“Part of the appeal of working with animals instead of humans is the absence of vitriol that has become a hallmark of social media.”

A funeral procession winds thr-ough the fields outside of what’s now Bonn, Germany. It’s around 14,000 years ago. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. This being Germany, odds are it’s cold as well. Among the departed is a 17-month-old puppy who died from a tooth infection. It will be accorded the same burial privileges as the two deceased humans also to be buried, and will rest with them in a common grave until being chanced upon by quarry workers in 1914. The so-called Bonn-Oberkassel dog was a harbinger of things to come. As the first undisputed example of a domesticated animal, it’s the herald of a long, and sometimes sordid, saga of animal domestication and co-evolution that helped humans become the dominant species on the planet. Dogs helped us hunt, pigs and ...