Pet perversions

It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s originality as a thinker, when he described him as ‘an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier’. Britain’s greatest natural scientist was indeed a keeper of fowl, with pigeons among his favourites.

The habit arose from Darwin’s instinctual recognition that in the animal-rearing experiments conducted over millennia by our ancestors, we had inadvertently stored away crucial evidence about the way in which all of life can change in response to environmental stimuli. It was part of his world-changing insights that he proposed how all the 200- plus pigeon breeds recognised in Victorian Britain, despite their astonishing breadth of variation, derived from a single parent species — the rock dove.

Katrina van Grouw wishes to remind us that Darwin was on to something which modern biologists prefer to overlook. Domestication is a vital window into the whole of the evolutionary process. Part of its importance is a matter of timescale. Natural selection operates on such a vast temporal canvas that it is almost impossible for one human, in the course of an individual life, to observe changes occurring in the physical forms of any animals. Not so, however, with pets and livestock.

A dog, canary, sheep or pig can be made to acquire extraordinary, exaggerated characteristics — massive increases in body-mass, complete changes of plumage colour, feathered feet, naked skin or ridiculously short legs — in the course of a few carefully manipulated generations. These vastly speeded-up mutations are what convinced Darwin of the insights offered by domestication. For van Grouw they are nothing less than a reaffirmation of the wider beauty inherent in all life’s processes.

She is thus on a one-woman mission to persuade us to take renewed interest, and acknowledge the wondrous processes at work, not in wild wolves and tigers but among pet dogs and cats.