Natural History

Now, what I am about to mention is something now widely considered in the discussion about dogs and wolves.

The common assertion is that dogs are not wolves because when dogs go feral, they don’t become the large, big game hunting wolves that we all know from nature documentaries and zoos. I’ve always found this argument to be rather faulty for reasons I shall explain.

I submit that the reason why dogs don’t become wolves is because it is far easier to scavenge off of people than return to their ancestral lupine form in terms of phenotype and behavior.

We do, however, have an example of a domesticated dog reverting back to a wolf form. However, the form it returned to is more of one of the subtropical races of wolf, rather than moose and elk-hunting wolves from the northern reaches of the Northern Hemisphere. No dog has ever returned to that particular form, simply because in all cultures in the northern part of  Northern Hemisphere there are both garbage dumps and a cultural tradition of dog keeping (and I use that term very loosely). Both of these features make it easier for dogs to remain dogs.

The dog I am talking about is the dingo. The dingo is sometimes considered its own subspecies of wolf (Canis lupus dingo). However, it actually descends from East Asian pariah dogs that came to Australia 3,500 to 4,000 years ago.

4,000 years ago, pariah dogs in Southern Asia looked a lot like pariah dogs do now. They  probably had floppy ears and curled tails. They were like the pariah dogs we find throughout the Third World. They are the pot lickers and primitive sanitation engineers of these societies. A few are used as hunters, especially in New Guinea, and a few are used as livestock guardian dogs (like the ones in the Ethiopian wolf video I posted yesterday).

The pariah dogs arrived in Australia through trade from Indonesia.

The native peoples of Australia did keep the dingoes as pets, but every account I’ve read of them, the dingoes were not fed. They had to go hunting on their own.  Not all bands of Australian natives were interested in them, and as the dogs spread through the continent, they became more and more wolf-like.

In fact, I’ll submit that a dingo is a domestic dog that became a wolf.

They do form packs and hunt on their own. They pair bond, and the males help their mates care for their young.  Most feral domestic dogs don’t do these things. However, there have been cases of some pariah dog males helping bitches rear their litters.

For generations, Indonesian dogs arrived in Australia, where they were absorbed into the dingo population.

I find it very interesting that the original theory about the dingoes derived from the Indian wolf (Canis lupus pallipes). However, we know that Indian wolves are rather unique genetically, and they probably had no role in the development of the domestic dog.

It is also a bit bigger than the typical dingo, weighing as much as 70 pounds. Most dingoes are around the 30 to 40 pound range. (The given weights on US dog sites insanely over-estimate the dingo’s size).

However, there is a wolf subspecies that does aproach this size and conformation, and what’s more is that it evolved for a similar arid environment.

This subspecies is, of course, the Arabian wolf (Canis lupus arabs). It stands about three inches taller at the shoulder than the tallest dingoes, but in terms of head and body size, it is very similar to the dingo of Australia.

It is because of the similarities between dingoes and Arabian wolves that I think we can make that the case that this is a good example of a pariah dog evolving back to a wolfish form.

It punches a large hole in the argument that feral dogs never become like wolves. They become like wolves when they are forced to hunt for a living.

I have never understood why we assume that all wolves are like the ones from Northern Eurasia and Northern North America. Those may be the most numerous wolves, and they may have played a role in the development of the domestic dog through the ages.

But not all wolves are of this type. The subspecies that are subtropical in origin, like the red wolf, the Indian wolf, and the Arabian wolf are all smaller animals, with slighter bodies and smaller heads.  (The red wolf may be a separate species, but no one has convinced me yet.)

The only way to test my hypothesis is to get rid of humans. If  humans were to disappear from the Northern Hemisphere, I think we could see the gradual evolution of domestic dogs toward a big game hunting wolf phenotype and behavior. Just like the Asian pariah dogs in Australia had to become wolves to survive in the bush,  domestic dogs would have to become wolves to live without us.

The old saying is that “Dogs make us human.”

Well, the corollary is that humans keep dogs in their dog-like form. Without our waste or  our dog-keeping cultures, dogs have no reason to remain as dogs. Without us, the niche that dogs fill no longer exists, and the organism is better off becoming a wolf.

And the dingo is a dog that became wolf for precisely that reason. Hunter-gatherers may have liked them,  but they didn’t have the conditions that allowed them to live as dogs. Those dogs had to hunt for a living.

And that’s why I still consider the dog to be subspecies of Canis lupus,  which is in keeping with the tradition of classifying domestic animals with their wild forebears.