{"id":144,"date":"2007-04-28T08:55:06","date_gmt":"2007-04-28T12:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=144"},"modified":"2007-04-28T08:55:06","modified_gmt":"2007-04-28T12:55:06","slug":"cattleaurochsdogswolves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/144","title":{"rendered":"cattle:aurochs::dogs:wolves?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darren Naish, in his great post<\/a> on the origins of the domestic dog, writes:<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. Instead, domestic dogs always end up looking like pariah dogs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the relatively small (11-16 kg), socially flexible semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A recent post<\/a> on O&P regarding Heck cattle<\/a> 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<\/a>. 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'”*<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creatures"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqxx-2k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}