Your Opinions...

[jackie_a1]

There are no studies on this. However, as an

experiment, you might ask a friend who has

been bitten by a dog whether poking him

with your fingers bent in claw formation has

an effect that’s similar to when he was bitten,

or whether your growling or biting seems

similarly ferocious.

HAHAHA! Funny as frack!

Edited April 25, 2010 by jackie_a1

[corvus]

To play devil's advocate...

Dingos mostly live alone, except in places where there is plenty of food like Uluru, Fraser Island, town dumps, popular camp sites (ie places in the desert with permanent fresh water and a name on the map).

But that's the point! Where resources allow it they congregate, but otherwise they are not pack animals.

No more mating with hunters. Explain that one to our dingos.

Dingoes are not domesticated, though. I think the argument is that the ones that stopped mating with the hunters became domestic dogs. The ones that kept hunting remained as wild dogs of whatever type. They are all over the place.

Not sure about grey wolves, and ancestral links. Don't know how long it would take with selective breeding for friendliness to get a dog out of a grey wolf. There was a fox experiment, where foxes where selected for friendliness and it was very quick to get a tame fox.

It's a good point. The friendly foxes came about in a matter of a few generations. But I guess it's not parsimonious. It's simpler that dogs made even smaller evolutionary steps from pariah dogs than from wolves.

"Dog as we know it today". Yes, what is that. Dogs have many roles. Dogs can cross breed with wolves, so they're pretty closely related to wolves. Certain sled dog types look very similar to wolves. And they don't seem to have been chosen for their help hunting, more like their help with transportation.

Also a good point. Looks can be deceiving, but it's true that dogs have a huge variety of roles. Some are now useless hunters (Erik, I'm looking at you and that mouse you watched run under your nose to the fridge tonight!) whereas others are quite accomplished at a variety of game. I think Canaan Dogs are a good model. They hang around, semi-domesticated, and if you wanted a dog to herd you'd pick one that would be good at it. If you wanted one to hunt, you'd pick one that would be good at it. If you wanted one as a guard dog, you picked one that looked to be good at it. They are still kind of semi-domesticated in some parts. There's a Canaan for any job. And if you get a good one for one particular job, you breed from it and keep the puppies and pretty soon you have a line and even a new breed. Basically, if you want something in a dog, you breed it from what you have at hand. Some of our breeds now have been around a lot longer than breed standards. Lapphunds, for example, have been herding reindeer supposedly for thousands of years, but they only got a standard some 30 years ago.

[BJean]

Ok so a friend sent me this link some time ago and I have been meaning to bring this up in this forum.

What do you think. Did dogs descend from wolves or does this person have the right theory?

I won't discuss my opinions just yet just want to see what you all think.

http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart1.html

Be sure to read all of the information.

As part of the import process, I am in discussion with long time breeder (20-30 years) of Caucasian and Central Asian in Ukraine, Siberia

and the way they keep their dogs

and what they expect from them -

imo there is no doubt

that the dogs react and exist within a linear system.

Some breeders of Caucasian and Central Asian

in certain parts of the world

will claim that the best fighters (sorry) / workers only take on the other dominant individuals and do not waste their time with those who are less worthy.

(I'm not going to get into the debate of fighting/ CO CAO character testing here, so please don't bother - sorry - I figure if you have an issue with it, take it up with those who do it in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Kazahstan etc)

but my point is there seems to be a clear system of hierachy when the dogs are left out and expected to defend for themselves.

So to me, what I see in my own dogs and what other breeders see in their dogs,

the concept of a non-linear system is quite bunk.

Edited April 25, 2010 by lilli

[Mrs Rusty Bucket]

I didn't mean that dingos were domestic, I meant that they were the "hunters" and were breeding with domestic dogs. Which they are. Ie explain to the dingos - as wild dogs - you're not meant to be breeding with the pet dogs - as described in the article.

But there is a very very small gap between a dingo and a domestic dog. Just look at kelpies and ACD. Not to mention strange GSD looking dingos out there.

What we really need to know is how close is Wolf DNA to malamute or husky DNA or those other wolf like varieties of dog. Is it as similar as Airdale DNA is to Poodle DNA? Or more distant.

If you really want to get confused about the arbitary nature of defining species, read "the beak of the finch" by Johnanton Weiner. Those pesky finches can switch species in one season/generation based on availability (or lack of it) of resources. Nature is much more blurry than most text books would have you believe.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/067973337X

[corvus]

I didn't mean that dingos were domestic, I meant that they were the "hunters" and were breeding with domestic dogs. Which they are. Ie explain to the dingos - as wild dogs - you're not meant to be breeding with the pet dogs - as described in the article.

