Why most dogs are not native dogs
Interdisciplinary caninology is flourishing, investigating a variety of research questions, from the origins of domesticated dogs to the unique psychological aspects of dog-human relationships.
The use of owned dogs is attractive and beneficial for laboratory researchers working with live animals, and the convenience of eliminating the need to use these owned dogs to raise and maintain animals in the lab may mask their degree of inrepresentation in the global dog population.
That said, many of the dogs studied by canine scientists are native dogs, and for researchers who live in places where such native dogs predominate, it's worth noting that most dogs don't exhibit these traits.
As an anthropologist, the differences became apparent when I began fieldwork among the Mayanga people in Nicaragua as a background, and Mayanga dogs do not fit into the typology used in colloquial language to describe dogs. For example, the term "country dog" usually means semi-wild scavengers.
In contrast, Mayanga dogs have owners who give the dogs personal names, offer them, and allow them to sleep in their own houses. Some Mayangna have made significant contributions as hunting companions, but the nickname "working dog" does not seem appropriate because it shares a common connection with a particular breed of dog and its training.
However, despite the lack of a clear type classification, Mayanga dogs are very different from native dogs routinely studied by canine scientists, whether native or otherwise, and dogs exhibit complex phenotypes that are the result of a dynamic interaction between genes and the environment.
The diversity of domesticated dogs, which are largely man-made, seems to be underestimated and can be easily distinguished by referencing some of the anomalous features of modern dog life, such as commercial dog food and veterinary clinics.
The more subtle distinctions come from anthropological literature on human society, which shows different survival strategies and diets, heterogeneous communities of domestic and wild animals, and highly diverse ways in which humans interact with dogs. Therefore, to understand their evolution, it is helpful to study dogs in environments that include the following.
Most pet dogs in the United States and the United Kingdom are neutered, and in other European countries, such as Sweden and Ireland, the rate of neutering of pet dogs is not necessarily as high, sometimes even quite low globally, spaying varies greatly from country to country, and stray dogs can also be neutered as part of population and health management campaigns.
These activities have been implemented in different international settings, especially in urban areas, where only one of the hundreds of dogs that my colleagues and I examined in Nicaragua was neutered.
Historically, lack of sterilization has been common in world cultures, and in a recent ethnological study based on archives in the field of human relations, only 10 of the 144 cultures included ethnographic descriptions of sterilization. In past human societies, dog sterilization may have been rare.
Neutered dogs may have an impact on the expression of their phenotypic characteristics, in the North American sample, neutered dogs tend to live longer than intact dogs, given the expected endocrine consequences, psychologists and physiologists usually record the neutered status of dogs in the sample, however in some studies, intact dogs are rare.
Contemporary dog breeds date back to the mid-19th century, when breed clubs began formalizing standards for the corresponding breed, and managed breeding of dogs resulted in discrete breeds that exhibited different phenotypes in morphology and behavior.
These breeds are generally recognized in many societies, and about half of all dogs in the United States are considered purebred. Among canine scientists, researchers typically record the breed of dog in a sample, and in many studies, purebred dogs make up the majority of subjects.
Purebred dogs are rare in many human communities, including the Mayana community in Nicaragua, which, like other rural societies, make little effort to manage dog breeding.
As a result, dogs in this population differ relatively little in phenotypic characteristics such as stature, hair length, and morphology of tails and ears, and although dog breeding has been described as a recent phenomenon, there are still ancient dog breeds such as Salukis and Bassenji.
Other unique varieties may have proliferated in past societies but have not survived to the present. However, given the lack of trait management breeding of dogs in many modern human populations, it seems that throughout the evolutionary history of the species, most dogs have been dogs.
Samples from different populations are needed to fully understand the evolution of domestic dogs. Available evidence suggests that most dogs, whether in contemporary or prehistoric settings, are very different from native dogs.
Most dogs lack the unique genotype unique to modern breeds, and their ontogenesis occurs in environments that are very different from the social and ecological environments in which native dogs live. From endocrine to cognition, from a multi-dimensional point of view, the unique phenotype of domestic dogs has been shaped by this history.
Canine scientists have previously sampled different groups of dogs. For example, cognitive researchers sampled dogs in shelters and free-range dogs in foreign countries.
Geneticists have sampled semi-wild dogs and dingos in remote international settings and often find evidence that recent migratory dogs have widely mixed or replaced endemic populations.
bibliography
1. Tanksley, Genetic Structure of Purebred Domestic Dogs, pp. 44-51, 2017.
2. De Francis, Preventive Veterinary Medicine, pp. 192-201, 2010.
