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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Your funny comment actually has some deep insight I'd like to see researched more.

We know by now how we turned the grey wolf into the dog, but do we know what the relationship has done for us? What have wolves taught humans?

Some hypotheses to get you started: they might've taught us the power of collaboration. The power of social hierarchy. The empathy towards other life forms. Anthropomorphism (maybe that's why we have furries today). I don't know, but I very much doubt the domestication of wolves has been a one way endeavour.

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On the evolutionary scale, we'd definitely have to say the change is more profound for the dogs. Every pet dog today is the result of selective breeding by humans, whereas most humans probably did not own dogs.

That said, on a personal scale:

My pets have definitely changed me and made me better.

Here's an idle thought - have we evolved to be pet lovers? Pets increase happiness and lower stress, which are going to have all sorts of relationship and career benefits.

Do primates in the wild keep pets? I know some captive gorillas had cats.

Baboons have been observed to capture puppies from feral dogs and integrate them into their troop.

Interesting - I'd never head of this. There seems to be some debate over whether these puppies/dogs might be considered as pets, but perhaps it was the same for early humans too - domesticating cats (egyptians) and dogs for their utility at controlling pests and guarding/warning against intruders, then later warming to their furry friends.

Not just that, but there's a very wide, gray area in our other domestication stories too.

You don't just rock up to a herd of wild bovines and say "hey, you're my cows now, let me milk you". Rather, one day a group of humans started following a herd around, killing one once in a while for meat; eventually perhaps they started protecting the cattle from other predators and guiding where the herd went, while also starting to find ways to continue lactation in females and get them to acquiesce to being milked.

The cows that were compliant to the slow changes were the most likely to reproduce; rinse and repeat until you get whatever we have now.

It's been observed by one television documentary that, among other things, included a dog with a collar in one of these shots (with no explanation for the context).

There's no peer-reviewed scientific research describing this phenomena. Or even any attempt at gathering any data with something resembling scientific rigor.

A simpler explanation is that these dogs and baboons are just... Living side-by-side in a garbage dump. And that the film-makers just didn't include any footage that didn't fit their narrative.

Yes - I remember Koko naming her kitten as "all ball" (kinda like "fur ball"?!).

I'm not sure if a wild animal has ever been observed to have a pet, but I guess many intelligent animals value playfulness and companionship, and have evolved to have tolerance and empathy, so judging by Twitter, etc, it doesn't seem that rare to have inter-species friendships even between animals that might be considered as predator and potential prey.

I mean, have you ever watched a working dog in action? I have two border collies and we never trained them to herd or anything but holy crap are they enthused to use their intellect and body to work for you in any way they possibly can, and solve whatever puzzles you give them. It obviously gives them insane pleasure to do so.

Watching a collie herding dog in action, or I presume a hunting dog, is quite amazing. Hard to believe humans wouldn't have watched and learned.

Also that 14,000 year domestication date mentioned in the article sounds remarkably similar to the dates humans began the processing of "domesticating" (settling) themselves, and is basically the marker for the end of the last ice age, too. Keeping crops and herds of animals and building permanent villages to guard and control definitely benefits from having canines (and felines for pest control, too).

> [...] but do we know what the relationship has done for us?

"Then as now, this was a good deal for the humans too. The scavenging dogs weren't just a sanitation squad, they were also security." [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/aQHBmY6LbiA?t=132

Check out Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto then, it's more or less exactly about this.

Sub Saharan Africa didn't domesticate dogs but they still had tribes and pack hunting.

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