There were so many different topics to write about this week, but I think the most interesting is something we’ve touched on before: the extent of co-evolution between man and domestic animals. How have we shaped each other, as separate species? It’s clear from experiments like Belyaev’s that domestication goes beyond simple taming and docility, that the genetic makeup of these animals is actually being changed. Rob Dunn mentions in his book The Wild Life of Our Bodies that we have bred many of our domesticated animals to have significantly reduced tendencies to feel fear. My question is, is all of this really genetics? In neither Dunn’s book nor reports on Belyaev’s foxes does there seem to be a mention of a more psychological explanation.
Dunn mentions that, “Cows and lambs are not just meek. They are actually numbed to the dangers that once haunted them, too tame to flee even when the wolf is at the door.” Belyaev’s foxes were selectively bred for “domestic” qualities, and each subsequent generation seemed to produce more and more dog-like foxes. I’m not arguing the truth of this, just the mechanism of the phenomenon. Mammals are particularly sensitive to human emotion- as the common saying goes, “they can smell fear.” Well, they can smell a lot more than that. Every animal trainer learns that the secret to success in forming a bond with an animal is that you have to be calm. If you are trusting and gentle, the animal will perceive you as such. This works especially well when you give the animal this impression of yourself at a young age- or when it is taught to them by their mothers and other “role models.” This is my theory: cows and lambs are meek not because they have been bred to have a repressed fight-or-flight response, but because they have been raised repeatedly in a world where this type of defensive behaviour is unecessary. They don’t need to be able to protect themselves; humans do it for them, to protect their investment in the animal. For herd animals like cows, sheep, and horses, humans serve as the dominant leader, the one in charge of protecting and defending the rest. In pack animals like dogs, we are viewed as members of the pack, and as long as they feel protected by their owners they will feel it is their duty to be protective of us as well. The integration of the lives of domestic animals with our own over the centuries, our protection of them (for whatever reason), has meant that from an early age they are used to us. They can read us emotionally (some better than others), and this I think lends itself to their docility and other domestic qualities more than anything else.
More evidence that this psychological explanation might have some credence? What about feral animals? By all standards, animals like cats, dogs, and horses have been completely domesticated. If genetics were the only things at work here, that means feral animals, who have had no interaction with humans during their formative years, would not act wild. But they do. Sure, feral cats and dogs may live in populated areas, and have no problem with human life–they may even rely on it to survive. But attempt to interact with them as you would a domestic animal, and you’ll quickly find their adrenal systems have not been dulled. Compare a wolf and a dog that has been feral all its life- they respond the same way.
We may have influenced the genetic evolution of our domesticated animals to make them rely on us, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that our selective breeding has changed their inherent instincts and behaviour. We learn these when we are young; animals are the same way.
Until we code the genomes for all domestic animals (and their wild counterparts, should they exist), we’ll never know for sure the extent that our selective breeding has influenced their genetic makeup. Here’s one more story to make us think about the huge impact of psychology on the domestication of animals: Christian the lion. Follow the link here to watch a short video about Christian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqQt1MKTiaI
Wolves, Dogs and In-betweeners 8
by corim14 • February on February 23, 2014
I’ll start off by saying I really enjoyed reading Terrill’s Part Wild, even if I didn’t agree with her life choices at times. I have had a lifelong fascination with wolf-dogs, so reading about Inyo and her life was entertaining. The book didn’t necessarily stimulate any new thoughts or questions about the relationship between wolves and dogs and how dogs came to be domesticated, but it did reinforce some theories I’d already had.
I liked that Terrill kept coming back to looking at the process of domestication of the dog from all different aspects: behavioral, morphological, and genetic. To me, wolf and dog are the same species, but I feel like a wolf is more like a breed of dog (albeit a very estranged breed) than an ancestral link in the chain. While we were domesticating dogs in all shapes and sizes, wolves were undergoing their own changes as a species, and most of these changes were probably the exact opposite of what we bred into the domestic dog: distrust of humans, tendency to avoid human civilization, and looking at us as predators more than providers. This brings me back to something I’ve been wondering since talking about Belyaev’s foxes: the researchers bred the foxes into two distinct groups- domestic, and aggressive. Could this be what happened to the common ancestor of dogs and wolves? Those with the slightly higher tendency to be curious about their neighbors the humans, who didn’t mind their company, and who could develop a bond with them would be those whose descendents became the domestic dog. On the other hand, the tendency to avoid human society and distrust what could be perceived as threat was exacerbated in the strain which became modern-day wolves. I see their common ancestor as on more of a middle-ground behaviorally, with wolves and dogs at the two polar extremes, due to inbreeding and selection (natural or artificial).
One thing that does irk me is that people have a tendency to refer to all domestic dogs in a general sense, as one entity whose behavior is constant between individuals. Dogs are more complex than that. Different breeds show different behavioral traits- how could a Chihuahua possibly show the same behavioral tendencies as a St. Bernard? But even deeper than on a breed level, different individual dogs have different personalities. They aren’t as complex as human personalities, to be sure, but anyone who has owned dogs, who has watched them interact and watched other dogs can tell you that they exist. Dogs have personal preferences, distastes, and habits which start developing as soon as they’re born. From research papers I’ve read on behavioral analysis in wolves, it appears they have something akin to personalities as well, however the research is not generalizable enough to be sure. Given the circumstances, we can’t expect wolves to have as much individual differences- it wouldn’t be a good survival mechanism for pack animals.
Discussion of personality is a good segue into what really interests me when discussing wolves and dogs: intelligence. Terrill believes that dogs are the mentally retarded cousins of wolves, bred only to be blindly obedient and want only affection and care. After her experience with Panzer, I can understand her point of view. After all, who should we consider more intelligent, the wolf-dog who avoided the cars, or the dog who got hit and was killed? But I disagree with her train of thought. After all, dogs ride the subway in Russia (http://abcnews.go.com/International/Technology/stray-dogs-master-complex-moscow-subway-system/story?id=10145833) with no problems. So which is really the more intelligent- dogs or wolves? I guess the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. In the human world, dogs will come out on top; in the wild, a wolf is definitely more able to survive. Knowing this makes it all the more heart-wrenching when reading about Inyo, who doesn’t belong in either place. It supports the belief that the practice of purposefully breeding wolf-dogs should be put to a stop. It will not fix the issues that have cropped up in modern dogs, as Leda believes; only give rise to a breed who can’t survive in either world.