I must say that I go with Serpell on this one:
Coppinger’s biggest problem is he assumes that wolves have always had short critical periods for socialization.
If we could select for tameness in silver foxes through those few generations of selective breeding, just think of what our widespread persecution has done to the wolf. When I say persecution, I don’t mean that we killed a few every year to control their numbers. I’m talking total annihilation. The only wolves that survived were the nervous and reactive ones– the ones most likely to also be very crazy about their territories and engage in cannibalism.
The wolf that exists right now has to be very different from the wolf that we first domesticated. In North America, where wolves were not heavily persecuted until Europeans arrived, there are accounts of friendly, curious wolves approaching people. Lewis and Clark even have an account of killing a wolf with a knife, after drawing it in with a piece of meat.
Serpell is correct. Hunter-gatherer people have always kept pets. Not all of them do, but those who live in lands with relative material abundance often do, especially those who live in the Amazon.
Early man was probably very fascinated with wolves early on, and it is likely that wolves were fascinated by us, too. It probably didn’t take much before people began keeping them as pets.
Dogs and proto-dog wolves have existed with humans for far longer than Coppinger’s theory suggests. His theory is strongly predicated upon dogs being domesticated around 12,000 years ago, when small-scale agriculture allowed for the formation of the first semi-permanent villages.
However, the genetic evidence is all pointing to a much earlier time period for the origins of the domestic dog, and there is some archeological evidence that dogs were living with people in Europe over 30,000 years ago.
Contrary to what many programs of this sort suggest, Coppinger’s theory is not the accepted scientific consensus about the origins of the domestic dog. In fact, if you were to ask me what the scientific consensus on the origins of the domestic dog, I would have to say that there is no consensus right now. As I said before, there are lots of theories and lots of evidence, and almost none of it is in accord.
However dogs were domesticated, it had to have been so easy that a caveman could do it.
Wait, what? Selective breeding requires chain link fences and long-term goals?
All selective breeding requires is that some traits be selected for above others.
Cull the pups that growl or snap at the baby, keep and feed the ones who don’t. By default, the only ones that get to breed are the less aggressive ones. It’s a fairly passive process. It’s doesn’t require long-term goals or fencing, or any training at all, or really very much bother.
That’s where Coppinger starts, and he assumes that wolves have always been reactive, nervous, and even cannibalistic. It is a logical fallacy to assume that way wolves behave now is exactly how they behaved 10,000 or 30,000 years ago.
I’ve read too many historical accounts of wolves in early colonial North America (where the natives didn’t persecute wolves as if they were the manifestation of Satan) that shows that wolves were friendly with dogs and very curious about people.
Lewis and Clark traveled with their Newfoundland running loose the whole time!
Today, if you let a dog of even that size run loose in wolf territory, he’s dead.
Mech thinks that wolf cannibalism and “wolf warfare” is natural. I don’t. Even though he found this in the relatively unpersecuted Arctic wolf populations, those wolves have still suffered from poisoning, aerial shooting, and the like– yes, even in remote areas which are very far from civilization. There are no wolf populations left that have not experienced some form of persecution from people. The ones in the Arctic have experienced less of it, which is why they are relatively approachable.
I don’t think Farley Mowat was 100 percent lying when he wrote about wolf behavior. He just happened to a few of them before they fell under the gun. The Ihalmiut legends in that book are true in that that was how they viewed the wolf and how they experienced the animal before our civilization of shitheads arrived. That is the value of that book, if you ever want to read it. He does bend facts, but he’s a very good writer.
Wild dogs in general are very curious about people and will beg food from them if they are not hunted. That’s why those South American foxes are so easy to film. Darwin killed one (which was named after him– the Darwin’s fox) by sneaking up on it and killing it with a geological hammer.
Various mostly nomadic tribesmen have been breeding sighthounds without fences for thousands of years. To keep a bitch from breeding, her vulva was sewn shut, or a special ‘coat’ that drapes over the back the bitch was placed on her.
