IF there's such a thing as a dog lover's calendar – and it's hard to believe there isn't, the world must be full of them surely – then any dog lover glancing up at theirs next month will see much of March heavily ringed in yellow or green or whatever other vivid neon hue is their highlighter colour of choice for some Very Important Dates.

So what are those dates? First up, there's Crufts of course. The self-proclaimed “world's greatest dog show” brings together 27,000 dogs and their owners and begins in Birmingham on March 8 with agility tests, freestyle heelwork and something called “flyball” (essential a race with a tennis ball) for the working and pastoral breeds. It runs through to March 11 when the gun dog breeds strut their stuff. Cue more heelwork (this time to music) plus a flyball team event and a gamekeepers competition.

The grand finale is the Best In Show presentation. That's when one pooch is crowned top dog and its owner sent home with a replica trophy and a cheque for £100 burning a hole in whichever pocket isn't already filled with Good Boy Crunchy Chicken dog treats. The prize doesn't sound a lot but the real pay-off is in the post-win sponsorship deals. After two years in which Scottish breeds won top prize – a Scottish Terrier in 2015 and a West Highland White Terrier in 2016 – last year's winner was an American Cocker Spaniel called Afterglow Miami Ink. They all have names like that.

Once the dust from Crufts has settled and all canine “leftovers” collected into nappy sacks, it's time for Wes Anderseon's new film Isle Of Dogs to be unleashed. Glasgow audiences had a sneak peek last week when it opened the Glasgow Film Festival, but the rest of us have to wait until March 23.

Featuring animated canine puppets, Isle Of Dogs is set in a dystopian future where dogs are corralled on an island off the coast of the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki. It features a gang of dogs with names like Duke, King, Rex and Nutmeg and follows the efforts of a 12-year-old boy to find and rescue his much-loved pet, Spots. Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel are among the stellar cast lending their voices. Anderson has even persuaded Yoko Ono to take a role. She plays a scientist called ... Yoko Ono.

Dogs won't be barred from seeing the film either, at least not in Edinburgh where the Cameo Cinema is mounting a dog-friendly screening at which pooches are welcome. Bowls of water will be placed around the cinema and blankets provided so owners and pets can sit together. The cinema is anticipating a sell-out.

Dogs, dogs, dogs. They're everywhere next month, or seem to be, which also makes it the perfect time to publish a book looking at the history of humankind's relationship with them – and asking what the future holds for that relationship in a century which will see more and more people living atomised lives in crowded cities.

The book is The Dog: A Natural History and it's edited by behavioural scientist Adam Miklosi, head of the Department of Ethology at Eotvos University in Budapest and leader of the Family Dog Project, the largest canine research group in the world.

Step away from the world of animated pooches and primped pedigree show dogs, forget you ever saw a Parisian grande dame with a Pomeranian in her Burberry handbag, and the facts as Miklosi lays them out are as simple as they are stark: dogs and humans have co-existed in packs for many thousands of years and over virtually all that time we have exploited them for their abilities as workers. Mostly that work was hunting, at which dogs excel, but it could also be guarding, shepherding, fighting or simply pulling something such as a sled. It's only relatively recently that dogs have become solely used as companions and pets.

Opinions differ between archeozoologists about how longstanding the dog-human relationship is. Some research suggests dog domestication may have begun a whopping 135,000 years ago, with dogs and wolves only diverging as species around 100,000 years ago. But almost all scientists believe that dogs were fully domesticated by around 15,000 years ago and were certainly an important fixture in virtually all human communities by 4000 years ago.

Nobody knows how many dogs are in the world today, but the best estimates say around one billion, of which only about 20% live under human supervision. The rest are “stray” or “pariah dogs”, like the 150,000 which famously populate the streets of Istanbul.

These dogs are cursed and revered in equal measure, as British-based German documentary maker Andrea Luka Zimmerman discovered when she went to the city to shoot a film about them. Called Taskafa: Stories From The Street, it features an alpha male street dog called Taskafa which has taken on almost legendary status in the neighbourhood it frequents, a source of pride for locals but also a focus for extravagant myths and stories. Taskafa may in fact be more than one dog, as Zimmerman discovers.

She also dips into the history of a real-life island for imprisoned dogs, Sivriada, where thousands of animals were stranded in 1910 in an effort by the Governor of Istanbul to cleanse the city of strays. Around 80,000 were transported there and left to die. A memorial now stands on the island to commemorate their fate and to act as a reminder of that act of cruelty. It reads: “After this event people changed the name of this place from Sivriada to Hayirsizada, meaning 'The Wicked Island'”.

That story goes to the heart of what could be one of this century's most significant shifts in our relationship with dogs – the wider principle of how we treat animals and, importantly, what rights we accord them and what laws we pass governing their existence.

