Friday, July 18, 2014

Dogs are scavengers first

Much of what has been written about dogs is undoubtedly nonsense. And, we will leave the critique of popular TV dog shows for the future. While dogs and wolves undoubtedly shared a common ancestor, it seems improbable that dogs were originally modified from wolves by artificial selection by humans. After all, abandoned dogs do not revert to being wolves, they become just feral dogs. Have humans selected dogs for various traits (color, body size, temperament, etc.) in recent times – undoubtedly they have. But, humans probably had little to do with getting a population of wolves to evolve into the dog. The animal that is generally considered the oldest domesticated species.
A free-ranging dog scavenging leatherback sea turtle nests
on Grande Riviere Beach on the north coast of Trinidad. Note
the large number of black vultures also present. JCM

In chapter 10 of the recently published book, Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior, titled “A Dog’s-Eye View of Canine Cognition” by Udell, Lord, Feuerbacher and Wynne the authors suggest the following.

Most dogs are scavengers and live on the periphery of human society. These dogs are more likely to avoid human contact than seek it. While pet dogs have been a major focus of recent research is unlikely that the human-dog bond is a special adaptation that is the result of co-evolution, but rather the bond is the expression of basic processes such as conditioning, socialization and biological traits that are shared by domestic and wild canids. Individual dogs that have been socialized to humans and become dependent on them have high levels of sensitivity to human actions. Udell and colleagues argue that the fundamental differences between dog and wolf behavior lie at more basic levels: in the processes of socialization, foraging, and reproduction. Small but crucial intertwined changes in the ancestral dog population led dogs to (1) become more promiscuous than any other canid, (2) be able to reproduce more rapidly than wolves, (3) be a much less effective hunter but (4) dogs are more efficient scavenger than other canids. The authors view the indirect consequences of these changes as producing dogs, and suggest that while “…it may be a little less flattering to the human species, we believe this perspective on dogs is at least as fascinating and closer to the historical truth than the story that humans created dogs.”

Citation
Udell, M. A., Lord, K., Feuerbacher, E. N., & Wynne, C. D. (2014). A Dog’s-Eye View of Canine Cognition. In Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior (pp. 221-240). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. A pdf of this chapter can be found on-line.

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