For those of us who have always, always preferred dogs to humans (and I'm not just saying this because Turbo my adorable Australian kelpie is here beside me as I write, fixing me with a loving gaze) these especially grotesque modern times of human-caused awfulness do seem to confirm our preference.

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In the faces of the newsmaking humans who are leering out at me from my screens today (Trump and Vance, say, Pauline Hanson, Sussan Ley, Angus Taylor, Anthony Albanese and all, none of them able to look me straight in the eye) I see deceit, ruthlessness and mad ambition.

By contrast in the faces of dogs (and notice how our dogs do, endearingly, unflinchingly, look us in the eye) we see 50 lovely varieties of simple sincerity.

And this very week sees the publication of Fatima Bhutto's The Hour of the Wolf: A Memoir in which she compares and contrasts humans and wolves/dogs and finds humans badly wanting. A long excerpt from the book, a piece called The Profound Link (and Love) Between Humans and Dogs, has popped up online.

She reviews the research into how the wondrous "covenant" between wolfdogs and humans, beginning 40,000 years ago, has been possible. After all, today's companion dogs are still wolves, essentially, Bhutto finds, with our Lunas and Teddys and Turbos (Luna and Teddy were Australia's most popular dog names in 2025) still sharing with wolves "their [wolves] social drive, animal instincts, physiognomy, anatomy, and 99.96 per cent of their DNA".

But one fascinating difference she finds is that wolves find eye contact hostile and menacing and hardly do any of it while our dogs revel in eye contact with each other and especially with us.

Researchers suspect, she says, that over the 40,000 years of this extraordinary "covenant" we humans may have always preferred wolves and........

© Canberra Times