Coppinger also says that sight hounds, like Sloughis, were only ever used to hunt hares and rabbits.
He’s full of crap. Taigan were and are used to hunt Ibex and wolves. Saluki, Sloughi, afghans on gazelle, jackals, foxes. I have my doubts about regular use of afghans on Snow Leopards, though.
Of interest in the following links are two pictures of bitches wearing ‘chastity cloaks.’
http://www.saluqi.net/id14.html
http://www.saluqi.net/id19.html
I have never liked Coppinger’s idea about ‘self-domestication.’ If the wolves dogs descend from were of any size, they probably predated on humans in certain circumstances. Losing their fear of humans would just have meant more predation, and resulted in greater persecution from humans.
Read his book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684855305/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0898158427&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0402JBVYB0WNM3ZTRZDE
Some of it is really good.
And some of it is bone-headed.
“A ‘Startling’ New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution,” huh?
I wonder how much of this loud “rejection of the paradigm” is him trying to sell more books?
I mean, his main premise that wolves ate human garbage, is not exactly a new idea. Maybe part of it is him trying to get more attention by being all OMG Different and Rejecting Established Thought.
He’s rehashing this old theory (I’ll have a post up on this within the hour): http://www.heatherweb.com/writing/lorenz1.html
Keep in mind that Lorenz was a Nazi. He didn’t join the National Socialists because it was the only way to get a job. He joined them because it was a great idea. The other founder of ethology, Niko Tinbergen, who was a POW during the war from the Netherlands and very anti-Nazi, didn’t speak to him for years after the war. (I’m of both Dutch and German descent, so I can get why the Nazis though the Dutch were just going to go along with all of this. They didn’t, thank goodness.)
Coppinger isn’t a Nazi, but he’s rehashing Lorenz. This whole jackal origins business has been proven nonsense, so why don’t I mix in a theory that all domestic dogs derived from starving street curs in Third World villages?
This flies in the face of the tons of anthropological evidence that dogs actually are essential to many hunter-gatherer communities and that pastoralists and hunter gatherers seem to have a very different view of the wolf. It’s very conducive to having very amiable relations between the two species. And that’s why I think domestication happened; our ancestors were awestruck by curious wolves that were better hunters than they were. It’s kind of like how we go ape over dolphins and orcas these days.
I wanted to read Coppinger’s ‘Dogs’ book for awhile now and always put it off, but I finally got around to it this week.
It’s put me in a bit of a crisis of faith, to be honest. There’s a lot of food for thought in that book… His explanation of behavioral conformation was really fascinating, as was his examination of the modern dog-human relationship, which really challenged me personally. I mean my God, is keeping dogs just to be pets really that screwed up? I’ve started self-examining to try and figure out what my personal motives are and how it relates to my relationship with my (bred for no reason but to be pretty pet) dogs.
I have a lot of mulling over to do now. I love dogs, but I think I need to examine just what that concept really means to me. Perhaps I’ve put too much value on things that don’t really matter.
I think it’s a bit different. I think that wolves were just like all of other wild dogs that never suffered persecution from humans, they were curious about us, and we learned from them how to hunt large prey and the two species were in symbiosis with each other. For some reason wolves don’t normally consider people food– it’s just like the orcas. I don’t know what it is.
If the wolves were like wolves as they are now, though, your scenario would probably have been more accurate, but if that were true, nobody could have domesticated the wolf– certainly not the Cro-Magnon or anyone with that same level of technology.
In India, that actually did happen: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=3913&in_page_id=2
And these are the 50 to 60 pound Indian wolves.
In the 1870’s, in the same state in India, 624 people were eaten by wolves: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/05/08/stories/1308017f.htm
This is actually the best evidence of wolves eating people.
That is what I was thinking about.
What’s interesting is that we really didn’t start selectively breeding other animals until we began to put up fences. It’s very hard to tell a bull who is he’s going to mate with if you don’t have a fence.
