Review - Dogs in the North: Stories of Cooperation and Co-Domestication

Before I go further: this is an academic book. Each chapter is a standalone article on some aspect of the relationship between dogs and humans in the circumpolar north, arranged in a roughly geographical loop from Siberia to North America and Greenland and then back to the Sami and their dogs. The idea of this arrangement is that modern Arctic dogs may be the result of a relationship that started somewhere in Siberia. The strange result is that this causes the book to open and close on reindeer dogs, with a segue through sled dogs and hunting dogs in between.

I don't expect that this book will be of uniform interest to everyone, even to everyone who likes dogs and enjoys learning about them. I do think that some of the articles discuss aspects of the use and history of Arctic dogs that are absolutely vital to understanding them, their place in the cultures in which they arose, and how dogs and humans work together in those contexts.

I suspect most readers who will get much out of this will either be interested in what I keep describing to myself as the position of dogs in the cultural landscape, or else in Northern breed dogs in general. It's dense stuff, and the interest probably has to already exist before you will find a great deal of enjoyment--though there are some very charming stories scattered through (and some that are, by any terms, distressing).

I grew up with Finnish Lapphunds, which are a modern breed selected from Sami reindeer herding and "helper" dogs. They're a Northern herder, more primitive than more southerly traditional herding dogs, more biddable than a "typical" Northern breed selected from dogs used primarily for freighting or hunting. The division of the Sami reindeer dogs into three separate modern breeds--the Finnish Lapphund, the Lapponian Herder, and the Swedish Lapphund--is more a product of 20th century dog politics than of distinctly separate origins, though there was always some regional variation among Sami reindeer dogs.

From this specific background, my favorite chapter in this book is the one that deals with the folklore of the dog in Sami tradition. I was told by a Swedish Lapphund enthusiast that this book changed the way she looked at her dog--an animal whose inherited characteristics may be the result of several decades of selection to written breed standards in more southerly Sweden, but is still the result of several centuries of Sami selection before that. To some extent, I feel the same way about what it is able to inform me of on the Finnish Lapphunds I grew up with, what I value in these dogs that I hope to find in future dogs as well (if I'm lucky, both Finnish Lapphunds and Lapponian Herders).

If you have Northern breed dogs in your life in any capacity, I truly do recommend reading at least a few chapters. They've been partners with humans for a long, long time--no matter how much a 21st century pet owner may complain of some of the traits that make them what they are. Dogs are a part of the cultural landscape, they are living cultural artifacts. We can learn a lot about them by looking at the context from which they came--and by looking at dogs, we can learn a lot about other people, too.