When did dogs become our best friends?
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Interestingly, while they were selected purely for lack of aggression towards humans they started to develop dog-like physical traits.
Hasn't been replicated yet, and doubtfully will, but interesting.
> "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another."
People seem to love them as semi wild animals and unlike dogs they aren't dangerous enough to be put down when they start biting people. On top of that a large percentage of the population are actually wild animals aka feral. Spend a lot of time with a kitten and it may become extremely affectionate, but we also habitually neuter them unlike the wild population. Go back 1,000 years and I suspect people acted similarly though without the neutering.
So the external evolutionary pressure for domestication doesn't seem nearly as strong as with those foxes, and might currently be going in the other direction.
Edit: visibly dog lovers are not too keen on learning that their best friends have a genetic abnormality. But that doesn't make it less true, it's pretty well documented. It doesn't mean that dogs are lesser somehow, they are still perfectly viable it the wild (well not the races resulting from the most extreme genetic selections, but most of them)
There are plenty of other genetically similar canine species that aren't domesticated. There are plenty of related animal (seals, ferrets, skunks) that aren't been widely domesticated, but are completely capable of being domesticated on an individual level, and none of them possess genetic abnormalities
One thing that many of these animals have in common is that they are fairly comfortable and adaptable to living in very close proximity to humans. That's true of modern day coyotes, raccoons, etc.
Humans have 99.9% identical DNA. All the variation you see in humans is explained by just 0.1% genetic differences. There's no reason to believe that the same isn't true for dogs without having to resort to a rare genetic deformity.
It's more likely that the social phenotype that is present with many WS patients emerged in dogs due to evolutionary pressures (explicit and implicit breeding) than dogs emerging due to WS.
Housecats also have a number of behaviors that seem only distantly related to things that would be useful in the wild, such as meowing for attention. Another weird behavior is when cats line up dead mice outside their owner's bedroom door like a present. There's clearly some relationship that they understand between themselves and their owner.
It's easy to imagine humans simply tolerating them because they kept mice under control around grain and other food storage.
Intuitively that matches my perception of the cat-human relationship vs. the dog-human relationship.
just speculating, but wolves are "pack" animals, so they are already adapted to cooperating with each other and following a leader. perhaps that made them easier to train and domesticate. cats aren't like that except in the "lion pride" breeding sense which is perhaps a narrower skillset in terms of utility.
and of course, anybody who has owned a tiger will tell you that a cat is fairly domesticated :) I mention it because "domesticated" and "useful as a friend" might be two different things.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-d...
Hence why I added the bit about not being replicated, it's far from settled science. Intriguing though, IMHO.
"My eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee (to the grave)... So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never canst thou be contentedly in my lap. In sadness have I buried thee, and thou deservist. In a resting place of marble, I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. In thy qualities, sagacious thou wert like a human being. Ah, me! What a loved companion have we lost!"
https://www.livescience.com/stone-age-dog-burial.html
Abuse of a dog or cat is a crime against civilization itself.
Maybe when we were nomads and the dogs roamed around freely around the tribe.
But most dogs today are locked in, most of the time and when they get outside, they are on a leash. Totally dependant on their human masters.
I don't think I would describe that relationship as a partnership.
Then there is the concept of breeding them, to establish certain "cute" traits, but cause great pain and misery to the animal:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualzucht (german)
I would argue, the native american tribes, who also did eat their dogs, treated them better overall, than humanity does today on average. So many dogs bred for running around, are lucky today, if they get to walk around outside for more than 20 minutes. This I would call betrayal.
Do you relatively equate this to how we treat other animals right now, killing the planet's livable ecosystems while exclusively creating living spaces and amenities for these domestic pets and treating the nature they come from as second class? Tens to hundreds of thousands of unique species and subspecies go extinct at previously unrecorded rates, but selective breeding of vanity traits in pet animals remains a common past time. There's clearly an attachment to these animals and breeds that keeps them in our conscious above others to consider it worthwhile to hold them in public reverence in a way that can still be described as companionship.
