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Pure Bred Dogs, Genetic Diversity and Diet
We were considering bringing a pup into our lives, so I dug deeper into breeds and genetics. In the process, I learned a few things. There is some real damage we humans have done through selective breeding. And to understand how it’s important to understand how we got here.
Dogs are the oldest animal species we first tamed, and later domesticated. They are descendants of wolves. The process may have happened twice and maybe as old as 40,000 years.
In some ways, it was a marriage of convenience. We liked to have guards, and wolves liked an easier meal. So who domesticated who may very well be a philosophical question. Regardless, tamer pups were bred with each other leading to easier to handle animals. We understand the process since it’s been repeated recently with foxes.
In the fourth selected generation, there appeared pups that responded to human by dog-like tail wagging. The offspring of the next selected generations displayed more and more dog-like behavior. In the sixth generation, there appeared pups that eagerly sought contacts with human, not only wagging, also whining, whimpering, and licking in a dog-like manner. Such foxes were assigned to the elite of domestication.
We have no idea how long it took early humans to get to domestic dogs. However, we under-estimate the observational…