![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On dogs...
Jun. 23rd, 2012 01:22 pmAfter calling it a night last night, I was browsing through what Netflix had to offer via Roku and ran across a NOVA documentary I had seen some time back, all about dogs.
I remembered the part about how dogs seem able to understand the human finger-pointing gesture (but not about how chimpanzees seem completely oblivious to it). Shiloh understands finger-pointing most of the time, and Thumper is getting there, especially when I'm showing them the direction in which I want them to move.
Other takeaways:
Dogs are descended only from wolves. No coyotes, dingoes, or any other canine species appear in the DNA record of Canis familiaris.
Wolves do not seem amenable to nurture, i.e., if you take a wolf cub and raise it in a human household (as was done in a series of studies in Hungary), it will eventually... act like a wolf.
In an experiment with silver foxes in Siberia, a multigenerational (in fox terms) effort was made to mate both the tamest foxes and also the most aggressive ones. After a half century, the effort with the "tame" foxes had created what appear to be domesticated foxes. Not only do they behave differently, their appearance has also changed. The mating for aggression appeared to also be successful, creating foxes that were more aggressive than their forebears (or would that be 'forefoxes'?).
The riddle of how wolves became dogs is explained (in my mind) by a part of the documentary in which a dog was showcased for not only being able to distinguish over 300 words for objects, but also for the ability to match pictures of objects to the objects themselves, as well as scale models of objects to their full-size analogs. It's pretty evident the dog is, well, a freak. Would not an similar wolf "freak"—one that was a few sigmas more amenable to socialization with humans—offer early humans an opportunity to eventually breed a domesticated wolf (i.e., a dog)?
My immediate reaction to such hypothesis is to think what a long shot it would have to have been, because not only would you have to have such a wolf (if not several) as "raw material," but you'd need one or more humans with not only the intellection vision to pursue this goal, but also the ability—both from the perspective of "spare" time (because survival is pretty time-consuming in nature) and persuasion (because you gotta know all the neighbors would be suspicious of anyone deliberately raising wolves for some crackbrained purpose)—to see the effort to a conclusion.
* * * As the above attests, I have finished The Seven Job™. It is sent. It is gone, all 18,100 target words of it. Having done so does not take me off the hook for a bunch of other stuff, but at least it is no longer hanging over my head.
Cheers...
I remembered the part about how dogs seem able to understand the human finger-pointing gesture (but not about how chimpanzees seem completely oblivious to it). Shiloh understands finger-pointing most of the time, and Thumper is getting there, especially when I'm showing them the direction in which I want them to move.
Other takeaways:
Dogs are descended only from wolves. No coyotes, dingoes, or any other canine species appear in the DNA record of Canis familiaris.
Wolves do not seem amenable to nurture, i.e., if you take a wolf cub and raise it in a human household (as was done in a series of studies in Hungary), it will eventually... act like a wolf.
In an experiment with silver foxes in Siberia, a multigenerational (in fox terms) effort was made to mate both the tamest foxes and also the most aggressive ones. After a half century, the effort with the "tame" foxes had created what appear to be domesticated foxes. Not only do they behave differently, their appearance has also changed. The mating for aggression appeared to also be successful, creating foxes that were more aggressive than their forebears (or would that be 'forefoxes'?).
The riddle of how wolves became dogs is explained (in my mind) by a part of the documentary in which a dog was showcased for not only being able to distinguish over 300 words for objects, but also for the ability to match pictures of objects to the objects themselves, as well as scale models of objects to their full-size analogs. It's pretty evident the dog is, well, a freak. Would not an similar wolf "freak"—one that was a few sigmas more amenable to socialization with humans—offer early humans an opportunity to eventually breed a domesticated wolf (i.e., a dog)?
My immediate reaction to such hypothesis is to think what a long shot it would have to have been, because not only would you have to have such a wolf (if not several) as "raw material," but you'd need one or more humans with not only the intellection vision to pursue this goal, but also the ability—both from the perspective of "spare" time (because survival is pretty time-consuming in nature) and persuasion (because you gotta know all the neighbors would be suspicious of anyone deliberately raising wolves for some crackbrained purpose)—to see the effort to a conclusion.
Cheers...
