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Comment by feintruled | Hacker News Reader

Quite a bold claim I think to say that wolves were domesticated for spiritual reasons rather than as hunting companions, the latter being much more a much more intuitive and immediate benefit.

It is quite a mystery to wonder how domestication happened at all, though seeing how modern wolves can be made (relatively) tame and biddable if you get them as pups, maybe it just took one person to have the idea. I imagine you would have been quite the badass in early human society with a tamed wolf at your side.

So maybe rather than some semi-spooky pan-human thousand year plus directed domestication effort it grew organically with people inter-breeding their captive tamed wolves?

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The famous fox domestication experiment that was carried out successfully in Russia over 40 years [1], shows how many generations it takes (40) and what genetic changes occur during domestication.

What I also want to add is that some dog breeders in the late 19th century thought that introducing wolf genes into dog breeds would make better dogs. They ended up creating horrible dog breeds (that still exist) that have the shyness, anxiety, and distrust of wolves.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Do you know any of the 19th century experimental breeds that still exist?

Two famous examples:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saarloos_wolfdog

The goal here was to recreate a fictional original German Aryan dog, untainted by modern degeneracy. The breeder thought to recreate the original heroic character by introducing the wolf into the breed, resulting in unbalanced, untrainable hybrids.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechoslovakian_Wolfdog

This was supposed to be another version of a better German Shepherd, better suited to the mountains. The result was the same as above.

The takeaway message is that every dog breed has its purpose, and that its character is inherited. There are dangerous dog breeds just bred to kill dogs or bulls (pit bull terrier). Some dog breeds were created without regard for the dog’s physiology (pug). Others were created without taking into account the temperament.

"wolf crossbreeds" are still a thing. Most of the time people have a "part wolf" husky they're breeding from and what they're selling is huskies with slightly more varied coats; but there's still 50% crosbreeds being raised by some folks.

Neighbor of mine brings his out to the flea market sometimes for socialization; when he hits the lot every real dog there knows it, and is upset about it. The wolfdog is very polite, and on a chain, the domestic dogs don't like his smell.

Can you provide a source re:19th century dog breeding with wolf genes? Very curious!

I answered a sibling comment just now.

Indeed, I had heard of that fascinating experiment. But I assume they were working from the prior example of domesticating wolves - I was wondering how you would get the idea of doing it with no prior example. From my research (*cough* YouTube *cough*) I can see that even a wild wolf pup can be tamed to a fair degree, and one person trying this experiment - maybe he killed the mother and raised the pup for amusement say - this singular experiment could have kickstarted the whole domestication arc.

Seems more likely to me than someone having a long term plan to domesticate, or wolves accidentally slowly domesticating themselves by scavenging food from human settlements. I am no expert in this matter though.

>a bold claim I think to say that wolves were domesticated for spiritual reasons rather than as hunting companions

I wouldn't be too dismissive of this - I'll use another domestication example to highlight why.

Given how modern chickens are so useful for cheap and easy-to-raise meat, you'd think that's why they were domesticated, but no. Chickens were domesticated for reasons much less utilitarian - they were domesticated for entertainment! Cockfighting.

Interesting. Have you got any sources?

I'd not heard this before, but a quick search gave me https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conqu...

I'd need to read more to understand properly, but from a glance it appears interesting and possible.

It's anachronistic to draw a hard distinction between "hunting" and "spiritual reasons." Ancient people wouldn't have differentiated ritual and how they did daily things from how they expressed their spirituality. These rituals were one and the same.

Why not both? It would be useful to have a tame wolf for hunting/protection/status, but what kind of person would seek out to do that in a society that would not have had the previous cultural knowledge of that being "something we do"? The idea of taking an animal and taming it might very well have had spiritual connotations to them given the amount of dog symbolism found in general. It does to an extent nowadays too.

> Quite a bold claim I think to say that wolves were domesticated for spiritual reasons rather than as hunting companions, the latter being much more a much more intuitive and immediate benefit.

And it's much more probable that the dogs got their reputation guiding the souls after they were used to guide living people than before

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