Did We Domesticate Dogs, or Did Dogs Domesticate Us?

A post by "Blake the Megalomaniac" To see more posts click here

When I reflect on it, the way I come up with posts and the way I used to come with posts is vastly different now; during it’s infancy, this infinite space where we come to share our ideas and thoughts (ideally) with you in hopes that you will reciprocate that feedback with your own opinions on our ideas and thoughts, was cluttered with meaningless commentary on mundane events.  I would go as far as to say that when scaling the web for ideas, I wrote more than I actually read (everyone knows you can’t be a good writer without being a good reader).  Now it seems when I scour the internet, I read much more than I actually write and as a result I produce less.  However, with the plethora of knowledgeable contributors the good news is I’m afforded that luxury.

We all know that AOL, one of the internet’s four fathers, has seen a steady decline.  Thanks to Time Warner and a new focus, the one-time internet service provider remaines relevant somehow.  In an article from Sphere.com, which is a subsidiary of AOLnews, Stuart Warner presents the case as argued by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Jon Franklin in his book, “The Wolf in the Parlor” (Henry Holt, 2009) that man and dog have always had a symbiotic relationship that began back with cavemen and wolves.

Well, any chance to speak on dogs is a chance I will take because I’m a certified dog lover.

To boot [link]:

“. . . Dr. Ray Coppinger, an animal behaviorist expert, argued in the book “Dogs” that the wolves began to domesticate themselves as they learned to live around humans. “It was natural selection,” he said in the New York Times several years ago. “The dogs did it, not people.”

Franklin suggested, though, that humans did play a role in the selection process. Sometimes, the wolf cubs made for a convenient dinner. The cuddly ones were less likely to meet the end of a club.

He noted something else unusual was happening then. The man in the photos death occurred near the end of the ice age. About the same time, fossils show, the human brain was shrinking by as much as 10 percent. Yet we got smarter. “Suddenly and inexplicably we began to herd, dig, build, draw, plan and invent … we became uncontested masters of the planet,” he wrote.

He believes that our evolutionary dance with the wolves made it all happen. As wolves became dogs — as the genetic research of Dr. Robert K. Wayne of UCLA has shown — they herded our flocks. They warned us of nearby predators. They helped us hunt more efficiently. That gave us time to think.

Dogs, Franklin reasons, made us better people. . . .”

While I haven’t read the book or completed any first-hand research, the article seems to make sense and further the old saying that Dog is Man’s Best friend. So while women may be overtaking men in the workforce, dogs have overtaken women in the household.

udothedishes, then repeat . . .

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