This animal is a Serengeti golden jackal.
Yes. They do look like coyotes.
Not all golden jackals look like coyotes, but some really are hard to tell apart from their North American cousins.
Golden jackals are much more closely related to wolves and coyotes than to the other two species of jackal. The side-striped and black-backed jackals are very distantly related to the other members of the genus Canis. They are found only in Africa, while the golden jackal is found in North and East Africa, a huge chunk of Asia, including the entire Middle East, and part of Europe.
During the Pleistocene, there are fossil records of what appear to be golden jackals (not coyotes) in North America, which would have been a weird situation. I’d hate to have to identify wild dogs in that particular environment!
I have never seen a verified record of a hybrid between a dog, wolf, dingo, or coyote and one of those two Africa-only jackals.
I have seen photos of dogs that supposedly are, but no one has ever performed any genetic tests of them. It’s just assumed that because certain pariah dogs in Africa have jackal features, then they must have jackal ancestors.
However, it is much more likely that the similarities are the result of sub-Saharan African dogs evolving to live in the same environment as the black-backed and side-striped jackal.
***
Black-backed jackals are fierce little critters. They totally dominate the side-striped jackals. The two animals are almost never found in the same environments, because the because the black-backed bullies drive the side-striped jackals out.
However, it’s a different story where black-backed jackals and golden jackals share a range in East Africa. Black-backeds must share with the goldens.
***
Many years ago, I saw footage of both black-backs and goldens scavenging the same carcass.
It was really strange to watch.
Here we had the cosmopolitan golden jackal, a close relative of the wolf and coyote, eating with an animal that is the oldest extant member of its genus.
It is almost like humans sharing a meal with Lucy or maybe even Paranthropus.
The two jackals species were about the same size, but the goldens had larger heads. The goldens also used the “threat gape” and the tucked tail and arched back posture that coyotes use as a dominance display.
The black-backeds were basically just rude guests.
They ran in and out and occasionally got into nasty fights with each other.
Because the golden jackals have bigger heads, I’m pretty sure they really damage a black-backed jackal. And I’m sure the the black-backeds knew this.
They didn’t mess with the goldens.
It was a very weird scene.
It was like watching two branches of an evolutionary family being reunited.
I wonder what these animals think of each other.
I’m sure they know they are not members of the same species, but I can conjecture that they somehow recognize some similarity.
I am reminded of the time when a three-month-old Miley came faced to face with a gray fox– an even more distant relation to her than black-backed jackals are to golden jackals.
The two animals just stared at each other for about 30 seconds. You could read both of their eyes. Both creatures were intrigued and frightened at the same time. This was the first gray fox she had encountered, and I’m sure that this was the first golden retriever puppy this gray fox had ever seen.
These animals have no knowledge of our sophisticated Darwinian theory.
But their noses, their eyes, and their ears surely spoke of some ancient commonality.
A sense that I cannot imagine, but can only catch glimpse of in my psyche.
My mind tells me that I am a primate, that I share a large percentage of my DNA with the chimpanzee and the bonobo, two species that could never safely live in my world. Yet I share my life with dogs, who fit so nicely into our culture constructs and various contrivances we call civilization.
I also am more closely related to that recently discovered titi monkey than I am to the domestic dog, a creature my species has known for tens of thousands of years.
Yet is the dog that feels like a family member.
I know more about those animals than I know about my own primate brethren.
And yet when I look at dog and I look at man, I am still confounded.
We know so much, yet know so little. We are so close, yet so far away.
We are closer than the black-backed and golden jackals feasting on carrion. We consider each other to be social partners, even family members, but the jackals have a common Canisness that I can never experience with another species.
I can’t imagine feeling as close to a chimpanzee as I do to my dog.
I am descended from the ape that became a wolf and then took over the world.
And that may be why I feel this greater commonality with the dog than I do any primate.
Maybe this is why man feels so alone among animate creation. We know no commonality with other species with which we share a close common ancestry, and the species with which we share the greatest commonality in terms of our behavior isn’t a close relative.
So we hold onto dogs to remind us of that one time when we part of something else, when we were not separate from the rest. The dog is our connection to the other creatures, not the chimpanzee.
[…] The answer. […]
So THAT’S where Golden Retrievers come from! Golden Jackals! It is all now so obvious!
Thank you, Konrad Lorenz!
LOL.
Have some old canine books from 1970 -80s. In them, always mentioned the golden jackal as as close relative to dog – and so, also to the s.c. turf-dogs – and finally to our spitzes too.