Things have moved fast in the last decade. The Animal Welfare Act, which came into force in Scotland in 2006, has been described by the RSPCA as “the single most important piece of animal welfare legislation for 100 years”. The Control Of Dogs Act, which was updated in 2010, penalises lax owners. And in 2016 a law was enacted requiring all dog owners to have their animals microchipped. In theory, there is now a database containing the details of every dog in the UK. As the so-called “internet of things” threatens to make even the most humdrum domestic appliance web-enabled, who knows what that will that mean for microchipping capabilities a decade down the line. Will you be able to hack a husky one day? Fit a GPS collar to one and you can already track it using an app on your smartphone.

More than that, as philosophical and moral arguments about “personhood” start to be applied to primates (and also tested in landmark legal cases, such as occurred in Manhattan's state appeal court last year) it's difficult to see them not being applied to domesticated pets at some point in the future.

Some of these developments are decades off but they should serve to make us think more deeply about dogs and how we use them. Adam Miklosi notes in his book that in tandem with human life expectancy rates, dog lives are lengthening too, but at the same time an increased focus on breeding pedigree champions means that many such dogs would actually be unable to survive in the wild.

Excessive over-breeding also causes “undeniable suffering” he writes. Among the examples he gives are short-muzzled dogs such as boxers and English bulldogs, where the developmental changes which make them so prized also cause obstruction of the airways and put them in danger of suffocation. Meanwhile their shallow eye sockets, a consequence of their malformed skulls, can literally make their eyeballs pop out.

Even something as apparently benign as greyhound racing has its problematic side. In Scotland we view it as a nostalgic activity tied to an era when there was mass employment, strong community cohesion and when working class pleasures – watching dogs chase a fake rabbit round a track, say – were simple. They still race dogs at Rutherglen's Shawfield Greyhound Stadium (“Stag and hen parties welcome”) but those attending might be surprised to learn that greyhound racing is actually banned in all but 10 American states. Even among those where it isn't, only six – Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and West Virginia – still hold races. Meanwhile Argentina banned greyhound racing in 2016 and an attempt by the Australian state of New South Wales to do likewise was only narrowly defeated.

In the UK there are around eight and a half million dogs, with the vast majority of them being family pets. Visit any park or other inner-city green space and you'll encounter dozens of them. You may also encounter the stuff they leave behind: nobody has actually weighed it, but the best estimates say UK dogs produce 1000 tonnes of poo a day. In the US it's 11 million tonnes a year, which is more than the entire human population produced in 1959. At a community level it's a nuisance, but at city-wide levels it's a growing problem with serious ramifications for public health. In 2013 a Spanish urban municipality used its dog registry database, plus a little covert surveillance by volunteers, to track down irresponsible owners who hadn't scooped up after their pets and post it to them instead. But that's not really an answer to the problem.

And it's in busy, frantic, tech-enabled cities that many dogs live their lives today, another reason our relationship with them could undergo a major change.

Globally the UN estimates that around half of the world's population is now urban and predicts that figure to hit 70% by 2050. As those cities grow and prosper, property prices will rise, domestic living areas will shrink and greenspaces will come under pressure from developers. Given that fact, given the increased expense of keeping dogs fed and healthy, and given the increased responsibilities law-makers may put on to dog-owners, could it mean fewer pooches on the streets?

It might, says Adam Miklosi. “In recent years our societies have been changing at a rocketing speed,” he writes. “So far, dogs have been an exceptional means of providing us with a unique experience of friendship, but now there are new competitors on the horizon.”

One such competitor is the robotic dog. If human intelligence can be applied to the manufacture of lifelike “sexbots” then it's perfectly capable of producing a real-life version of K9, the robotic dog which accompanied Doctor Who on his adventures in the late 1970s. As long ago as 1999 Sony produced the first of its AIBO robot dogs. Fast forward to January 2018 and the latest generation was launched, the AIBO ERS-1000. And what a makeover. Out goes the Terminator-style robot aesthetic, in comes something which actually resembles a dog, complete with LED screens for eyes (allowing it to blink cutely), “actuators” to give it 100 new lifelike moves and a cloud-based AI facility which lets it learn. Sort of, anyway. Oh, and it doesn't poo on the carpet. And you don't need to walk it.

Then again, perhaps our connection to dogs taps into something deeper: a hardwired distrust of tamed spaces and a buried desire to carry into our urban lives a connection to a time when existences were less fenced in, less constricted, less choked by pollution. As fewer and fewer people lead rural lives, perhaps they actually have more need of one of the most potent emblems of that life: the faithful dog.

The Dog: A Natural History by Adam Miklosi is out next month (Ivy Press, £20); Crufts begins on Channel 4 on March 8; The Isle Of Dogs is released on Friday March 23