What Would You Breed?
The Phantom’s pet, er, wolf
The first greeting I get on the beach every morning is from a dog.
A brown dog, or a black dog. Or a white one. An eager young male, or a slightly hesitant female with swaying mammaries.
They nose up to me even as I climb off my cycle and chain it to the lamp-post outside the public toilets. A few moments of nuzzling is all they want, a ruffling of the fur around the neck, a hug that holds their warm shanks to yours. Bison, the bhutiya who lived in the mountain home next to mine, was much more demanding. He appeared every morning as I sipped my coffee in the verandah, and leaned into me for his morning cuddle. Five minutes, the cuddle had to last. A few moments less, and he would poke his snout into my ribs till I completed my daily task. After, he would lower his fifty kilo bulk to the floor, and disappear into the furniture.
How did dogs become such ardent suitors for affection? They’re descended from wolves, right? Whom we know as ferocious carnivores that hunt in packs, and can bring down an elk. But we were hunters too, and especially during the last ice age*, about 30,000 years ago, when vegetation was scarce, we lived off the flesh of large animals, so-called megafauna. Wolves apparently lurked at the fringes of our camp fires, and fed off the remains of carcasses, the bits we wouldn’t eat. Or couldn’t - while wolves can live entirely on animal protein, humans can’t, and what their bodies needed most was animal fat.
Aside from this dietary complementarity with humans, wolves were among the most gregarious and cooperative species of carnivores. I didn’t know this till recently, but it explains why they hung around in packs, I guess. Also, there are wolves, and then there are wolves, what is called genetic variation. Those who had higher stress thresholds grew more comfortable hanging around humans. And those who were less aggressive were less likely to get chased away.
In time, wolves saw human encampments as home territory, growling when trouble approached; with their enhanced sense of smell, they could sniff enemies from miles away, long before our ancestors could. If camps were attacked, wolves and humans could join in defence. When hunting, they could join forces to bring down prey. A mutual dependence emerged, what the biologists call commensal evolution.
“The wolves changed in body and temperament. Their skulls, teeth, and paws shrank. Their ears flopped.” Ed Yong*
Perhaps more important than physical changes, the key pathway in the evolution of wolves was the emotional one - recurrent selection for individuals with a lower fight-or-flight response, and with a heightened ability to process emotions. Ed Yong again, “They gained a docile disposition, becoming both less frightening and less fearful. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces. They turned into dogs.” They learned to wag their tail upon spotting a friend, and to sink to the floor when content with a long cuddle.
In the beginning of our little tale, there were wolves, and there were wolves.
Now, there are dogs and there are dogs - “from one-pound teacup poodles to giant mastiffs weighing over 200 pounds. Beyond sheer size, body, limb, and skull proportions differ markedly among breeds*. ” Compare the dachshund - short of limb and long of body, to the whippet - who is all legs. Or the short-haired Great Dane to the Afghan hound, draped with a luxuriant carpet of its own pelt.
The diversity in dog types is vastly more than among wolves. Many biologists believe that it is more than in the entire order of carnivores. A great amount of research is going into determining the sources of this diversity. Much of it will be down to the climate and the physical environment in which these breeds of dogs emerged. Equally, specific traits were encouraged by human breeders, individuals selected for the heightened functional behaviour they could pass onto their offspring - hunting, herding, sniffing, guarding, seeing-eye, and most importantly, petting.
We humans have at least the same amount of behavioural diversity as dogs, I suspect. Certainly more than the wolves from which they descended. Almost inevitably, we are going to use gene technology to create humans with heightened traits that we deem desirable, maybe not in my lifetime, so consider this as a thought experiment:
If you could create a strain of human beings with heightened abilities and characteristics, physical or behavioural, what boxes would you tick? Allow yourself three ticks - and please do share them with all of us.
Unless paranoid secrecy is one of those desired traits.
Scientists call this the Last Glacial Maximum, which lasted roughly from 30,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, June 2016:
https://longreads.com/2016/06/03/a-new-origin-story-for-dogs/
AH Freedman, RK Wayne: Deciphering the origin of dogs
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-animal-022114-110937