In every dog there is a little wolf

In every dog, there’s a little wolf. That’s because all dogs were once wolves. And, man was essential to the change.

“No one knows exactly when the connection started,” said museum director and biologist Charles Knight. But, some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago a curious caveman or woman coaxed a wolf to take a piece of meat from his or her hand. Being both social animals an affectionate bond developed between the two, as well as trust and dependency.

At the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, a traveling exhibit in 2015 ‘Wolf to Woof’ included a replica of cave painting depicting humans and dogs hunting together. A nearby wood-carved statue depicts the loving embrace of a human and canine form, a personal relationship from 5,000 years ago etched in time.

The dog itself could be considered a sort of biological artwork of man. Over time, man began selecting certain pups over others and breeding dogs with certain characteristics together to create new forms.

Dogs are closely related to wolves and share many of the characteristics but humans have bred dogs for certain characteristics such as friendliness.

Dogs and wolves are genetically 99.9% identical. the domestic dog is an extremely close relative of the grey wolf, from which it differs by only ~0.04% in nuclear coding-DNA sequence, and no dog [mitochondrial DNA] sequences have been found that show closer kinship to other canid species.

Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and Admixture into HighLatitude Breeds ~ Authors Pontus Skoglund, Erik Ersmark, Eleftheria Palkopoulou, Love Dale´ n Correspondence skoglund@genetics.med.harvard.edu (P.S.), love.dalen@nrm.se (L.D.)  http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(15)00432-7.pdf

Yet, many livestock producers find it acceptable to slaughter the closest relative to dogs. Oh wait, I have forgotten that many ranchers claim they really care about their cows. They care about them so much as they haul them off to slaughter

#FollowtheScience #StandForWolves

~ L.G