Vargen blir hund (Engelska)

The wolf becomes dog

The wolf as a pet?!

To be able to have dogs as pets people at that time had to learn to live with the thought of having a predator, a deadly creature, in your house and amongst your food and children.

They also had to think about how they should train the wolfs to get rid of some of the bad behaviour.

 

Research and domestication

Domestication is when you change the species natural behaviour.

The domestication of wolves began with people taking care of wolf puppies and then starting to breed them after what the people wanted. That happened about 14 000 years ago in eastern Asia.

Now days they have been doing research on bones from different archeological dig outs and come to the conclusion that the domesticated dogs only come from wolves. But analysis has shown that wolves has been kept with humans for a longer period that 14000 years, from 25 000 years to as early as 100 000 years ago the first wolf was taken by humans.


To domesticate a species automatically changes the species, both appearance, temper, and behaviour, like it or not.

Since man chooses which animals to use in breeding, you can “select” the behaviour you want for the offspring to have. One of the reasons why it went so smoothly to domesticate the wolf is because they are very social and that they live in a pact and not in pair, but since they want to be the head of the pact when they are adults we have bred them to never become adults, mentally. That’s also why dogs often are so very playful even when they are old.

They keep much of their puppy behaviour such as barking and squeaking. This also does that the puppies have a shorter growth period and become fertile at a younger age, wolves aren’t fertile until they are about two years old. Ever since we started breeding we have gone towards the extreme, we like the extreme, German shepherd for example who gets a lower and lower back and whose spine even has changed. 

 

The dog as pet

During the time the dog has lived with humans it has been used to help us with many things, such as hunting, guarding, pulling, as a shepherd, for food, their coats and as pets. During most of the time we have studied the dogs to get exactly the dogs that we want, and trained them to be as we want them to be. We are still learning a lot about dogs and what they are capable of, like dogs who help people with special needs, dogs even work as lifeguards and save people who has been in an avalanche or such. Both man and dog has changed and started to like each other very much. And both man and dog has learned each others body language and expressions, you do see if your dog is mad or scared and the dog see if you are disappointed or mad at it. When the wolf where living in the wild and had a territory to defence it strolled at the borders to see if there had been any intruders, and that’s what it does when you are on your daily walks. And in the wild the wolf go some place safe and protected to give birth to their puppies and our dogs does the same thin, they want to lie in a safe place while giving birth.


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