I don't think we can make any blanket statements about who breeds with whom. But I guess my thought is how do you know it's the pet dogs the dingoes are breeding with and not the domestic dogs gone feral? I think it's fair to expect that dogs and dingoes will breed with whoever is handy at the time, and I think it's fair to expect that this will generally be wild dogs and domestic dogs breeding amongst themselves rather than with each other. You have to remember that population genetics is a slow, big thing and it's very dynamic. You'll always get individuals breaking the "rules", but it's what the majority are doing that matters.

What we really need to know is how close is Wolf DNA to malamute or husky DNA or those other wolf like varieties of dog. Is it as similar as Airdale DNA is to Poodle DNA? Or more distant.

http://www.britainhill.com/GeneticStructure.pdf

If you really want to get confused about the arbitary nature of defining species, read "the beak of the finch" by Johnanton Weiner. Those pesky finches can switch species in one season/generation based on availability (or lack of it) of resources. Nature is much more blurry than most text books would have you believe.

Don't get me started! We face this problem pretty much daily in conservation. It's a real pain for legislating species protection. Everywhere you look there are new species or false species. Hence my earlier comment about the species concept being outdated. It had problems right from the start, but they have grown in magnitude since genetic markers and so forth.

Lilli, has it occurred to you that you might have the exception to the rule in CAOs?

[Adnil444]

Hi, I was at a dog seminar recently and this was brought up and it was dismissed. What was being said on the night is that wolves and "village" dogs both came from a common ancestor. However wolves went one way and the dogs another - our dogs come from what we can still today see all over the world - they are smaller, bred to scavenge, short hair, usually tan in colour type dog.

[Mrs Rusty Bucket]

Corvus

The article suggested that hunters and domestics didn't interbreed.

I disagreed with that.

I've been to the pitlands in Central Australia. Every town has a squillion dogs attached. Some are pets and others are left to fend for themselves, and dingos are not far away as a dingo travels, very close really. Most of these town dogs have never seen a vet, let alone been desexed, so plenty of opportunity to breed with the dingos, though most likely the mixed dogs would stay with the town. I've seen some mixed dogs like that in the Kimberley. On the scale between Kelpie and Dingo - they looked and acted more like dingos (aloof not friendly) and there's plenty of both kinds of dogs out there too. And again, not much attention from vets.

[corvus]

The article suggested that hunters and domestics didn't interbreed.

I disagreed with that.

I noticed. I'm trying to temper the outrageous generalisations with more realistic generalisations.

On the scale between Kelpie and Dingo - they looked and acted more like dingos (aloof not friendly) and there's plenty of both kinds of dogs out there too. And again, not much attention from vets.

I've seen my share of dingoes on the outskirts of "civilisation" as well. And I've met a few "pets" that were more dingo than anything else and acted like it. But I don't really see what your point is. To me, you have the wild type and the domestic type of dog. There are certainly areas of overlap, but why do we still have a wild type and a domestic type if there isn't some sort of segregation at the genetic level going on? Your dogs out in Central Australia are the pariah dogs that domestic dogs are proposed to have come from. It doesn't take long for a reversion to the wild type once humans are out of the picture. And they tend to look like dingoes sooner or later, too. How many generic "yellow dogs" have you seen? I've seen countless. Some are pets and some are wild dogs. That situation with the wild dogs not far from towns and the camp dogs in the towns is pretty much exactly how domestication is proposed to have occurred by Semyonova, based on the Coppingers' work. Think of it as a Venn diagram. You have the wild type, and the domestic type, and that little grey area of both. The grey area is not really important to the argument - although I am not suggesting it isn't VITALLY important to understanding the origins of domestic dogs.

[jackie_a1]

Domestic dogs descended from wolves, researchers confirm

WASHINGTON (AP) Fido may be cute, cuddly and harmless. But in his genes, he's a wolf.

Researchers tracing the genetic family tree of man's best friend have confirmed that domestic dogs, from petite poodles to huge elkhounds, descended from wolves that were tamed 100,000 years ago.

"Our data show that the origin of dogs seems to be much more ancient than indicated in the archaeological record," said Robert K. Wayne of UCLA, the leader of a team that tested the genes from 67 dog breeds and from 162 wolves on four continents.

The study suggests that primitive humans living in a hunting and gathering culture tamed wolves and then selectively bred the animals to create the many different types of dogs that now exist.

Wayne said in a statement that DNA sequences of the animals also confirms that wolves are the only true ancestors of domesticated dogs.

The study is being published Friday in the journal Science.

Stanley J. Olson, a University of Arizona vertebrate paleontologist, said Wayne and his colleagues make a "logical argument" but need more evidence, such as canine bones found at places where ancient humans lived.

"It could have happened 60,000 years ago or more, but we have no physical evidence, such as bones and so forth, to prove that," said Olson. "All of the materials I have seen indicates that the taming and domestication probably happened 10,000 to 14,000 years ago."