So, Lane, not only to the Golden retrievers.. -lol-
It is becoming evermore apparent we became who we are because of the Dog. A couple of Australian anthropologists put forward this theory 20 years ago, they where instantly scoffed at. How things have changed. Some paleo-anthropologists are starting to wonder if it is the dog that enabled Homo Sapien to beat out Homo neanderthalensis as there is no evidence the Neanderthal had domesticated animals of any kind. This speculation is predicated on establishing a time frame for when modern humans first had dogs. Right now it could be as much a 40,000 years. The last traces of Neanderthal disappeared about 30,000 years ago so there is a 10,000 year overlap when Modern Humans could have had the use of the superior hearing and noses of the Dog which would give them a massive advantage in hunting success. In times when there is plenty of game to hunt this would not have be that big an advantage, but in times of scarcity it would mean the difference between life and death. In the massive climatic fluctuations that have been documented to have happened at the end of the last ice age such scarcities would have been the rule.
Retrieverman I agree with you I feel no familial connection to any of the Great Apes. To be honest about it the behavior of most primates repels me. But with any canine species I feel a deep understanding and kinship.
Wayne and Vila have produced genetic analysis that suggest dogs are over 100,000 years old.
I’m skeptical of that early date
But it is much earlier than the Coppinger thesis.
The only thing about that Australian study that bothered me was the discussion of brain size.
You can get too worked up over that.
Not the right place for this, but here is a debate among bird dog people about the ruffed grouse in W. Va. that I thought you’d have interest in:
http://www.gundogforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=25042
Interesting.
I’ve seen more ruffed grouse this year than normal.
It must be their boom year.
I have always believed that the downfall of the fur industry had to do with the downfall of the ruffed grouse.
People kept fox and raccoon numbers under control. Now there is no incentive to do so.
I don’t know about blasting raptors, but a lot of those species aren’t endangered at all but are protected under the various treaties.
I don’t know why we couldn’t do some modest harvesting of raptors and not really cause much trouble.
The words in this post rang so true for me.
When I was a kid, my mother read Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”. It’s a popular easy to read story about a big dog named Buck, who was dognapped and sold to gold miners in Alaska to be used as a sled dog.
It tells of his transformation back and forth between a tame dog and a feral dog. It speaks of the pull of nature, the Call of the Wild, of the awakening of his instincts, and how this triggered his instincts to try to find a way to wake them up more.
But then Buck would feel the pull of Love, of love for people, for one man.
The book also, mentioned the desire to work that some of the huskies felt.
I’m sure my dad wanted me to be like the huskies who love their work, but I felt with Buck.
The Gutenberg project might have it on-line?
We probablly have packed up with canines since before a period of time that we had any real culture at all. So dogs have been part of our cultural development all along.
It is often said that dogs gave up being culturally canines to be with us, but we probally did give up being primates to co-evolve with dogs.
I too simply could not work with chimps. And monkeys disgust me too, ick. But I am against torturing the poor creatures in experiments.
To me, monkeys are wild animals, but dogs are part of the family, and wolves are part of the family of the spirit within, if you know what I mean?
I believe that some peoples transferred their attachment to horses, and even call the horse “brother”. Maybe that’s why men like women with long hair and women wear their hair in pony-tails? Somewhere inside, their ‘spirit’ (their instincts) are linked with the mental image of a horse?
Can you feel running with the wind in your face, galloping bareback on a horse across the plains? Snooping through the forest on a horse, watching when he turns his ears towards the sound of a broken twig? Can you smell his sweat and know it is good?
Hawks, falcons, owls, hold the ability to cause some people to identify with them. Have you ever stood on a hill, and wondered what the circling bird sees from so high up?
He sees everything below him, even when he appears as a dark little dot, a period, in the vast deep blue of the sky. He soars and our heart soars with him.
He is the first rung on the pull to space, yet he will still be above us on the ladder upward, when our feet stand on red dust of Mars.
He is our little brother too. Has not the United States chosen an Eagle as their symbol? Have not other nations chosen birds of prey as their symbol too?
We chose him, he was our gun, in a time before guns. Now we have real guns, and our little brother, the birds of prey, can fly free, as it was meant to be.
This is why when you speak of ‘harvesting’ or hunting raptors, people growl at you. They are part of us, our feathered wolves.
And cats? Some people love them and some people hate them. Cats are not us, but they are our friends too.
Like parts of our brains have a place to register colors, emotions and sounds, so there must be a place for “cat”.
Have you read how some baby birds will hide from a hawk above them, but not other types of birds?
Born inside of some little birds is an idea that pops into their heads before they are even old enough to leave the nest – it is a born-in image of a hawk and with this image is the feeling of fear.
