Our neighbor commented on the proficiency of our border collie in moving our livestock. I had to admit that I had very little to do with it. It’s his instinct. He comes from a line of dogs who’ve been selected for specific characteristics found in their wolf ancestors. What is predatory behavior in wild canines had been shaped to work in favor of pastoralists who needed help moving groups of grazing animals.
Our boy helps us get the cows home but he would be a failure moving our sheep. The reason is that his instinct to circle and collect them is utterly defeated by their unwillingness to be collected. Groups of grazing animals have their own instincts. Some gather together when threatened, others scatter. Both strategies have their survival advantages. Most domestic breeds of sheep have been selected over generations from ancestors who possessed the gathering instinct.
Our type of sheep, from the Shetland islands originally, were left in a wild state on the hundreds of small islands in that archipelago. Each single island was already an enclosure and the shepherds just needed to drive them to collect them in pens at one end or another. That involved walking toward them and forcing them to retreat. They would eventually find themselves with no exit.
Benign neglect served human purposes best concerning their range of traits. They were left for nature alone to shape them into the hardy, low-maintenance, extremely wooly creatures they are and since their environment presented them with only one kind of predator, human beings, a scattering instinct remained more valuable.
The hilarity of a pig wrestling contest is a good example of how hard it is for a human to collect creatures that don’t want to be collected. Our dog would be baffled by our sheep’s reaction to him when they individually scatter to all points of the compass. We don’t want to pay for therapy sessions as he works through his feelings of defeat so we have him help us where he will be the most successful.
That got me thinking about our own instincts. Humans seem to have a natural tendency to favor others who are most genetically similar to themselves. Call it the selfish gene theory of human behavior, recognized by biologists like Richard Dawkins, or something else; it’s a concept that offers an explanation for things like clannishness in our species.
Human instincts, just as those in all other animals, can be tinkered with. In the case of our dog we shaped his by rewarding him when his natural behavior matched the role we wanted him to play. Food or praise delivered at the right moment works on his reward center and reinforces the behavior we want him to exhibit. Once established as a habit, his nervous system delivers him a spritz of dopamine every time he does it. It’s a win-win. He is made happy and so are we when it works to our advantage.
Let’s stop and think a moment about how our collective influences are shaping us. What chords are they playing on our inner strings? Are we being herded together, or driven in some direction? Are we letting our instincts dictate our actions or can we rise above them to a more reasoned state of being? Are certain behaviors being reinforced? Who, or what, is the source of that reinforcement?
When faced with danger, are we like the kind of sheep that flock together, or ones that launch out on solo flyers? Are we, like the border collie, having our predatory instincts refined to achieve some secondary purpose? In the multi-dimensional world in which we live, much depends upon the intentions of the ones who are exploiting these instincts to work for their own advantage.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.