I already knew that dogs, wolves, and coyotes could interbreed with fertile offspring, and apparently this is true for jackals also. There are, it’s said, “coydogs” running around LA, and I know that coywolves are a thing in the SE United States.
Obviously fertile offspring =/= same behavior among species, but to what extent is canid behavior genetic and to what extent environmental? If you put, I don’t know, a Labrador pup in a wolf litter (and it didn’t get killed, because Mama Wolf was a tolerant type) would the Lab grow up to chase and slay elderly deer? What if you raised a jackal pup in your house, could you have a loyal and trustworthy pet?
This is a long-winded way of asking if there’s any way of knowing where genetic variations that don’t prevent interfertility can determine behavior. Or maybe this is something we just don’t know yet.
I think looking at the history of dog breeding through the “lens” of what you’re talking about may provide a great deal of insight. I believe some of your questions have been (in practical terms if not rigorously scientific terms) answered by people’s experiences trying to “make” the kinds of dogs they valued.
There is some talk that domesticated dogs essentially have Williams syndrome. In humans Williams syndrome is noted by, among other things, extreme friendliness. They are also intellectually impaired. Both are things we see in domestic dogs (wolves are spooky smart…way past Fido).
As adaptations for living with humans dogs have a higher tolerance for starch in their diet, and can track what humans are looking at (something neither wolves nor even chimps can do well).
I have also read that the process of domestication (at least with dogs and foxes) often results in a tendency towards urinary incontinence along with the desirable traits.
If wolves are so smart, why are there about 100x as many dogs as wolves in the world?
I think it would be more accurate to say the two populations are smart in different ways. Dogs are way more naturally attuned to human communication than wolves are. For example, they “get” what pointing means, and that is such a fundamental means of human communication.
Another difference between dogs and their wild cousins is that since humans started raising starchy food crops, dogs have adapted to be able to digest starches.
They seem to have made this adaptaion alongside their human companions.
I saw a very interesting documentary on dogs (don’t remember what it was called - watched it quite awhile ago). They did an experiment where they took a newborn dog puppy and a newborn wolf pup and raised them together. They both were hand fed by humans and had the same amount of contact with humans. As soon as the pups were mobile you could already see the difference in their behaviors. The dog followed humans around and wanted attention all the time. The wolf did not - he kept to himself and only tolerated human contact. When the pups were around 6 mos old the wolf created havoc everywhere. If his human caretaker was eating something, he would lunge right at the persons face trying to get the food. The person would open the fridge and the wolf would launch himself inside trying to get food. For the wolf, it was all about food, all of the time. The dog just craved human attention.
Bingo. One study purported to show wolves were more intelligent than dogs because they used a crude tool (provided in the test) to pry open a food container, whereas the dogs mostly encouraged the humans to open the container for them.
A human is a vastly more sophisticated tool for opening a human-designed food container than a stick. Calling the dogs stupid in this test is like calling the Apollo astronauts stupid for using a computer to calculate orbits.
This article describes an attempt to create domesticated foxes:
The upshot is that it takes generations of selective breeding to achieve domestication. So, to the OPs question, it appears that it does not work to just drop a baby animal into a different environment and see them fully take on the characteristics of the native counterpart.
I don’t think we know exactly. Dogs have only been separately selectively bred for a few thousands of years. That’s not a lot of time to create entirely new genes but it is plenty of time for humans to tremendously distort the frequency of genes in the dog population versus the source wolves. I suspect there is more than one gene that leads to dog companionability with humans and that in any given domestic dog, companionship genes are likely to be over-represented relative to wolves.
Accordingly, I would expect that if you took some random wild dog ancestor,* you would have some chance of winding up with at least some of the companionship genes that are common in domestic dogs. This might mean that you wind up with a wolf that has at least some companionate abilities. More likely, you have a wolf with no particular ability to get along with people. It is incredibly unlikely that you would wind up with a wolf that were as trainable and companionate as a dog.
Going the other way, I suspect that a dog puppy could pretty quickly learn to fit in a wolf pack if it were raised by a tolerant wolf mother. The traits that make dogs compatible with people, like subjugating themselves to the leader, getting along in groups, learning the rudiments of communication, and working together, would help a domestic dog fit in just fine with a wolf pack. Still, I doubt that it’s super likely that a wild wolf mother would adopt a domestic puppy.
*I’ll say wolf rather than jackal for this purpose because I think that dogs are believed to have descended from wolves so wolves probably have the greatest incidence of the relevant genes among canids.
Right. Humans and dogs co-evolved, and dogs certainly wouldn’t exist without humans (and I’m not sure humans would exist in entirely the same way without dogs) so the primary dog survival strategy is to leverage the super-caninely-intelligent tool-user to do everything which doesn’t involve smelling, running really fast, or biting things.
The thing I find most fascinating about the Soviet silver fox experiment is, even though the researchers were selecting only for behavior (lack of fear of humans, etc), the foxes started to develop physical differences from the wild foxes, and these are essentially the same physical differences that differentiate wolves from domesticated dogs – floppy ears, curly tails, mottled coats and shorter legs and snouts. This suggests that these physical traits are somehow linked to the same genes that code for “domesticated” behavior.
Also, while Icarus’s statement that it takes “generations” to achieve domestication is true, it’s surprising to me how few generations are required. The scientists say that obvious differences from the wild population started to appear in the fourth generation. BTW, you can now purchase foxes from this experiment for yourself, at a cost of only about $7000 per fox. Aquiring a Tame Fox - Domesticated Silver Fox
And this is why it’s such a bad idea to point at a physical trait and ask what purpose it serves: It could be a side-effect, something that happened when a trait that actually was advantageous was being selected for.
Moreover, trying to explain some trait is a good way to generate Just-So stories, and that alone should ping your bullshit meter so hard it’s ringing off the hook.
The bolding is mine, and i find this thought really interesting. I’ve read a range of articles and letters regarding the history of the human-canine relationship. Mostly on the pop-science side of things!
Is anyone with some detailed knowledge of the matter aware of just how important Dogs are to our development/evolution? Could the human species have survived through some historically lean times without our faithful companions?