Olson said there is evidence that primitive humans and wolves lived near each other and probably benefited from the relationship. Wolf packs, he said, probably got some of their food from carcasses left behind by hunting humans. It's possible, he noted, that wolf packs incorporated human bands into a territory protected from other packs.

"They could have become like natural watchdogs," he said.

It is also likely, said Olson, that primitive humans raided wolf dens, captured pups and then raised the ones that showed promise of being tamed.

"Once they started feeding these animals, they probably couldn't get rid of them," he said. "It's clear that we like dogs and they seem to like us. That could be how it started."

In the new study, Wayne and his associates studied patterns in the mitochondrial DNA from dogs, wolves, coyotes and jackals. This type of DNA changes at a specific rate. The number of changes increases with time.

Wayne said the study showed so many DNA changes that dogs had to have diverged genetically from wolves 60,000 to more than 100,000 years ago.

"We have found that the origin of dogs is much older than previously believed because the genetic diversity within dogs is much greater than if their origin was as recent as 14,000 years," Wayne said in a statement.

The researchers found four distinct genetic groups in the dog world. This suggests that wolves may have been tamed and domesticated several times, at different times and places, and that no single wolf ancestor is common to all dogs. It also suggests that dogs and wolves could have interbred later, adding fresh wolf DNA to the domestic dog gene pool.

But no DNA evidence was found of coyotes or jackals in the dog family tree. The study showed that Fido, and every other dog in the world, was all wolf, the researchers said.

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news24.htm

[sandgrubber]

I'd go with the DNA evidence. But personally, I think dogs ascended from the wolf, not descended

[whippets]

Isn't there some evidence now that the Dingo may pre-date the wolf?

Thought I saw another thread on that.

[WoofnHoof]

The Coppingers wrote a whole book about it that is currently sitting on my coffee table waiting for me to get around to reading it. From what I can gather the ideas about where dogs came from convince most people, but some of my friends in research didn't much like the writing style and some of the things said about wolves and dogs. I'll have to read it already.

I'm a bit behind on dog genetics, but last I heard they had changed domestic dogs to a wolf subspecies because of evidence from mitochondrial DNA, which has its own little suite of problems.

Personally, I think that dogs descended from wolves in that they descended from pariah dogs that descended from wolves. I do not think that dogs are anywhere near as social as wolves.

From a species perspective, technically dogs and wolves must be the same species because they can interbreed and produce viable offspring. Only problem with that is that so can tigers and lions. The species thing is starting to really annoy me. It's very arbitrary. It's got to the point that cryptic species are popping up all over the place now that we have the technology to look at genetics. I think the species concept is outdated.

As far as the non-linear dog goes, there's a lot of good stuff worth a look in that. Semyonova is sadly a raging pitbull hater and BSL advocate, but that doesn't mean all her ideas are rubbish.

I thought ligons were sterile? I do agree that the species concept is beginning to show signs of wear and tear in this day and age but essentially humans are only applying selection pressures to certain traits and so really they aren't that far from the wolf, particularly when you consider that some of the traits that we are applying that selection pressure to are also wolf traits.

There has obviously been some divergence of the two since domestication first began but there is nothing to convince me that they are not essentially the same species or that there were any other species infuencing them, many species of domesticated animals are vastly different from their ancestral species it doesn't mean there were other species involved in their development.

It's akin to saying that other equids are involved in the development of the modern equus caballus - there are enough significant differences between the species to discount the possibility. It's that very artificial selection which I believe has isolated the species from it's peers and other species alike.

I didn't mean that dingos were domestic, I meant that they were the "hunters" and were breeding with domestic dogs. Which they are. Ie explain to the dingos - as wild dogs - you're not meant to be breeding with the pet dogs - as described in the article.

But there is a very very small gap between a dingo and a domestic dog. Just look at kelpies and ACD. Not to mention strange GSD looking dingos out there.

What we really need to know is how close is Wolf DNA to malamute or husky DNA or those other wolf like varieties of dog. Is it as similar as Airdale DNA is to Poodle DNA? Or more distant.

If you really want to get confused about the arbitary nature of defining species, read "the beak of the finch" by Johnanton Weiner. Those pesky finches can switch species in one season/generation based on availability (or lack of it) of resources. Nature is much more blurry than most text books would have you believe.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/067973337X

I *think* there is a DNA study comparing wolf DNA with certain breeds but I *know* I have a behavioural study floating around in my files which does indicate that behaviourally at least among the breeds analysed the siberian husky is the closest in behaviour to the wolf.

The cavalier was identified as having the least number of behaviours in common with wolves. Essentially it was proposed that animals whose morphology most closely resembles the wolf also shares the most wolf behaviours. It is thought to correlate closely with neotonisation, which is the tendency for domesticated animals to resemble the juveniles of the original species both in behaviour and in appearance with larger heads and behaviour in accordance with various developmental stages of juvenile wolves.

edited to fix shoddy punctuation.

