The Posthuman Dog
aeon.co
aeon.co
Why do we find puppies cute? Is it because they have evolved to look cute in our eyes? Why then do we find wolf cubs equally cute? They certainly don't care about our opinions. We have done some evolving too. The humans that found wolf cubs cute adopted them. The humans that could best take care of and communicate with wolf cubs gained massive hunting and safety advantages. A spear or shotgun cannot wake you up when a bear gets near your tent. An adopted wolf certainly will.
Just look at any baby interacting with a dog. They know what they are doing. The babies that got along with the adopted wolves were more likely to survive the winter. Parents that allows their babies to play with the adopted wolf were more likely to see those kids thrive, their genes live on. We made wolf into dog, but wolf also made us.
While evolving to trick others into looking after your young is on a relatively straightforward evolutionary trick, evolving to look after others is not a straightforward story.
Child care is incredibly resource intensive and hard work. Evolving an instinct to care for creatures other than your own young is almost entirely negative from an evolutionary point of view, unless there's a big benefit that isn't obvious.
The suggestion higher up the thread is that perhaps that trait lead to humans keeping animals that provided a significant evolutionary advantage. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't seem terribly likely since other mammals have the same trait but don't keep pets.
Cuteness is pretty well studied, it basically comes down to evolutionary selection towards liking things that resemble human babies in terms of proportions. Mainly about the size of the eyes and heads. You can see it in cartoons where characters are drawn with big eyes
For example, I could also hypothesise we evolved to find cute anything fluffy whose eyes were large relative to its head because that’s what baby pre-humans looked like, and that is why we started petting baby other animals, and the advantages of liking dogs and cats was unrelated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)
"The dog was pulling Jeremy down his driveway when Tara, who the family states was very attached to Jeremy, tackled the dog and chased him away"
The utility of having a cat as babysitter will have to be weighted against the risk of tripping over one, though. Tara is newsworthy because it doesn't happen as often.
> How would you stay warm?
Just like any regular outdoor dog. Find shelter, huddle together, grow winter fur and eventually adapt to the climate. Meanwhile, spend the nights in sleepless shivering fits - but survive. Evolution is brutal, but it works.
> What would you do when it rains?
Get wet! So what?
> What would you eat?
Whatever is available! In any place with a stray dog population, this quickly becomes obvious: Any other animal you can take on (unless it has guns), including other, smaller dogs. Forage for trash or vegetable matter. If humans weren't so crafty and well armed, they'd be yummy too. Stray packs certainly do have a history of nomming the occasional lost human (post-war Croatia for example).
> And most importantly, wouldn’t you be lonely without me?
Hell no. Most of the strays I've seen formed packs or sometimes pairs if they were strong enough to defend their territory.
I am getting PETA vibes from this article actually. Plus the listing of pain management via acupuncture as a benefit makes me question the author.
As for eating it's not so simple. Stray dogs are still depending on humans for food in many ways, either by random people feeding them occasionally, them eating our trash, or hunting prey that human hunters feed so they can shoot it (at least in my country hunters are notorious for feeding wild animals in the winter which causes overpopulation which in the spring and summer they use as an excuse to shoot most of them).
I've had 2 stray dogs adopted - a medium size mongrel that was doing pretty well in the wild (hunting and begging random people for food), and then an irish setter abandoned in the woods and living in the wild for months. She was barely alive when my sister (who is a vet) found her, I've never seen dog that was so starved, despite being a hunting dog supposedly.
By evolving to also be extremely open to human partnership, they have much longer lives when living with humans because humans are extremely consistent and persistent food sources. Their "loyalty" and "love" is, instinctually, to our supply of food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)
> The fixup[1] novel describes a legend consisting of eight tales that the pastoral, pacifist Dogs recite as they pass down an oral legend of a creature known as Man.
I've seen Simak's writing being characterized as 'pastoral scifi', I think that's accurate and we don't really have a contemporary equivalent to it.
Most of the purported gains are matters of freedom, whereas most of the losses are matters of life and death.
I don't know how dogs themselves would rank freedom against life if asked about it, but even humans often trade quite a lot of freedom for a hint of food and safety. Nobody has a right to tell other people to risk a much, much higher chance of death in pursuit of someone else's ideal of freedom. When you do it to humans, that's called a cult. I wonder why anyone thinks dogs will be okay with it.
Well, I didn't see humans disappear. I was just thinking how two intelligent species might co-exist: when dogs will eventually start walking on two legs, start speaking... because of accelerated selection pressure. It's amazing that a grey wolf could be turned in all the different kinds of breeds in such a relatively short time.
If one looks at feral dogs (dingos, so-called American dingos, the middle east strays brought to the west with soldiers) they look very very similar, as if some fixed point of feral qualities is being approximated.
While a Husky and Malamute both clearly resemble a wolf, the vague fixed point of feral dogs that, across the world, look so very similar (vaguely like a yellow lab breed, but not quite), makes me question the wolf origin.
(I say that having invested career on the topic)
Dogs were present in pre-Columbian America, presumably brought by early human migrants from Asia. Studies of free-ranging village/street dogs have indicated almost total replacement of these original dogs by European dogs, but the extent to which Arctic, North and South American breeds are descendants of the original population remains to be assessed.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248397726_Pre-Colum...