One experimentor put a painted cardboard bird on a clothes line above a nest of baby birds. If he pulled it head first, it made the baby birds hide, but if he pulled it tail first the baby birds did not hide. The little bird brains knew.
In us are animals, not real animals, but powerful anyway.
They are like archtypes. Like the “monsters of the id” they influence us, and not finding them within, deprives us of some of what we were meant to be.
Cats are linked to the darkest part of the night, both good and bad. Good if you are guarding your fields of grain from rats, and from wild grain eaters that sneak in after dark. Bad if they are large carnivors coming to eat you.
For mentally, what is the difference between the image of a little cat near you, and a tiger a longer distance away?
Horses and small cats hold their place in our minds from a time of harvested foods, as do birds of prey.
Big cat images are probally in a more primorial spot in the brain, a place where sabor-toothed tigers have their image.
But the dog? His image is all over us, even in ‘our hearts’, thats is to say, his image is paired with emotion.
Yesterday I caught the tail end of a program (on NatGeo?) about the Mongolian peoples and their horses. The “windhorse” figures prominently in their prayers…it is a symbol of the soul, of luck, of good fortune. As a nomadic people, their tough, sturdy little horses (we’d call them ponies) are essential.
Mongolia is a big time horse culture.
They also have the only truly wild horse in the world (Przewalski’s– look just like the horses on the cave painting as Lascaux).
Domestic horses will crossbreed with them and produce fertile offspring, despite having a different chromosome number. Domestic horses are derived from the Tarpan horse that was once common throughout Eurasia. They don’t exist anymore.
My favorite of these ponyish domestic horses from Asia is the Yakut horse, which lives in the taiga of Siberia. The Yakut people, who call themselves the Sakha.
Compare:
It’s funny. I’ve had two separate people (a rural mail carrier, and a vet) say that they have seen several wild bobwhite coveys in the last month. If this is a trend, it’d be a really big deal.
I was out dog training in August on a small FL farm that is being managed for turkey and quail. I was asked help out and shoot at any coopers hawks that were attracted by my pigeons. I am glad i didn’t see any. Not sure I’m ready to take that next step, but I agree with it in principal.
Killing wild predators to boost game for sport hunting humans, to me, is incredibly short-sighted and selfish! DON’T SHOOT THE HAWKS!!!!! It SEEMS a simple solution, but it rarely works out quite like people think, because short-sighted humans do not know or take everything into account. I bet those hawks kill and eat a lot of rodents. Rodents raid gamebird nests and eat gamebird eggs. For the occaisional bird the hawks take, they end up doing gamebirds a bigger favor by eliminating nest raiders(they also eat snakes–many of which are also nest raiders). This attitude was taken with foxes on one heavily managed Bobwhite quail area once, and the native rats became so populous(after the foxes were exterminated) they devastated the quail population by eating eggs. ANOTHER such incident happened with trout fishermen wanting to get rid of otters to boost trout numbers. They successfully eliminated otters from their streams, and the trout populations plummetted! Why? Even though otters will nail the occaisional trout, they eat a helluva lot more crayfish, which, as these fishermen found out, eat lots of trout eggs. So, hunters, don’t be greedy! Enjoy the predators, don’t try to control or exterminate them!!! Understand Nature has always and will always fluctuate–learn to be tolerant and patient. Manmade problems like feral cats? Well, okay, but those natural coyotes are doing a good job handling that problem(which really used to be a factor for quail before the coyotes “invaded”…). The BEST thing you can do for gamebirds(or ANY wildlife) is to protect and increase HABITAT!!!!! Build it, and they WILL come!
It doesn’t bother me, if we are sport-hunting raptors.
We trap foxes for fur.
I don’t know why these animals get special dispensation.
All small predators are controlled in this manner.
Not for sport-hunting alone.
Just so that their numbers don’t become too excessive.
I wish we lived in the verdant wilderness the Native Americans had, but we don’t.
Some things are finite.
Wish the same analytical number-based controlling could go with ALL the things touching nature concerving.
Man’s controlling or intervening “the natural order of nature” has already led to far too many disasters on this globe! :(
Hawks(and other raptors) get shot plenty–you don’t need to encourage it by having an “open season” on them! That’s why they had to be so strictly protected in the first place,because, like the attitudes toward many predators(as threats or competition) too many people try to totally eradicate them. Shoot them for sport? Well, most gamebirds, at least, are EATEN by responsible hunters–who wants to eat a hawk? And to me, if you don’t eat it, and it’s not threatening you or your livlihood(and one should TRY to be more tolerant and understanding there if possible–don’t shoot a hawk because you think it MIGHT go for your chickens….) then killing it just for “fun” is (again, to me) somewhat unethical. To me, this shows no respect for life or Nature. Besides, as I said, things are usually much more complicated, and such solutions often cause more problems in the long run. I always ask the question of a wild predator vs. human sport hunter–who really NEEDS the prey item? The wild predator, or the human hunter out for entertainment and adventure? I believe in NOT interferring, unless some population of critters is totally degtading the habitat for themselves and everything else, and as a desperate measure, MUST be culled. And, ironically, it is HUMANS that need to be controlled more than any other critter on the planet!!!!
