Natural History

Posted in Uncategorized, wildlife | Tagged domestication, sloth, two-toed sloth | 22 Comments

22 Responses

1. on April 27, 2010 at 1:47 pm Jess

   I saw that yesterday. Can you imagine going out to pee in the middle of the night and seeing that pop out at you?

   
   
   • on April 27, 2010 at 3:06 pm retrieverman

     Considering that those things bite and are quite aggressive, it would be a bit of a concern.

     
     
2. on April 27, 2010 at 3:54 pm Christopher@BorderWars

   I guess this goes toward the question of “what is domestication” but I wonder how a domesticated one of these would be different than a captured wild one.

   I think they fall into the edge of those sorts of animals that are manageable enough in their wild state and wouldn’t offer a great deal of additional benefit with generations of fluffy breeding.

   We really don’t ask a lot from most pet birds, fish, and rodents. I hear many birds and rats are actually quite smart, but their ability to interact is limited.

   I wonder what you could really do with one of these in the house.

   
   
   • on April 27, 2010 at 3:59 pm retrieverman

     You actually hit on the real problem with Coppinger’s theory. Why is it only dogs that appear to have been domesticated in this fashion?

     Coppinger’s theory is that animals can self domesticate simply by relying upon people for a food source.

     I am not so sure.

     When I see a genetically tamed raccoon, maybe.

     Or a genetically tamed two-toed sloth.

     
     
3. on April 28, 2010 at 1:07 pm Lane Batot

   IF animals “self-domesticated” by scavenging, we would have a plethora of such examples. If ONLY wolves, by some quirk of Nature were able to do that, we should still see examples of it occurring where wild wolf populations are in contact with human settlements–you don’t. Coppinger’s ridicule of people taming wolves and turning them into dogs, calling it the “Pinocchio theory”(Giuseppe-wants-a-real-boy-makes-a-wooden-one-and-by-a-miracle-it-becomes-real) irks me no end. So how did people get domestic cattle, sheep, goats, horses, water buffalo, camels, chickens, geese, ducks, rabbits, ferrets, pigs, cats, llamas, alpacas, turkeys, guinea pigs, and all the other zillion domestic animals that we have now if they were so incapable of this? How did they tame and use falcons, cheetahs, and cormorants to hunt/fish for them? Who were the crazy wise-guys that tamed the first elephants, for goodness sakes? Oh no, they all just “domesticated themselves” according to anyone who joins Coppinger in calling this process the “Pinocchio theory”…..

   
   
   • on April 28, 2010 at 5:54 pm Penin kulmilla

     Actually, you can still see some wolf popula that hang around in people’s gardens in Russian Karelia.
     I have heard that also in Finnish Eastern-Karelia it happens.

     I even heard wolves coming into gardens and to carbage in Mid-Finland, but it may be a provo.

     What is true, is that less than a 100 years ago happened this one.
     A Labradorian came out from his house in the dusk, only to find his dog pack doubled. He was about to get his gun, but didn’t, because watched a while the canines lying on the footsteps, couldn’t decide which one was a dog.
     It’s told by Dr. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell and there are many other same kind of documents he has witnessed.

     Since people have been so cruel to wolves, they can’t trust us too much any more. Only the less-taimebles have survived.

     
     
     • on April 28, 2010 at 5:57 pm retrieverman

       It’s a lot like this:

       
       
     • on April 28, 2010 at 5:58 pm retrieverman

       That’s actually my theory. LOL.

       
       
       • on April 28, 2010 at 6:57 pm Penin kulmilla

         THAT is a good story – even if it was yours lol

         
         
     • on April 28, 2010 at 5:58 pm retrieverman

       Your family is from Karelia, right?

       
       
       • on April 28, 2010 at 6:10 pm Penin kulmilla

         Yeah grand parents from both sides.
         And my ex-man was from there too, North-K., near Nivala the border line and the port to Russia.
         He had seen wolves few times in the yards there;
         and what do you think they were doing there.

         
         
         • on April 28, 2010 at 6:13 pm retrieverman

           Looking for food– garbage or cats.

           
           
           • on April 28, 2010 at 6:55 pm Penin kulmilla

             Wolves surely smell the people’s food in the house!
             The houses in the rural North-East are not so vaccuum.
             See, people make late dinners in their house -and wolves come to see if there could be something for them also.
             But the smell of food, that’s it.