We've flipped the needle on adapting them for survival companionship to (essentially) slaved ownership with the aftereffects like you've mentioned, but I think zooming in on the scale of an individual societies' treatment won't generally be favorable. We barely even treat our own species with a level of achievable compassion for anyone deemed undesirable or are a lower class, the betrayal starts earlier than our treatment towards dogs.
I only talked about dogs and humans.
Do you really think it makes sense to always talk about everything? The topic was about dogs and humans and this is what I was talking about. Nothing more, even though surely I could. Topics are connected and I do not neceasarily disagree to what you said, but sorry, this is indeed not my preferred form of discourse.
Here[0] is an English-language explanation of the term Qualzucht (with the English translation given as "torture breeding").
That German article also references a BBC documentary, which has its own English Wikipedia entry[1].
[0]https://www.petethevet.com/qualzucht-is-a-term-that-should-b...
But I too draw the line at eating dogs and cats, except during extreme survival situations where it's eat your pet (or fellow human) to avoid starvation. I feel eating canids and felids as taboo as eating a primate, or eating a human.
By this argument and amount of places (not people), eating a primate might be less taboo than eating a canid or felid?
As an American, I feel the same cultural taboos and they’ve kept me from eating some things but I’ve been reconsidering. Horse and rabbit were delicious.
What about coyote or mountain lion though? Those are still but seldom eaten in America mostly by hunters.
Some people draw the line at not eating predators not because of cultural taboo but because of bio accumulation issues.
Fascinating ethnobiology and moral boundary discussion.
It always interests me to consider just how relative taboos can be.
Only one country isn't it ?
Nepal’s population is 82 percent Hindu. This means many people from Nepal respect cows very much.
It is legal to eat beef in Nepal and many major hotels will serve it. However, it is illegal to kill a cow within the country.
I cannot think of a land-dwelling meat-eating animal human routinely eat. We eat chicken, but they eat anything including rocks, and they're towards the bottom rank of good-tasting meats anyway.
Really, dogs, primates, and humans should be the only animals that are okay to eat.
Otherwise you're saying that it's okay to kill and eat thinking, feeling creatures as long as they're sufficiently different from yourself.
Plus, only humans can consent to being eaten— In theory, anyway, though I wouldn't want to see any system that claims it can actually respect that honestly.
Show me evidence that co-evolution with rats and cockroaches is anything like this.
"Of note, it's unclear whether the dog died a natural death, or whether it was killed to be buried with its human. An analysis of its remains may reveal this mystery."
What are the odds that the dog died of natural causes at exactly the same time as the owner?
> Abuse of a dog or cat is a crime against civilization itself.
That logic doesn't follow. If dogs predate civilization, then how could it be a crime against civilization? Your article is about dogs in primitive hunter gatherer societies. Not civilizations. Besides, many civilizations have thrived abusing dogs and cats. You might want to read what the bible says about 'unclean' dogs. Or why we have the saying 'there is more than one way to skin a cat'.
Or how 'civilizations' dispatched of dogs not too long ago.
https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...
Not to mention the millions of cats/dogs that are 'euthanized' every year or the hundreds of million of cats and dogs that are castrated ( which people oddly don't consider to be abuse ). Heck, it's not hard to argue that imprisoning animals in your home as 'pets' is abuse.
If anything, civilization is an abuse against dogs and cats.
Which tracks with the neolithic transition when we started "domesticating" animals for all purposes
Also speaking of northern Italy, as a dog owner, I am fully behind this[2] proposal to DNA test dogs and punish anyone leaving dog poop on the streets.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=talBvZ5x8sY&t=4882s
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/17/italian-provin...
Also it would depend on the specific commune and not a country-wide requirement.
Interesting comparison: https://jacknicastro.substack.com/p/vienna-and-new-york-high...
