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When did dogs become our best friends?

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Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#191

Post by Jrjrir48 »

westmeal wrote: post #169
Jrjrir48 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hiking, the same. 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!

No offense but why do you care what the law says when you're by yourself in the middle of the wilderness?

It is mostly South Europe, not wilderness but more like 10 km from nearest village of 2000 people. Injuring dog is a serious offense here ($20k fine, perhaps jail). I am also foreigner, not local citizen...

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#192

Post by JohnBooty »

antisthenes wrote: post #63
JohnBooty wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree that cities and apartments aren't great places for dogs. 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 barki…

> While I generally don't think we should be breeding dogs at all 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.

Right. I wasn't very clear. I perhaps made it sound like I didn't want any more dogs to be born.

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.

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#193

Post by fransje26 »

klyrs wrote: post #99
alistairSH wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling in rural Virginia/West Virginia has this risk as well. 99% of pooches just want to run along and make noise, but 1/100 wants flesh. The solution - never be the slowest in the group!

When in Rome... open/constitutional carry, stand your ground?

I, too, like cycling around with my shotgun. It nicely complements the spandex outfit.

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#195

Post by hackable_sand »

sph wrote: post #22
lordnacho wrote: post #6

[flagged]

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 w…

[flagged]

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#196

Post by acchow »

b5 wrote: post #176
IncreasePosts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't neanderthals form an alliance with wolves too? Especially considering Neanderthals had a multi-hundred-thousand year head start in wolf range compared to homo sapiens.

It’s an interesting question. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of wolf domestication by Neanderthals. If they didn’t domesticate them, it would be interesting to try to work out why – maybe there’s a subtle difference in psychology between H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis that enabled us to bridge that gap but not them?

There isn't a whole lot of evidence for how Neanderthals lived. We have only discovered remnants of 400 Neanderthals (about 30 mostly-complete skeletons).

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#197

Post by sph »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #121
sph wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am OK with some cultures not eating some meats: pork for the muslims or jews, horse for some Western countries, sometimes rabbit. Where I'm from (Italy) we eat both horse and rabbits. 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.

Just as there are places where eating canids and felids is not taboo - so too are there places where eating a primate is not taboo. A larger geography by far as far as I know. 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. Hors…

I think the issue with predators is that they taste "bad" compared to herbivores. Maybe we have evolved not to like they because of bioaccumulation, i.e. its not just a cultural norm.

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.

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#198

Post by Zenzero »

Natsu wrote: post #190
sdwr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really fascinating, I love the implication that domestication is tied to juvenile characteristics (getting along in a group means acting more like a kid than an adult protecting your territory / breeding rights). > "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…

It also seems to have something to do with adrenaline, making them less fearful. It's really interesting research.

That is backwards. The cortisol measurement approximates the level of stress and fear. It does not cause it.

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#199

Post by codexb »

satellite2 wrote: post #159
imzadi wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, though, because anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they are only barely domesticated. It might be something in the canine brain that makes it easy to domesticate them.

It's because dogs are wolf with the Williams Syndrome. A DNA deletion syndrome which reduces aggression and increases empathy. In humans the syndrome produces individuals with characteristic facial features, a big smile and friendly traits. 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…

Williams syndrome is only in humans. It's not even a particularly hereditary condition. If what you said was true, we would expect to see modern day wild Wolves with this same genetic abnormality. Or we would expect to see wolves (and other predators, too) domesticated many different times in many different places, whenever this animal version of "Williams Syndrome" naturally occurred. We don't see that.

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.

Re: When did dogs become our best friends?

#200

Post by klyrs »

fransje26 wrote: post #193
klyrs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When in Rome... open/constitutional carry, stand your ground?

I, too, like cycling around with my shotgun. It nicely complements the spandex outfit.

Missed opportunity here. I found a number of gun racks for bikes, but no hardpoint mounts for gun turrets on bikes.
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