Do cats ever have dwarfism?
I've never heard of it. I suppose I'm the closest thing we've got to a professional breeder here. My wife used to breed cats and we've bred dogs and various species of parrots together.
C. familiaris evolution (a subspecies of C. lupus, not a distinct species
The subspecies is
Canis lupus familiaris and the wolf is
C. lupus lupus. I don't know if they're calling the domestic cat a subspecies of the wild cat. I don't think so, since they haven't had as many millennia to diverge and also because we don't seem to have tinkered with their bloodlines as much as we have with dogs.
Some canine biologists no longer think we domesticated wolves. What seems vastly more likely is that village dogs - of their own choice - began to make a living off of village refuse dumps.
As a breeder I find this to be the dominant theory today. There is an alternative to the scavenger vector. Human tribes and dog packs hunted the same territories and must have frequently run into each other. It's not a stretch to wonder whether they observed each other's strengths and realized they were complementary. I can picture the human hunting party coming upon a large herbivore like a bison that the wolves, with their superior sense of smell and faster running speed, were able to catch and stop but couldn't kill, and I can picture the wolves gaping in exhausted admiration as our superior organizational ability and our pointy sticks finished the job so there was a bonanza of meat for everybody. Cooperative hunting could have developed by accident.
Experts in wolves and dog training have long been suspicious about the idea that people took in wolves and trained them and selected amongst them. This process would have been nearly impossible and would have, for a very large number of generations of dogs, been an incredible waste of resources for the villages and even more impossible for nomadic groups.
The killer flaw in this theory is that this first ever multi-species pack was created several thousand years before the dawn of the Neolithic Era. There were no villages.
I suppose humans could have taken in orphaned wolf cubs, but that wouldn't be easy because wolf packs care for their own orphans. And caring for a puppy while migrating would have been difficult. Furthermore, one of the key differences between dogs and ancestral wolves is that wolves don't have the generalized interspecies bonding instinct that dogs have evolved. You have to get a wolf cub very young in order for him to grow up feeling like a member of the human pack.
The 'we domesticated wolves' idea has been around for a long time. . . .
Sure, it's a no-brainer. It wasn't until the last century that we could date the invention of the technology of agriculture, which includes animal husbandry. And it was much more recently than that that we were able to determine when dogs first began living with humans. The dates are simply in the wrong order. We didn't know enough about animals in 15000BCE to have domesticated a species.
This lifestyle and not human selection for traits shifted dog size and brain size downwards and domesticated them to some degree. Later these medium-sized dogs were found to be potentially useful - they already functioned as alarms - and symbiotic relationships developed with humans. Then humans began to train and select.
The three main differences between the wolf and the dog are:
- Dogs have smaller brains. This is because they adapted to the more omnivorous diet of a scavenger and maintaining brain tissue requires a lot of protein.
- Dogs' teeth aren't quite as useful for ripping raw flesh.
- Dogs are more gregarious. The typical wolf pack is fewer than ten individuals. Not only do feral dogs roam in much larger parties, but dogs easily form packs with humans and less easily with other domesticated species such as cats and pigs. Dogs are well along in the transcendence from pack-social to herd-social, just as humans are. Open all the gates in a city while someone is attacking a human child and he might face 200 dogs who never met before, cooperating in defense of their anonymous herd-mate.
I read that the Pekingese is a closer relation to the wolf than the German Shepherd. In fact, the German Shepherd is a fairly new breed. I was shocked.
Yes, the Peke turning out to be one of the earliest breeds shows that humans were interested in dogs for their sheer companionship value a very long time ago. Kind of sweet.
It's not easy to trace the histories of the various dog breeds since the scientific information (as opposed to breeder lore) is rather new. But regarding herding dogs, from the information I have I'd guess that the Turkish breeds may be the oldest: the Akbash goes back at least 3,000 years and the Anatolian Guardian might be twice that old. We'll know more as they proceed with the DNA analysis. The Anatolian was only introduced to the USA in the last few decades and only recently became an AKC breed, so it's had a rather low profile.
The Pharaoh hound, for example, looks just like the dogs you see in Egyptian bas relief. However, it was extinct for more than a thousand years. Modern breeders simply recreated a dog that looks like it by breeding the various sighthounds until they got what they wanted. I gather this was not a terribly well-kept guild secret, but DNA has completely exposed it.
