By Lim Tze Tshen
Of all creatures, they have become our most trustworthy four-footed buddies of all time, one with an ancestry amongst some of the most fearsome of wild carnivores. Scientifically, we called them Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris (a name that divulges their wolf ancestry). Yet for many who take them as part of one’s family, we bestow them with some of the dearest and individually unique calling name, we not only feed them and share our living space with them, but also pamper them, play and grow up together with them; not to mention how very often one is deeply saddened with their passing away and then put them in a special resting place. Yes, they are those extraordinary but charming creatures that a nonchalant stranger would call the ‘domestic dogs’.
Before they are known more commonly as “Anjing” (the word for dogs in Malay language), there had been many names used by the various communities in Sarawak to connote dogs/dog-like creatures in a general way, such as Asu, Udok, Aser, Asau, and Pasun, to name but a few – readers interested in the subject would benefit tremendously from an article (some interior dialects) published in the 1955 issue of the Sarawak Museum Journal (SMJ, in short) by I.A.N. Urquhart.
Interestingly enough, the list of local vocabularies collected by the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace during his monumental exploration in parts of southeast Asia from 1854 to 1862 (published as an appendix in his 1869 travelogue, The Malay Archipelago) indicates that the usage of the term Asu (and its many derivatives) for dogs is not restricted to native Bornean languages, but is (or, was previously) shared with other languages from areas in the region as far as the Maluku islands in eastern Indonesia.
This shared linguistic heritage of how different communities from such a wide geographic area in Southeast Asia used similar words to call a dog is a reflection of our deep historical association with dogs during the ancient past when our forebears moved across stretches of open sea in search of new lands. From such a perspective, it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the dogs’ history is a part of (and, not apart from) our history.
Modern and Historical Times – The Real Dogs and the Cultural Dogs
Dogs are sometimes frequently found around human settlements in the interior of Borneo. It has been said that they do not usually bark, but may at times howl in chorus.
These Bornean dogs are variable in body size, but they are not regarded as a large breed. They are not particularly lanky, but neither are they short-legged. They are short- and smooth-haired, and in colouration they may be entirely black or pied, but most frequently dull orange-brown (Figure 1). Some have upright tail, but others may be found with their bushy tail curved-over and not infrequently bend on one side of the hips. They have pricked ears and a pointed muzzle. In the lower cheeks or at the back corner of their mouths, some individuals (such as those that I had seen in the Ulu Padas area in interior southwest Sabah) may have one or two small mole spots that usually bear a number of stiff black prickly hairs.
In appearance, these dogs kept by Bornean natives are similar to the Indian Pariah dogs (Figure 1). Some scholars had also compared them (Figure 2) with the Basenji-like dogs (Basenji-like dogs of Thailand and Borneo by C.A. Carpenter, 1963, SMJ). Unavoidable creatures, as they are, in the day-to-day living in longhouses or around the temporary settlements of nomadic Bornean natives, it is almost impossible for someone as observant as Tom Harrisson not to have spared some field observation hours on these four-legged companions of humankind. His remarks on the dogs that he saw in various places across Borneo can be found in the SMJ article that Lord Medway (presently, the 5th Earl of Cranbrook) published in 1959 – Niah animal bone: II (1954-8).
For a Bornean hunter regularly armed with a parang and a blowpipe with poison darts, the good dogs are always the best and the most efficient traditional hunting partners for pursuing small and large game animals (Figure 3) before the widespread use of shotguns.
In every instance of successful hunting, the hunters ‘borrow’ and put into good use some of the ‘super-human’ qualities of the hunting dogs that we do not possess or only mildly developed as a species: a more acute sense of smell that even the minute trace of a wild game can be pick up on the forest ground; hunting in packs, the dogs are quick to react to stimuli so much so that no hunting time will be wasted; and, a greater speed for chasing down a prey when it was detected. In the process, the human hunters have to strike up a well-coordinated partnership with their dogs both in action and in effective cross-species communication.
The dogs would need to understand the instructions given by the hunters, and the hunters, in turn, would have to be conscious of each and every feedbacks the dogs sending back to them in order to safely bring down dangerous prey.
According to Tom Harrisson and Tuton Kaboy (a Melanau who travelled with him and conducted ethnographic census), the nomadic communities ‘Punan Busang’ who stayed in the remote interior of the upper Baloi-Rejang headwaters had even invented and perfected a special kind of communication with their hunting dogs – three “secret” communication systems among Borneo nomads (and their dogs), 1965, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS, in short).
Having a pack of good hunting dogs would increase the success of a hunting trip, and their presence during the whole operation would minimise, not in a small way, the risk the human hunters may suffer from being injured by non-fatally wounded large wild animals, like the bearded pigs, rhinoceroses, and orangutans. The camaraderie built up between the human hunters and their dogs during these moments of adrenaline rush is intimate and steadfast.
The Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari, who explored parts of Sarawak from 1865 to 1868 (https://dayakdaily.com/italians-exploring-sarawak-and-its-biodiversity/) had even brought along his small Dyak dog Kap while searching and chasing for orangutans in the Batang Lupar. He provided in his 1902/04 travelogue (Wanderings In The Great Forests Of Borneo) one of the earliest known descriptions of native Bornean dogs, but had also developed a love-hate relationship with them when he realised the dogs kept in the kongsi in Marop were stealthily eating away the orangutan specimens that he and his local helpers had so carefully prepared and stored there – an unfortunate experience shared with Alfred Russel Wallace during the latter’s orangutan collecting trip in the Sadang river in 1855.
Over multiple generations of human times, the physical dogs had achieved a certain degree of importance among living Bornean cultures. Charles Hose in his 1926 book Natural Man – A Record From Borneo mentioned a few noteworthy examples, like prow of boat carved in dog’s head figure painted in red and black, dog-based designs that adorned walls and roof-beams in traditional buildings, and the practice of using dogs in oath-taking in some native communities.
Visitors to the Borneo Cultures Museum may not want to miss the rare chance of seeing a wooden tattoo block with a dog motif (Figure 3) and a wooden figure of a crouching dog used as corner support for a wooden table/platform.
Ancient Niah – The Oldest Known Dogs in Sarawak
From her book Our Oldest Companions published in 2021, we know from the American palaeoanthropologist Pat Shipman that the oldest known dog remains were found in archaeological sites in Europe as old as about 36,000 years, whereas the Asian records showed that humans here were not living with dogs until about 10,000 to 9,000 years ago in north China and Japan. Unlike these areas, there is no wild wolves or confirmed presence of other native dog-like creatures in prehistoric Borneo from which dogs can be domesticated, so the dogs must have been brought into Borneo by early humans together with other material cultures.
But, when in the deep past did the first dogs arrive at Sarawak (or, Borneo)? Local oral traditions (for example, those recorded in Harrisson’s article mentioned above) are ambiguous at best.
From the West Mouth of the Niah Cave, Juliet Clutton-Brock reported in the 1959 issue of SMJ (Niah’s Neolithic dog) three specimens of dog remains belonging to three separate adult individuals (Figure 4). These zooarchaeological remains were thought to have come from sediments that were deposited during the Neolithic period (roughly from 4,000 to 2,000 years ago at Niah).
Subsequent research at Niah and elsewhere in Sarawak has not been able to produce older specimens, which implies that the earliest human inhabitants of Niah (about 50,000 years old) may have lived there without any dog companions. Interestingly, these ancient Niah dogs were broadly coeval with similar findings from archaeological sites in Vietnam, Thailand, and Timor-Leste – like Niah, these places also seem to show that the earliest modern humans there were leading a dogless existence.
Another surprising aspect of the Niah ancient dogs is that they were smaller in size than the modern-day Bornean dogs (Figure 4). It is said that these ancient adult dogs were likely to be about the size of a modern lapdog, such as an ordinary terrier. In the eyes of some scholars, the small size and some specific features of the bones and teeth also suggest that this ancient breed may have been subjected to a long period of domestication.
The same Lord Medway mentioned above had in 1977 published in JMBRAS a most comprehensive (up to that time) and splendid review article on the history of dogs in Malaysia (The ancient domestic dogs of Malaysia) with additional zooarchaeological and historical specimens recovered from Sarawak.
Yet, pertinent questions remain unresolved over the decades: Where did the ancient Niah dogs come from? What roles did they play in the ancient society? Were they used as hunting dogs? Guard dogs or as natural hot water bottles to keep cold feet warm? Or, simply as part of the palaeo-diets of prehistoric humans? To what extent that we can say that they and the larger bodied hunting dogs of modern times represent different waves of introduction of dogs into Borneo in the ancient past? Are they an extinct breed of dogs, or, perhaps, living representatives may still be found somewhere in Borneo (an unknown that I just wish it to be true)?
Acknowledgements
My appreciation to the following for granting permissions to use images reproduced in this article: Nancy Jolhi (Director, Sarawak Museum Department), and Norraha Abdul Rahim of the same museum for facilitating the application process; Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; Leong Yoke Mee. Examination of the Niah zooarchaeological remains was made possible through a research grant of the Sarawak Museum Campus Project (2018-19) and the research permit “(81) JKM SPU/608-8/2/2 Vol. 2” from the State Planning Unit at the Office of the Premier of Sarawak. A word of thanks is reserved for Juanita Ramirez-Rovira for her information about the native terms still in use for dogs in Sarawak. — DayakDaily
Lim Tze Tshen, formerly a research fellow and guest curator at Sarawak Museum, is a vertebrate palaeontologist and zooarchaeologist. A dedicated lover of the Tsang Apso breed of dog, he is reachable through limtzetshen@yahoo.com.