But we’ve been selectively breeding dogs for a very long time.
If probably started out like this: if it snarled, it got knocked in the head and was served up for dinner.
Coppinger also plays the role of the cranky curmodgeon in this BBC radio documentary on the New Guinea Singing Dog:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/newguineasingingdog.shtml
As an aside, NGSD researcher Janice Koler-Matznick states in the documentary that NGSD’s are the only dogs that don’t do play bows. Curiously enough, my four year-old Siberian Husky doesn’t play bow. She responds to play bows either by slowly moving forward in a mock stalking manuever (long-range) or at short range by a series of fake-outs( quick short step forward and fast withdrawal) before making contact.
Interesting. My goldens have all done play bows. I thought it was a “wolfish” body language signal.
You know what I think these dogs are?
I think that, like the dingo, they are domestic dogs that have reverted back to the wolf (or something like it). Both of these dogs are relatively young and are most likely derived from animals we would think of as domestic dogs.
Thereis an article of hers linked in this post:
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/10/controversial-origins-of-domestic-dog.html#links
which I found very interesting.
I don’t know if I agree with Darren Naish’s thesis. Dingoes are basically Arabian wolves that live in Australia– and evolved from dogs that you and I would call domestic dogs.
That 0.2 percent of MtDNA study from Wayne is often repeated, but it’s not usually repeated correctly. It says that the variance between dogs and wolves in the MtDNA sequence is at most 0.2 percent. Some dogs and wolve share MtDNA sequences, that is they have the same ancestral mother. We are not that closely related to Chimpanzees or Bonobos. When a nuclear DNA examination was performed, it was found that dogs are subspecies of C. lupus.
Gosh, that pdf link is broken.
Try here: http://newguinea-singing-dog-conservation.org/Resources.html
Origin of the Dog.
If the dingo is given its own status within C. lupus, I don’t see why they aren’t called C. l. hallstromi.
It’s interesting that Belgian Sheepdogs belong to the “clade D/ clade IV” with the shared MTDNA identical to (Rumanian) wolves –yet they are used for a multitude of tasks requiring heavy reliance on them. I knew an individual who had a pure wolf (she was a behavioral reseacher)– it was just as safe as her Alaskan Malamutes. The assertion is that a captured wolf becomes a “unreliable & unpredictable animal” — yet to this day we have people with pet lions, pet chimps, raccoon dogs, and a number of historical documents of tame cheetahs. The level of risk of “unpredictable / unreliable” is rather different for those whose life is based on risk versus those who have lives based on risk avoidance. A lot of old time cowboys were happy to have “get a bite/ get out of it” stockdogs that would be banned from any herding trial of today — the cowboys weren’t working tame cattle and needed dogs with a whole lot more grit, bite and tenacity than dogs that work tame cattle or sheep. The average life of most ranch dogs is about 6 years — same as wild wolves. All you need for domestication to occur is the wolf “hanging around” and protecting you and YOUR tribe from other intruder animals and possibly, being amenable to charging into the herd of deer from the desired direction and spooking them into the hunter’s spears or nets. Something a one year old “wolf” can do — before most of the undesireable behavior starts showing up. Bred at a young age (and probably why we selected for more frequent breeding and earlier maturity) — as Serpell says, you only need one success out of several thousand. Once you have SOMETHING, then, like the fox experiment, getting “better” is not that hard. Dingo level is not that hard. Coppinger is spouting bunk. His arguement that wolves started as “pariah dogs” doesn’t add up — it’s like arguing that humans evolved from beggers becasue you can find beggars in every city and throughout all cultures and civilizations.
Coppinger produces a lot of bunk.
There also have been many very dog-like wolves. Adolph Murie had one: http://books.google.com/books?id=_jrDrKS4o-IC&lpg=PA45&ots=DXvKpqQsh-&dq=murie%20wolves%20of%20mt.%20mckinley%20wags&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q=&f=false