Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

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I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship.

The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.

Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.

Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.

If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.

The reason I chose dogs is because it isn't an easy target.

Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.

The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.

If you had the choice between death from a gun, death from starvation, death from the claw and tooth of a non-human predator, which would you choose?

You'd have to bring back wolves and coyotes and bears to areas that currently only have deer to give deer the quality of life they 'deserve.'

I'm ok with that but I think you'd find that an untenable policy for most Americans.

Coyotes never really went anywhere; in fact, they seem to thrive in the same marginal suburban and semi-wild niches that deer do. Coyotes don't generally prey on deer, however, and hence they're not a perfect substitute for the lost wolves and bears. (Coyotes are too small and slow to take adult deer, except in snowy conditions.)

We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.

Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.

We kill them, because we have replaced the apex predator in most ecosystems.

There are too few wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and bears to keep the population in check, so we do it.

>so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.

There's more to it than that. Overpopulation will cause damage to more than just deer. One of the biggest is the increase in the deer tick population and the subsequent increase in Lyme disease.

Instead of killing them ourselves, we could try to reintroduce predators, but why would a deer prefer being killed by a mountain lion to being killed by a human?

The issue with deer is that there are too few natural predators for them in many places on the east coast. The booming population has detrimental effects on the forests. Deer consume only certain plants so they end up causing lower diversity of eastern forests. When the decision is either cull them now or let the population starve until it gets back to a comfortable capacity, it's much better to cull them. This not only helps the surrounding ecosystem but also gives some people the chance to get large quantities of meat for almost no cost. Some people in the US really do still live off the land to an extent, meat is much cheaper when you kill and clean the animal yourself.

https://blog.nature.org/science/2013/08/22/too-many-deer/

We should cull deer to preserve the forests. Deforestation caused by deer is becoming a very serious problem.

Wherever you see a forest where there is a deer problem, the trees you see today will not be replaced when they die.

Deer eat all the undergrowth and new saplings.

> I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer

Source: Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html

I agree wholeheartedly.

There are many problems with dog breeding though. The health and wellbeing of the animals do not seem to be prime motivations in at least some breeds.

But at least it contrasts with cows and chickens, which are domesticated and selectively bred as meat producing machines that survive just long enough for slaughter (for 99.99% of individuals of those species).

While we humans are thinking creatures, and must seek to act morally, keep in mind that nature isn't and doesn't.

From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.

From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").

Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.

You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.

Well put, and I agree. I love the theory of evolution for explaining so much of the living world, including the awful stuff. I think it's a great comfort to know that it's not arbitrary.

In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.

You/we ARE a part of nature. If 100% of people care about doing certain things (that they actually have control over) in a certain way, that's the same as nature doing it that way. When it's a smaller percentage, that's just that thing happening in different ways.

Well, that's true in the same sense that everything in the world is just quantum fields interacting. It's true that my mind is part of nature, but my thoughts are not part of an explanatory theory, a framework for predictions, certainly not one that is mostly about genetics and evolution.

Explanatory theories, frameworks and the like are always a work in progress, ergo, never complete - ref Gödel's theorems. What's standard knowledge in the future can easily be utterly incomprehensible today, thus that (being part of a theory or framework) shouldn't be taken as a necessary criteria in talking about things at a level that's more abstract than a theory (which by definition must be about the (mathematical) specifics of specific phenomena), as the parent thread does.

If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?

It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.

Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.

PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.

PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.

There was a genetic survey done a bit ago that suggests that wolves and dogs are more remotely related. That domestic dogs existed as a separate wild dog species from wolves at the time of domestication.

Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them?

Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species.

The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).

I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.

Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.

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