Because the monthly pass rate is so low, most people have purchased the pass on their phone and that must be shown a couple of times a year or else you’ll be charged a fine at the checkpoint. I’m actually surprised that the evasion stats are so low, since the fine isn’t terribly large and you might come out ahead just never paying the fare and only paying fines.
I have to say though, that system of spot checks makes the day to day very low friction.
In Austria, people are required to deposit money to borrow a grocery cart while shopping for food. Not so anywhere I've been in the US -- ergo Austria is low-trust and US is high-trust? I think not.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travelbuzz/2004272-euro-coin...
Here's a rule of thumb I use to judge if a community is high trust or not. If I leave my bicycle unlocked and it gets stolen, will others be surprised or will they call me a moron for trusting other people? Obviously NYC is low trust, I would be mocked mercilessly if my unlocked bike got stolen there.
The US is relatively high trust in this space. And I don't know of many countries that will pass the bike test. Certainly, nowhere in Europe would.
Maybe we could try a different test - how afraid is the society of itself. Count how often you see cops, how well-armed they are, etc...
It's so trivial and yet it shows how much the society cares about its own systems functioning properly or not.
It only takes one asshole out of thousands to steal a bike, and every society has at least one asshole.
Also high trust != absolutely no crime ever
It's the difference between getting your bike stolen because of a random asshole and knowing your bike will be stolen by someone (also arguably an asshole).
Literally any city with good fare compliance. If it's got enough people in it to have a transit network, it's got enough bike thieves in it to steal your bike.
> It's the difference between getting your bike stolen because of a random asshole and knowing your bike will be stolen by someone (also arguably an asshole).
That's just a product of population density. If you live in the middle of nowhere, with 5 people total in a 15-mile radius, it's highly unlikely someone's going to steal your bike.
If you leave your bike on Main Street, where thousands of people walk by every hour, all it takes is one in a thousand.
> It's not an anti-theft measure, just a little thing to encourage honest people to walk slightly further than normal.
... because they can't be trusted to do it without the deposit...
Come on, you can't be serious. Police and code enforcement officers aren't going to stop random dog walkers on the street to demand DNA test results. Real Americans don't tolerate that kind of government overreach, and the authorities already didn't even have time to investigate actual crimes.
I didn't say they are going to, and you didn't say they wouldn't. You said they couldn't (because people "would just ignore it") and I said they absolutely could. Which is true.
Re "Real Americans", get a grip.
So, if you want to solve the issue, you use the methods which work in the affected area.
In high trust, as long as the thing is seeing benefitting most, it is often followed. In low trust, breaking a rule is often seen as a sign of independence and generally being cool, so you need to put deterrents to make it uncool to get caught.
At least, this is coming from my own personal experience living in different countries. Might not be the same everywhere.
People no longer (for instance) leave their children (or even their dogs) outside shops whilst they go inside.
I'm not sure specifically about kids and dogs but I'm not quite sure that was the case then, given the extremely huge heterogeneous society that was already back then. What do you think?
Plus dog poop is ecologically good for the environment and fertilizes nature.
Was news to me as a dog owner who allows our dog to do her business in the back yard (but would never allow it on a public walkway/area).
probably because most kibble is vegetable based and vegetable based poop is good for the grass.
maybe you fed your dog more meat?
if your dog's poop is killing the grass you're doing something seriously wrong with its diet.
Most cheap kibble maybe.
> if your dog's poop is killing the grass you're doing something seriously wrong with its diet.
If yours isn't, I think _you_ might be doing something wrong with its diet. https://lawnlove.com/blog/is-dog-poop-bad-for-grass/
"Dont believe everything you read on the internet"
- Abraham Lincoln
most kibble is vegetable based
This country has really gone downhill with education
My teachers would have yelled at me for having a source like that.
and you won't get that disease.
Problem solved.
