Dog Domestication Research

The thesis of this article is that wolves, once endangered, have come back and started to flourish causing mixed feelings for locals and biologists. Wolves were once hunted because one, to protect livestock, and two, they were seen as pests and/or vermin. The government then put wolves under the endangered list to try to save them. Since then, wolf populations have multiplied.

Man’s best friend: you would think that that title would conjure up images of humans, or even our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, such as monkeys, apes, and chimpanzees. However, the first image that enters most humans head is the same image that would have induced fear hundreds of years ago, the not so distant heir to the wolf: dogs. The same creatures that we feuded with for survival now take up a huge part of our lives and make up a large portion of the images littering the internet. Dogs take part in everything from movies to family gatherings, to search and rescue and emotional or physical service. Nearly fifty percent of American households alone have at least one dog, and between all of us we own 83.3 million dogs, a number not to be trifled with. The place our four-legged canine companions claim is undisputed and easily backed up.

Back then, the wolf-like dogs would have been used for hunting thanks to their amazing hearing and excellent smell. These traits would help the hunters tremendously. The hunters also used them as guard dogs for their livestock. Also, if the hunters were ever attacked by an enemy, the wolf-like dogs would have come in very handy as another warrior on the battle field since wolves are faster and stronger than humans. Having a loyal animal is useful in many ways when the world used to be wild and untamed. Plus, the lack of technology in the past would make it seem that a tamed animal would equal that of a machine.

what effects the domestication of wolves had on ancient and modern humans(Important Idea #2. This will be explained in Paragraph 3),

In North America as far back as the 19th century, 200,000 to 500,000 wolves lived among the Native American people. Wolves played a major part in nearly all legends and mythology of the Native American tribes. Since that time, many things have changed; today, the Native American people tell these stories, many of which involve wolves, in art and songs. They speak how the wolf saved the people from the Great Flood, and how they provided fur to the Native American people to keep warm.

It is common knowledge that dogs were domesticated from wolves. However, the exact details of this process are not nearly as well known, and many studies have been performed in recent years to discover exactly what caused this change to occur. Many different techniques, from comparing morphological evidence to peeking into the genome itself have been used to unlock this mystery. While many factors of the evolution of dogs are still being studied, it is now known that domestic dogs were developed from an ancient, ancestral wolf species rather than from the gray wolf, that clear morphological differences between wolves and domestic dogs can be found, such as the difference in the shape of the skull, and that the ability to digest starch not only varies between dogs and wolves, but between different dog breeds. The findings in these studies each provide a different piece to the puzzle that is the initial domestication of ancient dogs. Understanding how dogs were domesticated could in turn shed a new light on the development of ancient humans.

Remember that dogs, no matter what they are today, were predators in the past. Wolves, hyenas, dingoes, and foxes are carnivorous creatures who hunt to survive. Dogs were most likely domesticated from their wolf ancestors from 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. In fact, the many dog breeds have only proliferated in the last 200-300 years. Before that, a few breeds existed to meet their masters' needs for work.

Nobody knows exactly when dogs were domesticated there is so many different showings of when dogs were domesticated but the latest would be where it says 32,000 years ago. The domestication of cats and dogs or  any animals come from humans and animals living so close to each other in close quarter communities. Genes during domestication overlaps with the genes from humans, the same kind of genes are for digestion, metabolism, neurological process and cancer according to population genetics. So humans and animals both was domesticated from the same genes. Human and animals are a lot alike. “Biologist Raymond Coppinger has another idea, the wolves domesticated themselves he suspects the process would have begun at the end of the last Ice Age approximately 15,000 years ago” (“What Caused The Domestication Of Wolves”). Coppinger believes in “flight distance” which is a behavioral characteristics that transformed the wild dogs to the modern dog

Dogs were the first animal, and the only large carnivore, to be domesticated. in both appearance and in both Dogs are not tame wolves, but how they became these unique companions to people is still being debated.

The human impact in evolution affect the characteristics of the wolf which were affected from our early ancestors’ perception of the wolves.To our human ancestors, wolves possessed peculiar and fiendish behavior which stimulated hatred. However, through ignorance, people never attempted to understand the wolves and other creatures. During the agricultural revolution, people annihilated wolves because they depicted the creatures as competitions. However, people could have utilized wolves as a learning opportunity where the wolf could serve as “a teacher to be emulated” (Dutcher 4). Wolves’s hunted the same prey as us. Therefore, by studying the behavior of wolves, people could have employed the strategies of the wolf and created a more efficient

The reason dogs have become domesticated was the synergy between humans and the wolves who were the ancestors of modern dogs. Dogs were attracted to humans by scavenging their left over food and the humans liked the dogs protecting the human settlements with their warning barks and fending off other predators with their constant presence. This meant the dogs natural diet of raw food was changed over the years and adapted to include cooked food left over from human consumption. This means that dogs who were essentially carnivores were eating the same food as humans, who were essentially omnivores. It is only since the late 1800′s that commercial dog food has been available, and not until the 1950′s did it become popular. It is also in the same

Kenneled environments can be very stressful due to space availability, noise levels, and social interaction. Domesticated dogs are forced to endure kenneled settings for many reasons such as rescue and boarding. The continuation of stressful factors can lead to behavioral issues, chronic stress and the overall deterioration of the animal’s welfare which play a part in re-homing the dogs. Auditory stimulation has been proven to be psychologically and physiologically beneficial in humans and a variety of species. However, the effect of audiobooks as auditory enhancement have not been studied on kenneled dogs. Thirty-one dogs in a recue shelter were used in the study. The experiment examined the effects audiobooks had on the housed dogs. The five

Have you ever played outside with your dog for a while and lay back to consider about how your dog evolved into whom he is today and how he turned into "family?" Well, over the centuries, dogs have evolved a lot! In between that time, they turned into what we call pets. Because of this, the relationship between dogs and humans has changed over thousands of years, wolves evolved to dogs and the wolves soon became pets.

One of the most meaningful acts a breeder can do is provide their puppies with the best start in life, but it doesn't stop there. As a responsible breeder, your dedication surrounds helping prospective puppy owners raise happy and healthy dogs. As a dog lover, connecting caring, responsible individuals and families with their forever pet is your passion. By encouraging and endorsing products that promote the wholesome development of dogs, particularly during the first year of life, breeders can be a part of ensuring a long and active life for the pups. Breeders hold themselves and their clients to the highest standards and the goal is improving the life of each puppy.

Though it is widely believed that early humans domesticated dogs, what if it was dogs that domesticated them? The domestication of wolves occurred when humans realized that these canines are great hunters. Nevertheless, this was “a time when modern humans were not very tolerant of carnivorous competitors. In fact, after modern humans arrived in Europe around 43,000 years ago, they pretty much wiped out every large carnivore that existed, including saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas” (Hare and Woods). Similarly, the fact that the wolves need to eat, shows that if humans wanted to domesticate them, they would have been forced to sacrifice some of their meat to be able to feed them. Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and a research scientist at Duke University, respectively, contemplate how perhaps humans domesticated wolves from the