             
             
4. on April 28, 2010 at 5:37 pm Penin kulmilla

   Lane B. once asked, if the wolf was self-tamed, why the fox then is not?
   Their natures are so different. Fox is not social, but wolf and human are amazingly equally social in their behaviour.

   I think we cannot tame animals anymore – we can do gene manipulation and via that make some new “useful” animals.
   Gotta say I object GM. The trad. breeding is not GM.

   I think behind the wolf domestication must lay instinctional motives.

   Of course wolves hung around and took benefits they could. They’ve been living in the hood since we were still hominis. This is a good start.
   But the exact act of taming?
   As a feminist, I’d vote for one theory -case where a woman who lost her baby found and adopted a pup. This pup protected home while men were hunting.

   Professor Erkki Pulliainen thinks that Neanderthals tamed the wolf. If they did, they didn’t need this to protect the women because they were hunting too.

   
   
   • on April 28, 2010 at 5:45 pm retrieverman

     I’m aware of Pulliainen’s theory.

     We do know this– wolves and hominids have been in the same areas for hundreds of thousands of years.

     Sometimes bones of wolves are found in the same caves that contain hominid bones.

     Maybe we’re reading too much into it.

     Maybe not.

     
     
     • on April 28, 2010 at 6:06 pm Penin kulmilla

       Yeah.
       Seems every nation has a creation theory were wolves play the main roles.
       Finno-Ugris, ancient Romans; do you know more?

       
       
       • on April 28, 2010 at 6:09 pm retrieverman

         I don’t know of any others, but I do know that my Germanic ancestors believed in a wolf apocalypse:

         http://www.musesrealm.net/stories/fenriswolf.html

         The Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians’ ancestors believed in this. I’m pretty sure Saxons had a similar story.

         
         
       • on April 28, 2010 at 6:12 pm retrieverman

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k

         
         
       • on April 28, 2010 at 6:12 pm retrieverman

         We have lots of myths and even modern urban legends about children being raised by wolves.

         
         
5. on April 28, 2010 at 6:28 pm Penin kulmilla

   In Kalevala-collection, there’s long poem about a woman who carries wolf pups in her womb.
   That is the way the wolves and the dogs were born.

   Do you know Indian legends?
   Eskimos seem to have a very practical relationship to the wolves. It was quite common a pack of wolves following a sledge full of meat, coming from a hunting trip. The Eskimos didn’t bother (this is again by Grenfell)

   
   
   • on April 28, 2010 at 8:47 pm retrieverman

     There is an Ahalimuit legend in Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf:

     http://books.google.com/books?id=eQQ0cxgL5bMC&lpg=PA125&ots=0uWYvwCYhl&dq=never%20cry%20wolf%20kaila&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&f=false

     It starts mid-way on 124.

     Caribou = reindeer.

     
     
6. on April 29, 2010 at 9:23 am Lane Batot

   Penin Kulmilla, you are quite right that wolves ARE still scavenging from human settlements today–areas in Italy are some of the ones I’ve read about, where some wolves get MOST of their food from human dumps. But the thing is, they are not changing physically or becoming more domesticated(unless they crossbreed with dogs), which is the basis of Coppinger’s theory–that wolves developed dog characteristics simply by having less of a flight distance to humans as an adaption to scavenging from them.–I. E. became tamer. And he uses the Balyaev fox experiment where foxes in captivity were selected only for tameness, and developed floppy ears, piebald coats, curly tails, etc. to support his theory. So it IS possible for foxes to do this, even though yes, they are not as social as wolves. But Coppinger also states that wolves became LESS pack oriented and social(and smaller in size) in order to compete for human scraps, and as foxes are already less social and smaller to begin with, IF this theory was correct, it seems they were tailor-made to “domesticate themselves”–but they never have. And Balyaev’s foxes were in cages being strictly selected by humans–hardly a good example for animals “domesticating themselves”! There are some intriguing theories that it was indeed WOMEN who started the domestication process by taking in and nursing wolf pups, and I find this much more plausible, and we have examples of peoples all over the world nursing and raising baby animals of all kinds in just this manner! So why is this so hard for Coppinger to grasp? His theory has numerous other holes–actually it has ZERO tangible proof of any kind, and that is why it irks me so how quickly and unquestionably it has been accepted by so many, and the older, more established theories(which DO have Archaeological and Anthropological evidence to support them!) have been discarded…..

   
   

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