Many people are trying to take care of their dogs by buying them human-grade organic food, expensive beds, and ample toys. In reality, the best gift you can give to your dog is the understanding of its nature and behavior.
Your dog is not a human being trapped in a dog’s body. It doesn’t have the same interests as a person, be it reading books, playing in all british casino or betting on dog races. It is also not a wild animal such as a wolf. While some scholars like to underline the connection between dogs and wolves, dogs have been living around people for so many thousands of years, that your dog is much more than a tamed wolf, jackal or dingo. While your dog does share a lot of physical traits with these animals, humans do share a lot of physical traits with apes, yet it does not make us apes.
If you were to sort all modern domesticated animals by the descending amount of time spent around humans, dogs would be the leaders of such classification. Humans started domesticating dogs well before learning how to grow their own food.
Originally, both humans and dogs were hunters. The relationship between the species was mutually beneficial. Humans had the ability to learn and reason and dogs could hunt in the ways humans couldn’t. For dogs, being around human campfires was much better than spending time in the wilderness and potentially becoming prey for bigger animals. On top of that, dogs were regularly gifted with food leftovers that for the dogs were free meals.
There is one feature that both humans and dogs share. This feature is territorialism and it was responsible for the relationship between the species developing much further. Wild canines viewed human settlements as their territory. When other animals approached, they made noise or fought for the territory, thus warning humans and saving human lives with their vigilance.
Domestication is about genetic modification, which is much more than taming a wild animal and that’s exactly what happened to dogs over thousands of years of their existence next to humans.