Posted in carnivores, dogs, tagged Jamie Dutcher, Jim Dutcher, Living with Wolves, Sawtooth pack, wolves, Wolves at Our Door on November 24, 2009 |
I’ve always loved the documentaries about this pack.
I’ve also read the Dutchers’ book, which has pretty good insights into the intimate lives of wolves.
If you look at how their size and stature compares to the people in this film, it is very obvious how different these big game hunting wolves from the northern parts of North America are from domestic dogs.
But they are also similar.
Posted in carnivores, tagged bald German bears, giant short-faced bear, Leipzig bald bears, spectacled bear, Tremarctine bears on November 5, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Some weird medical condition is affecting the spectacled bears at a zoo in Leipzig. Check out the photos.
The bears are named Lolita, Bianca, and Dolores, and normally spectacled bears look more like this:
Spectacled bears are the last surviving member of a subfamily of bears called the Tremarctines. The most famous Tremarctine bear of all was the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus). That particular bear was the largest bear that ever existed, weighing as much as 2,500 pounds and standing over 5 feet at the shoulder. It had a broad range in North America from Alaska to Mexico.
Now, these poor bald bears in Germany are nowhere near as impressive as that animal.
But it is a mystery why these bears have gone bald. All are female, so their sex may have something to do with it.
It may also be a genetic condition. It could be their diet. But whatever it is, the bears are going to suffer in this winter.
Spectacled bears are vulnerable in their native range in South America, which is roughly the entire northern and central Andes. This is the only species of Tremarctine bear to survive into the modern era, and it is the only surviving South American bear.
But if one were seen in the wild, I wonder what some cryptozoologists would say.
I can only imagine.
Posted in carnivores, dogs, Unusual animals, tagged cougar, hunting dogs, mountain lion, Panther, Puma on November 4, 2009 |
Aaron Hall, "Lion Hunter of the Juniata" and founder of the legendary strain of Pennsylvania panther dogs.
I came across an account of an unusual breed of hunting dog that was developed in Centre County, Pennsylvania. This account comes from Extinct Animals of Pennsylvania by Henry Wharton Shoemaker. The text was originally published in 1907, but the actual account comes from period between 1845 and 1869 in which a legendary cougar hunter named Aaron Hall was said to have killed fifty “panthers.”
Hall’s legendary status had left him with the sobriquet “Lion Hunter of the Juniata.” He had styled himself as the central Pennsylvania version of Davy Crockett.
And like any great hunter of those days, he had a pack of hunting dogs that helped him pursue his quarry.
Unlike any other hunter of that day, though, he had bred a rather unusual strain of cougar hound.
His massive dogs were run in pairs that then pursued the cougar until they could catch it by the ears– one dog on each ear, very similar to how hog catch dogs are used. It is also very similar to the way that the borzoi caught wolves. The borzoi would grab the wolf by the sides of the neck, usually two dogs on either side.
The dogs were said to be the result of breeding old-type bulldogs, mastiffs, Newfoundlands, and bloodhounds together to produce a superior cougar hound. They dogs were said to have been so large that a former Pennsylvania game commissioner was able to ride one of them.
I have some issues with the veracity of these claims, but it is known that the mastiff-type dogs can be used to hunt large cats. Fila Brasileiros were used to hunt jaguars and South American cougars, and the Dogos Argentinos were also used to hunt cougars in their native country. Newfoundland dogs were very common in America at the time and were considered an appropriate dog to use for hunting various species of game, although waterfowling was their most common purpose. Bulldogs were probably chosen for their tenacity and ability to grip recalcitrant and powerful quarry, and bloodhounds have legendary noses. The mixture makes sense.
However, the story about the dogs grabbing the cats by the ears is a bit too far fetched for me to accept. A cougar is a very strong and agile animal. If cornered by dogs, it is going to fight very hard. Because its ears aren’t that large, my guess is that the dogs would have a very hard time holding the cats by the ears. They would simply be clawed to pieces, even if they did manage to get them by the ears.
Keep in mind that a cougar can kill a lone wolf, and it wouldn’t have very much trouble killing a domestic dog of any size. (There is a very good account of a cougar killing at captive wolf in Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s Wolves at Our Door.) Most modern cougar hounds tree the cats or hold them at bay. Very few of them engage in mortal combat with the cats. I seriously doubt that any dog would be able to fight a cougar until it was able to grab it by the ears.
Unless Hall or Sober were very small men, I seriously doubt that he could ride any dogs resulting from his crossbreeding. The biggest mastiffs have exceeded two hundred pounds, but if you’re crossing in smaller bulldogs, bloodhounds, and the slightly smaller Newfoundland of the day, it is very unlikely that anyone would be able to produce animals of that size.
Shoemaker wrote a lot about the folk culture of rural Pennsylvania, and theis story sounds a lot like mountain person’s tall tale. Mountain culture in Pennsylvania isn’t that different from mountain culture here, and I can tell you that telling stories like this one are almost de rigueur, especially when someone starts talking about his hunting dogs. Maybe Shoemaker was playing around with this lore, or maybe someone was playing a trick on him. After all, he was an outsider, a graduate of Columbia and a native New Yorker who had grown up in India. Such outsiders are very often told tall stories, for nothing can make a rural person with limited educational and economic opportunities feel better than when he or she gets some outsider to believe some outlandish story.
He does mention that many people of this region were keeping cougar dogs, but most of the dogs used to hunt cougars were “fices” or “whippets.”
