Comment by epilys
12 days ago
You are mixing up two concepts here, that of the domesticated species and the domesticated individual animal. The article talks about the former. The latter means taming an individual of a species. Dogs are by definition domesticated wolves and depend on humans for survival in general.
>Horses may have been domesticated twice
When I read the title, I was thinking I like a horse that's been domesticated the whole time :)
Former or latter, I don't want to actually participate in the full rodeo experience.
Plenty of dogs live wild mostly off the waste stream of humans, but they are not domesticated. Lets call them coyotes.
Let’s not. A feral dog is behaviorally very different than a coyote or a wolf.
A wolf pup raised by humans won’t be anything like a tame dog.
People whose animal experiences are limited to pets and zoos have many wrong ideas about how real wild animals are.
What about dingoes? The best guess is they were domesticated and then went feral some 5-8k years ago. These days, in places like Fraser island in Australia, you have big fences for campers to not get eaten by packs of those and you need to drive everywhere, they would not hesitate for a second if given a chance.
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Behaviorally very different. In other words, in just a few generations the distinctions we make ("dogs" "coyotes") are irrelevant.
> People whose animal experiences are limited to pets and zoos have many wrong ideas about how real wild animals are.
How are they? Really shy and prefer cermonial fights?
I would guess a stray dog is a bigger threat than a wild wolf that have not got its instincts breed away to have the fur in a special way.
(Note, I don't mean I'd rather be in room with a wolf than a stray dog. But that the wolf would bail 1 mile away from me.)
It's really interesting topic to discuss