideological needs of the colonialists. Wild animals were equal to wild humans and vice versa. Roberts writes the English
They dehumanized the Native Americans whose societies the dogs lived in, at the same time that they effectively erased the realities of Native domestication from their territory. The historical background of both of these processes advanced the grand imperial project of challenging Native American nations as uncivilized and thus rhetorically legitimizing their dispossession.
And the immigrants were quite successful in that. The indigenous people of the Northeast were largely wiped off the map. Genetic research on native dogs clearly shows, Roberts continues, "the replacement of a large majority of the historically native dogs of the Northeast by dogs of more recent Eurasian heritage." But, Roberts reminds us, just as the people were not ultimately exterminated, "despite the insistence of white scientists on their historic disappearance," the idea of "complete extermination of native dogs must be approached with caution."
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It cannot be said for certain that no dog of native heritage still lives in New England. Indeed, the clear parallels with the late 18th-20th century 'Disappearing India' narrative caution against writing native dogs off too quickly."
Native dogs continue to be "misidentified and persecuted" as wild animals as explorers, traders, and settlers carry their prejudices westward across the continent."
New England and then continental efforts to eradicate native dogs "were a means of controlling Native American communities and taming what newcomers perceived as a threatening wilderness dominated by wild people and their wolf companions."