Via Engadget, a dog collar that combines a GPS receiver and a cell phone. The collar can phone home with long/lat coordinates – with the right device on the other end, putting a dot on a map is trivial. Right now it’s way too bulky, but I’d imagine that a year or two down the line we may be able to put a similar unit on a large hawk or falcon. Many folks put two telemetry transmitters on their birds now – substituting a GPS/cell unit for one might make sense in some circumstances. Two critical considerations – battery life (always an issue) and density of cell towers. What might make sense here in the east (or across the Atlantic) might be foolish in the middle of Wyoming where the falcon is more likely to be eaten by a Goldie than it is to find cell service. There’s also the fair chase aspect – incorporating yet another gadget into an ancient practice. The question may never arise – my bit of technological prognostication may be off base – but if it does, I have to think that avoiding a plane rental (for an aerial search) may be a good thing. To illustrate the post (you may have noticed that I likes me some pitchurs) a falconer with bird and sighthound:

Darren Naish, in his great post on the origins of the domestic dog, writes:

As a rough rule of thumb, the domesticated forms of wild mammal species (1) revert back to wild-type after being feral for a few generations, and (2) readily interbreed with their wild ancestors. If domestic dogs are wolves, then the many populations of feral dogs that live world-wide should theoretically have reverted back to being wolf-like in appearance and behaviour. But they haven’t. Instead, domestic dogs always end up looking like pariah dogs – the relatively small (11-16 kg), socially flexible semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics.

…

Archaeological data shows that pariah dogs have a stable history, with dog skulls from 4000 year old deposits in Thailand being essentially identical to the modern dingo-like pariah dogs of the area.

A recent post on O&P regarding Heck cattle got me thinking about this point. For those who don’t want to click through, Heck cattle are an attempt to breed back to the extinct ur-cow – the aurochs. The general consensus on Heck cattle seems to be that the attempt was a failure; “once a genetic lineage is gone, it cannot be ‘bred back'”*. My thought on all this is that it seems to show that once genetic material is lost in a population (as a result of domestication) it’s gone – all the king’s horses, etc. Perhaps, then, it’s not shocking that dogs revert to pariah dogs in some number of generations – the genes that would allow reversion to a more wolfy form are just gone from the domesticated dog’s gene pool. To extend the title of the post a bit – border collies are to pariah dogs as Holsteins are to criollos/Texas longhorns? Don’t get me wrong – there are a number of other persuasive points in Darren’s post – I’m just not sure about the ‘won’t revert to wolves’ argument at this point.