Badc writes:
Progressive in this case is domestication, I remember an experiment by soviet scientists to domesticate silver foxes, the results was that the domesticated foxes had smaller snouts.
Robert, have you read about the domestication of silver foxes.
I think east Asian are the most domesticated race.
I think you may be correct. The more progressive races do seem more domesticated.
Yes I have read about those experiments. I think our cats and dogs have had domestication actually bred into them. That is, even when they are first born, they are already different from purely wild cats and dogs of the same species.
We think that our cats and dogs act good because we trained them that way, but I think there is more to it than that. They come out of the womb already part domesticated. In other words, with some more wild cats and dogs, you could raise them from birth and they might never settle down very much. It’s well known that some species just do not domesticate well.
Why are cats and dogs genetically domesticated? Maybe we have been breeding them that way for 9,000 years. Humans weren’t always so nice. When humans had pet dogs and cats 1000’s of years ago, some may have come out of the womb wild and never settled down. Their human owners may have just killed these wilder offspring because they are just not compatible to be pets. Or perhaps they turned them loose. Or perhaps they were likely to run away.
Possibly the very first dogs and cats to be domesticated were already pretty docile as this is what allowed them to be domesticated in the first place. Perhaps after the first domestication, pet stocks were repeatedly reinfused with new pets captured from the wild. The ones likely to be captured from the wild and adjust well in captivity were probably already more docile.
We don’t really have any wild cats and dogs to compare to our pets. Sure, we have bobcats, mountain lions, etc. and coyotes, wolves, etc. I have heard that coyotes don’t make very good pets. I saw a man at a gas station with a strange little dog that looked like a coyote. He told me it was in fact a coyote and its parents were killed and they took it in as a pet. I believe he said they didn’t make very good pets. I believe that the so-called dingo in Australia is simply Canis domesticus that has been running around wild for 40-50,000 years. They are just about the same species as Fido. I hear that dingos are pretty wild.