I think people who have pheasant preserves shoot tons of hawks. Same with anyone who has gamebird shooting as part of their income.
I personally would like to see this made legal and strictly regulated. Its not like those areas where gamebird preserves are the entire country.
There is a lot of animus in the gamebird preserve community towards the laws that protect hawks. And yet many of these hawk species are not endangered in the least.
The ones to watch out for are not the buzzard– by that I mean the red-tailed hawk. It actually is a buzzard. It’s not a big time gamebird or chicken predator.
The ones to watch out for are the three species of goshawk– the sharp-shinned, the Cooper’s, and the Northern goshawk.
Of course habitat can be managed so that gamebirds have lots of places to hide.
I am not for predator persecution. I’m not for what Sarah Palin did to wolves in Alaska. That’s stupidity.
I’m just saying in areas that people set aside to hunt birds, they should be allowed to institute some modest predator controls of non-threatened species.
I’m sure the fur industry kept the numbers of ruffed grouse high for many years.
Now, the fox-chasers will throw a fit if you shoot a fox.
Shooting a fox doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.
“And, ironically, it is HUMANS that need to be controlled more than any other critter on the planet!!!!”
Lane, quite true!
There is not enough FOOD in some parts of the world to feed the population.
There are not JOBS enough for the people to try to make a decent living.
There is no EDUCATION available for the poorest/weakist – girls/women especially.
And – I think – the equal opportunity to EDUCATION is one of the most important issues.
Oh, well didn’t I get carried away – but that’s how it is IMO…
The problem with most hawk shooters is they CAN”T tell the difference between hawks–they just shoot anything and everything that looks like a hawk! Predator control programs are often based more on emotion than biological fact–take the wolf(and coyote) programs to help increase ungulates for humans to shoot. Again and again this has been done, and if not maintained and continued to virtual extermination(definetely unethical in my eyes), all it does is only very temporarily reduce numbers, which then tend to INCREASE beyond what they were to begin with! This is especially apparent in wolves, which do much to regulate their own numbers quite effectively. When packs are disrupted by these “controls”, more of the scattered individuals will mate and produce offspring than would have ordinarily, where the Alpha pair of a pack tends to suppress all but their own mating. Although this was “discovered” by modern studies, it was known LONG before, by the old time wolfers out West, who made their living on wolf bounties, and realized full well that such behaviour was a form of job security for them! Until the wolves had all been exterminated eventually, that is……It is well known that coyotes respond to “control” by having larger litters, and also more individuals in any area producing than otherwise would, because they would have been suppressed by older, more dominant coyotes. Such pressure also creates warier, more savvy animals that get harder and harder to “control”, and coyotes have certainly proven that over and over! They basically have little or no protection wherever they occur, and they are more populous than they ever have been, and with an enormously wider range! Of course coyotes are not hawks, but that is just as an example as to how such control programs rarely take the actual facts of the animals’ behaviour and reproduction into account, and unforeseen consequences that can occur. Besides, I still say killing anything that you don’t plan to eat, and isn’t bothering you in any way, just for the helluvit, is unethical and makes hunting look even worse than it already does to the general, urban, Peta-ized public–who DO outnumber hunters(by a HUGE margin), and look for any excuse to vote them out of existence!
I’m not in favor of massive controls of large predators.
But the smaller ones can be controlled in limited areas.
I live where no one thinks of shooting foxes or raccoons because hounds chase them.
As a result, those animals are pretty much left alone.
In the 60’s and 70’s, those animals were not endangered but they weren’t incredibly common.
That’s because of fur prices.
Trappers and other furtakers took large numbers of these animals, and the number of ruffed grouse was unbelievably high.
Then trapping went downhill, and those animals had numbers that recovered– to carrying capacity, to be sure.
Modest predator control doesn’t bother me.
I’m not against hunting wolves.
I’m not saying that I would, however.
A much larger problem for upland game birds is the West Nile Virus. Here in Wyoming it has decimated The Sage Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) population and it has been a real fight to keep environmental groups from getting them declared an endangered species. These groups profess their concern over the Sage Hen but their real agenda is to close off oil and gas production and stop coal companies from open pit coal mining.