One of the great ironies about cougars is that they were known for having a great deal of fear of dogs. Although they were capable of killing a dog easily, they normally would run if pursued by a pack of them.
Normally, these pursuits end with the cougar a tree and dogs barking at them. My guess is that if a cougar had found itself being chased by Hall’s cougar dogs, it would have run for the nearest tree before the dogs could even get close to it. This would have meant that it would have been next to impossible for the dogs to grab them by the ears. (Unless those horse-sized curs could also climb trees.)
I particularly like the story about the Pennsylvania panther dogs, but I am very skeptical that this story is real. Maybe Hall really did have big cougar hounds, but they didn’t hunt in exactly in the way described. Maybe they held the cats at a bay or pushed them into the trees. Some of them were probably much larger than the typical hunting dog of the region, and thus, they were given such an outlandish size.
Hall’s strain of panther dog went extinct shortly after his death in 1892. We can never really know for sure, but I think the chances of these dogs hunting in the way described are not very good. I can’t imagine that a cougar would allow itself to be held by the ears in such a fashion.
Posted in carnivores, dogs, Unusual animals, tagged Falkland Islands fox, Falkland Islands wolf, maned wolf, South American wild dogs, warrah on November 3, 2009 |
warrah or Falkland Islands wolf
Remember my post on the enigma of the warrah or Falkland Islands wolf?
I stated that we didn’t have the foggiest clue what its ancestry was, although early studies of its DNA suggested that it was derived from something like a coyote.
It has been speculated that the culpeo and the other zorros or wolf-like foxes of South America are its closest relatives.
Well, a new study was released yesterday that suggests that the warrah’s closest relative was the maned wolf. The lineage of the two species split 6 million years ago, when the ancestors of both species lived in North America.
Yes, South America might have a great diversity of wild dog species today, but all of its wild dogs descend from North American ancestors. Canids moved to South America 2.5 million years ago.
So the enigma of the warrah has been solved.
However, no one has found any North American canids that could be considered the ancestors of the warrah or maned wolf.
***
I need to say here that the maned wolf is one of the more bizarre wild dogs. In fact, I can’t think of a stranger animal for the warrah to count as its closest relative. Remember, the warrah looked like a dingo, a culpeo, or a coyote. Its appearance wasn’t that strange. It was the fact that it was located on isolated island that made people wonder about it. If it had been found on the mainland, it would have been instantly grouped with the South American zorros.
They stand over three feet at the shoulder but weigh only about 44-55 pounds. Their long legs are an adaptation to living in their grassland habitat, where the grass often grows too tall for a shorter-legged dog to see its prey.
Unlike other large wild dogs, the maned wolf does not form packs. A monogamous pair shares a territory, but they normally are not seen together in that territory. They apparently come together only to mate.
Also unusual for a wild dog of this size, over 50% of its diet is vegetable matter. One particular species of fruit, the “wolf apple (Solanum lycocarpum) is named because maned wolves like to eat it. In captivity, these animals have been fed like normal canids and then have developed bladder stones. Their bodies simply cannot metabolize such high protein diets.
Even more strangely, their urine smells like marijuana. Their urine contains a pyrazine, which also occurs in marijuana. It is possible that their urine gets this distinctive odor from the pyrazine.
The warrah’s only living relative is much stranger than it was!
***
Posted in carnivores, dogs, tagged coyote, coyote attacks, Taylor Mitchell on October 29, 2009 |
Yes, it’s true.
And while we know that such statements are poor comfort the victim’s loved ones, these attacks are very rare.
I disagree with the biologist who declares that there are no wolf genes in these coyotes. Actually, there probably are some wolf genes in these coyotes, as this study suggests. I don’t think there are any “pure” coyotes in the whole of the Northeastern US or Eastern Canada. They all have some wolf genes.
I know of at least one other fatal coyote attack in the US.
The real story behind only documented fatal wolf attack in North America is not clear.
I’m not even going to speculate. It could have been a garbage-habituated black bear. It could have been those garbage habituated wolves. (I personally don’t think there is a giant international conspiracy to protect the reputation of wolves, considering how freely people talk about the wolves that kill children in India.)
Posted in carnivores, tagged dog-fox hybrid, dox, Jackal, side-striped jackal on October 22, 2009 |
Note the very bushy tail and the white tip.
Now consider this account of a supposed dog-fox hybrid that was killed in Warwickshire, England, in 1906.
I think a really good case can be made that this animal was a side-stripe jackal pup, like this one. The head shape in the depiction of the “dog-fox” hybrid suggests that this is a side-striped jackal. The animal in question is said to be smaller than a fox, which suggests a juvenile animal.
Menageries of the day probably kept this species of jackal, which may have bred. Perhaps one of the pups escaped his parents’ cage and went wild in the forest. For that time period, I doubt that a young jackal could have been captured in Africa and taken to England while it was of that size. Because of the length of its transport to England at that time, if it had been caught wild in Africa, it would have already grown considerably by the time it arrived (and escaped).
I should also note here that red foxes cannot hybridize with dogs or any member of the genus Canis. They have often been reported, but they have never been able to withstand scrutiny. However, it might be possible that dogs could produce hybrids with South American canids, some of which are called foxes but really aren’t.
Posted in carnivores, dogs, tagged Arabian wolf, dingo, Indian wolf, wolf. dog on October 10, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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.
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