Edited April 26, 2010 by WoofnHoof

[Mrs Rusty Bucket]

To me, you have the wild type and the domestic type of dog. There are certainly areas of overlap, but why do we still have a wild type and a domestic type if there isn't some sort of segregation at the genetic level going on?

Corvus

Your two sentences contradict. From a paragraph full of internal contradictions.

It's all shades of grey - or black and yellow.

Do we really still have a "wild" type which is separate from a "domestic" type?

Natural selection in the wild will favour the dogs that are good at fending for themselves.

A combination of natural and human guided selection in domestic situations - will help a dog type that wants to live with humans.

Ie the ones that don't bite humans and are friendly are more likely to survive and breed domestically but these traits would not help dogs in the wild that have no help from human resources. The edge of civilization is not fixed - it's blurry. The "grey" area between domestic and wild is important. That is my point. There is no arbitary human defined line of separation.

[Aidan]

but my point is there seems to be a clear system of hierachy when the dogs are left out and expected to defend for themselves.

Does that necessarily suggest a strict linear system though?

[poodlefan]

My opinion is I don't care any more about this than I do about whether Australia or NZ invented the pavlova.

We've got thousands of years of selection for certain traits in domestic dogs and culling of others. I think if I want to understand my dog better, I'll read the studies done on dogs. ;)

[~Anne~]

My opinion is I don't care any more about this than I do about whether Australia or NZ invented the pavlova.

We've got thousands of years of selection for certain traits in domestic dogs and culling of others. I think if I want to understand my dog better, I'll read the studies done on dogs. ;)

I must say I agree with this. It has always been difficult for me thinking along the evolution form wolves line when I look at Pugs. They are so far removed from wolves it isn't funny. I am more interested in the modern dog and the theories around them.

[poodlefan]

My opinion is I don't care any more about this than I do about whether Australia or NZ invented the pavlova.

We've got thousands of years of selection for certain traits in domestic dogs and culling of others. I think if I want to understand my dog better, I'll read the studies done on dogs. ;)

I must say I agree with this. It has always been difficult for me thinking along the evolution form wolves line when I look at Pugs. They are so far removed from wolves it isn't funny. I am more interested in the modern dog and the theories around them.

Ditto to what you said about poodles and Whippets. Yes, prey drive is there but lots of other behaviours have been modified. I think also you need to factor in the impact of socialisation and training on domestic dogs - that also modifies behaviours.

My dogs are a pack but they don't have to defend territory or feel the need to run off or kill strange dogs.

Edited April 27, 2010 by poodlefan

[BJean]

but my point is there seems to be a clear system of hierachy when the dogs are left out and expected to defend for themselves.

Does that necessarily suggest a strict linear system though?

Define 'strict'.

Yes there are lots of was we can use word semantics / perspectives to describe why we think a dog is doing what

I call dog A which uses physical force against dog B, C, D to enforce its right to mate, its right to eat, its right to drink, its right to take, its right to have precendence about what it wants the boss dominant dog.

Why do dogs fight and why do some dogs always win?

What makes them perservere? Why do they want what they want more than another?

Same mentality as what makes a TB a rachorse or a winner.

Some horses are born with the will to win.

imo it is much the same thing.

[BJean]

Lilli, has it occurred to you that you might have the exception to the rule in CAOs?

Nope - there are other breeds that would behave with a similar ethos also.

Sure, some companion bred dogs are a lot different (why wouldn't they be) -

but the article doesn't make that distinction or acknowledgement.

[WoofnHoof]

My opinion is I don't care any more about this than I do about whether Australia or NZ invented the pavlova.

We've got thousands of years of selection for certain traits in domestic dogs and culling of others. I think if I want to understand my dog better, I'll read the studies done on dogs. ;)

I must say I agree with this. It has always been difficult for me thinking along the evolution form wolves line when I look at Pugs. They are so far removed from wolves it isn't funny. I am more interested in the modern dog and the theories around them.

Ditto to what you said about poodles and Whippets. Yes, prey drive is there but lots of other behaviours have been modified. I think also you need to factor in the impact of socialisation and training on domestic dogs - that also modifies behaviours.

My dogs are a pack but they don't have to defend territory or feel the need to run off or kill strange dogs.

Depends, the behavioural study I mentioned showed a direct relationship betweent the neotonisation of the domestic animal and the various developmental stages of the juvenile wolf. Putting this in a practical setting it was useful information for me because sometimes I've observed that a 'language barrier' exists between my sibe and my chi, my sibe uses more adult wolf behaviours which are far more subtle and so aren't picked up by the chi who is several developmental stages 'younger'. This can be a useful measure when dealing with individuals who use very different behaviours but which are behaviours which have been identified in the juvenile wolf.