And dont let your kids eat any animal poop
Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Of course not. Animals want to be free like any other living being, but just like cows, dogs would not survive on their own because we have artificially selected them. Imagine aliens capturing humans, breeding them in captivity until they are docile little creatures that cannot survive on their own. It's easy to feel sorry for farm animals because we eat them, but in a way people who love pets are not any better than the farmer, despite the culture thinking otherwise.
Numerous wild animals can be held as pets, without going through domestication, so apparently they do. If you feed them, they may have no reason to mind the leash, life is hard in the wild.
That's a nice thought, but in reality there are plenty of humans even that just get overwhelmed and scared at the thought of freedom, whether their own or other people's, and actively demand, seek, and create rigid and oppressive systems of rules and restrictions in order to trade freedom away for predictability. Otherwise… The entire human world would likely be shaped quite different from how it currently is.
Our morals don't map cleanly onto physical reality, and values like "freedom" are unfortunately still relatively inconsequential next to causalities like "death", "killing", "starvation", and "culling". Does a tapeworm "want to be free" from its host? How about a male anglerfish, which only has a nervous system complex enough to find a larger female anglerfish which it can latch onto while its entire body is subsumed away? Animals want whatever animals are neurologically wired to want, humans included, and only sometimes does that align with our higher ideals of life having intrinsic worth. The nature of things simply is, and in a lot of cases, I think the ways we try to assign moral judgements to it are projecting our own social instincts onto ecological and cognitive systems that do not share our values.
Certainly, the power dynamics, amount of control, and relative levels of awareness between humans and pets are… Would be rightfully horrifying, though, if the alternative were a relationship of equal peers.
I guess I'm mostly pointing to a double standard between pets and farm animals. I eat meat, so I'm not advocating for any solution on either case here, just making an observation that potentially we are farming animals for more than food, and there aren't any movements advocating for the release of pets or alternatives to animal companionship.
In a sense it probably made me stronger but I can't say I build a friendship and a mutual sense of confidence with dogs.
She's a 90 lbs Mastiff/St Bernard/Lab cross. It's not like she's worried about being crushed or eaten. She could probably eat me.
Or maybe she doesn't realize she's big. I don't know.
But many bad behaviours are pretty easy to train out of most dogs (eg barking at passer-bys). Dogs are easy to train. Too many lazy owners blame their "nature" or "that's just how they are" as if they can't do anything.
Could probably go for pepper spray nowadays.
So its not cycling then its a stray dog thing :)
The solution - never be the slowest in the group!
I got bitten on a bike before, we have lots of aggressive stray dogs here. Even running routes have to be carefully planned to avoid the dogs.
I said "when in Rome" to signal distaste at the idea, for whatever that's worth. On the other hand, if bicycling leftists armed themselves and started blasting away every car and dog that made them feel threatened, it might move the needle on gun rights in a way that right-wing shooters fail to.
And, I've had several dogs escape their fences. They aren't just noisy.
I have a pistol and was thinking about carrying it but that means every time i take my dogs for a walk i have to get it out of the safe and put it back in the safe. I have kids so can't just hang a holster with the leashes. Too much hassle and I know i'll eventually stop taking it with me. What i ended up doing was getting bear spray that can attach to the leashes. Now I can't forget to take protection with me when taking the dogs out because it's physically attached to the leash.
edit: this happened in Dallas TX
For when you need to deliver a really, really important message.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/cougar-attack-washington-state-...
Pepper spray, knife etc are illegal here. I carry air horn for quick deployment, and petards (very small explosives). Saved my ass twice! Once I was surrounded by pack of four large dogs!
I live in a large city, and based on the number of dogs locked away in apartments all day barking and bored to death with almost no stimulation, I figure dogs are certainly not the best friends of a lot of people. Instead, they are more like prisoners that illustrate the cruelness of humanity in general: these people use them as entertainment and care fairly little for their overall welfare.
To put it another way, would they be better off being strays? I doubt it.
And it might be affection they give their dogs but it's not really love if they are so cruel. Besides, they wouldn't be strays if they were never bought, at least not a lot of them if the demand were lower, then so would the breeding and supply.
