Lying scattered around the town square in shaded doorways and across the long stretch of summer grass in the public park in Chacabuco, Argentina, a number of dogs are resting contentedly and surveying the traffic of men about them. They neither approach nor avoid the people walking by or sitting at cafés, but observe the happenings around them with subtle constant interest, interacting as nonchalantly and warmly with each other as the people do in this small Argentine town.

Fascinated, I wander around this park outside of my hotel and observe them, talk to them, invite them to interact with me. Though hard-pressed and far from rushed to disturb a good nap in the shade, they stretch their legs and approach with a reasonable scrutiny about my intentions, reading me for indications of opportunity or trouble. I am struck by their pragmatic confidence, their calm and friendly unobtrusive demeanor, as they lower their heads and lean into me for a scratch before taking interest in something or someone else across the street. They are not ill-behaved or invasive, but cautiously well-mannered and kind. They are as flea-bitten, fat, and happy a bunch of dogs as I have ever seen.

A woman has taken on a few of these creatures and formed a daily ritual with them that echoes the original common niche of the world’s original dog over the continents and centuries. She has leftovers to spare, and the dogs are positioned there to scavenge them. When the right person appears from a certain door at a specific time in the afternoon, a dozen of these Chacabuco dogs are poised in waiting to move in on the café scraps of trimmed fat and last night’s empanadas, which she carries out into the park. The dogs greet her with wagging tails and whimpers when she appears, following her closely toward a large tree where she empties the contents of a bag. They have taken all the right notes about the details of the events that occur in a certain place and time in their environment and respond accordingly.

If we go back a hundred years or more or travel outside of modern Western civilization, we will see the dog in this world environment as he has lived for thousands of years. We will see dogs living in very different ways than they do in our homes today. Dogs, since the dawn of human civilization and still throughout much of the undeveloped world, have lived among people not as pets as much as domesticated wildlife of sorts with loose alliances and arrangements with their human counterparts.