Dogs And Monsters

1391 Words6 Pages
Your Best Friend Today In the Saturday Night essay “Dogs and Monsters” Stanley Coren, a Professor of Psychology and a dog behaviour specialist, argues that dogs have been genetically modified for centuries in order to make people’s lives easier and more comfortable, yet there are still people in the world who disagree with genetic engineering. He claims that what people fear most about this type of science is that it is seen as “tampering with creation”(Coren 533) and something that as Prince Charles put it “should be left to God”(533) for fear that the earth and nature will be unable to handle the changes in species causing an unnatural balance between them. However Coren raises many interesting points proving that genetic engineering is not just in its beginning phases, it has in fact been around for centuries starting with primitive humans, jackals and wolves. Coren begins his essay by describing exactly how dogs and people first came into contact. In doing so Coren shows how people use dogs to make their lives more comfortable and that early people would use dogs at first as essentially a form of garbage disposal. That is until primitive people realized the security that the wolves and jackals had to offer. This, Coren claims, is when genetic engineering first began. Early humans recognized that some of the wolves and jackals around their camps would begin to bark if people from other camps or wild animals approached during the night. They understood that if there was guard dogs surrounding the camp at night the need to have human security watching their camps was unnecessary allowing the humans to save energy for other important tasks such as hunting for food. It was this revelation that prompted primitive people to breed dogs that were loud barkers with one another while killing or chasing away dogs did not bark. By using this example Coren explains that
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