These arguments fall apart when the animal is anthropomorphized.
Dogs sleep a lot more than people do, needing around 12 hours. They will take about 4 hours of that sleep in the day regardless if a human is around.
It's very breed dependent but, the majority of dogs don't require a significant amount of mental stimulation. For most breeds, a half hour of mental stimulation is plenty.
Obviously locking a husky or a cattle dog in an apartment (and this unfortunately does happen), is another story. There are certain breeds you shouldn't go for if you live in an apartment. But there are a lot of breeds that do just fine, even some large ones, like greyhounds.
Speaking of greyhounds, we fostered an Italian Greyhound one time...and I thought Frenchies were fragile.
Now that we both work from home we can see that the dog mostly sleeps all day, occasionally getting up to bark at some squirrels or passers-by.
Adopting a dog will probably do it good, but a lot of people are buying dogs from dog breeders (and then the mentioned behavior happens, dogs left alone to bark in apartments). Should dogs be purposefully bred as pets, only to be left alone for hours on end?
Being unfit to raise a dog does not imply cruelty.
Live in a suburban house with a small back yard and a small dog doesn't like it and wants to roam.
Dogs are great in rural areas, in cities I think they suffer for the sake of humans.
I grew up in the countryside in the middle of nowhere, my dog used to have an enormous backyard to run in, and was cheeky enough to have made a hole in the fence when that time of the year came and he really wanted to leave for a couple days at a time, either to sire some puppies, or to roll around in horse dung. We used a leash whenever we took him amidst civilization, otherwise he was used to just walking unleashed, with us (mostly getting impatient at how slow humans are), sniffing anything he wanted and peeing on every pole that stood in his path.
I miss him every day (died at 15 years old a happy and free half golden retriever mutt). I'd love another dog, but I know they're a type of animal that enjoys a large territory, freedom, as well as a social hierarchy. I will have to suffer with this hole inside of me until I am able to leave the city and offer a dog not only love, but large enough space to run around and not get bored to death.
Cats on the other hand, as long as they have food and are left alone, can happily live holed up in a flat. Thrive, I'm not sure, but they have much simpler needs than dogs.
are much more like humans - cat's dig urbanism, can hang out at a cafe for hours, sit on a couch watching the tube all day, they happily adapt.. So that' why we say "there's a cool cat" but you never hear anything about "cool dogs". So your theory is correct in my opinion: dogs are good rural friends and cats are good urban friends. There is also the matter of dog poop. Has anyone every complained on cat poop on their stoop? Or getting bitten by the neighbor's cat? Or being annoyed at the neighbor's mewing cat?
Now a cat on a farm, don't know about that. Wonder how that would work.
We domesticated cats so they would keep rats away from our winter grain storage.
Can easily feed themselves from all the rodents enjoying the grain supply.
But a lot of dogs are rescues, and a lot of breeds are quite happy in apartments.
There are also a lot of mitigations possible. There are dog walkers and dog sitters who come by and walk the dogs during the daytime. You can have multiple dogs that keep each other company. Etc.
based on the number of dogs locked away in apartments
all day barking and bored to death with almost no
stimulation
A barking dog isn't necessarily distressed. In fact, they're probably not distressed: there are a lot of other ways that dogs show that.
They also like to sleep during the daytime. They sleep a lot in general. They are pretty adaptable to our schedules.
While I generally don't think we should be breeding dogs at all, the reality is that there are a lot of dogs who need homes (as well as homes who need dogs!) and in the majority of situations I think that getting dogs into homes with a loving family is preferable to euthanizing them.
What do you mean by this? If we don't breed dogs, in about 15 years or so, there will be no dogs left at all.
To be clearer, my wish is that we could curtail breeding until supply matched demand. Rather than the current situation where lots of dogs are put down because there are more dogs than homes.
Anyone who thinks an animal enjoys being locked indoors all day with no understanding of why, or for how long it will be, is a much lesser person than me.