what happens if you raise a dingo puppy as a normal dog? 🤔
IIRC feral horses do fine since genetically they haven't un-domesticated themselves, wonder of the same is true of feral dogs
interesting! wasn't aware of that about cats — any tips on where to read more about this? my impression was that with cats it's more about socialization in the first 4-6 weeks of life than being of a feral lineage but i am in no way an expert and might well be mistaken
I don't remember the particulars but the short answer is no. The long answer is that people have tried.
Doing a quick double check of new science suggests they're not actually domestic but a common ancestor to domestic dogs.
interesting, thanks! if you're doing Science Checks would you mind linking what you're looking at? my google-fu, never strong, has become considerably weaker since search engines went to shit, but I'd be interested to see the literature
NGL, I started with Wikipedia but I followed up by looking at other articles. I use ddg so my results aren't completely fucked by bad ai
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
"start with Wikipedia" is a thing I'm used to with history but not in the habit of doing with the physical sciences, i need to get better about that
thanks!
(also I too use DDG but it's always been clunkier than google and it too has gotten noticeably worse)
My favorite genre of post is someone talking about how they found a lost dog and are trying to nurse it back to health and it's so scared and then they show the most MISERABLE looking coyote.
Like, the poor thing KNOWS it's not in danger but is in some foolishness.
BTW, the origin of "The dingo ate my baby!" originates to the Azaria Chamberlain case in 1980, where a family insisted that a dingo snatched their 9-week-old daughter from a tent, but people were convinced the mother murdered her, & she went to prison (long story short: it actually was a dingo).
It was only sheer luck that she was released from prison. A climber fell to his death at Uhuru and police went searching for his remains that might have been dragged off by dingoes. They found an area with dingo lairs, and there found Azaria's missing jacket.
It was awful. The parents were 7th Day Adventists, & rumours were widespread that they practiced infant sacrifice. Azaria was claimed to mean "Sacrifice in the Wilderness" (it doesn't). The mother was accused of being a witch, & the fact that she dressed her daughter in a black dress was "evidence".
The public was out for blood, and the initial inquiry which cleared them was dismissed. A bogus blood test for fetal haemoglobin was used to claim she was murdered in the car (9 week olds don't even have fetal haemoglobin). Witnesses testified to seeing dingoes, & every witness believed the family.
did you ever see that documentary where like Russian scientists were raising foxes. and they had one group where they started with foxes but only let the nicest foxes breed with nice foxes all the way down? they basically speedran domesticating foxes into lapdogs?
also there was a mean fox group
and they literally started convergent evolving into dogs!! their ears got floppy!! their tails changed shape!! they developed mottled coloring!! untold consequences for evolutionary biology!!!
kelpies are half scottish collie and half dingo. they live a really long time and they can JUMP. my bigger dog mika has a little kelpie in her and I can attest that she does jump 4 feet into the air and does it for fun
