One of my main takes from hearing Coppinger speak is how it doesn't really matter what Westerners do with their dogs from a species point of view. Dogs will flourish as scavengers around the world. Westerners may cause the purebred dogs to go extinct from closed breeding pools and all their health problems but dogs won't go extinct. It almost seems like just a big experiment. We have such a different relationship with dogs than most cultures around the world. In a way it is crazy to take a wild animal and try to get them to live in our homes and follow our social rules. And it's surprising how often it works!
Personally, I think having dogs is a benefit for people because it connects us to the animals and ecosystem more than if we lived only around humans. There are definitely cases where it goes wrong, dogs with behavior problems, dog bites, disease, etc. But there are also a lot of cases where it goes right. And then there are dogs with modern jobs.
I hadn't heard Coppinger say before that village dogs are like cuckoos because the juveniles need support from humans to survive. It makes sense and fills the gap in his research that at the Mexican dump they saw healthy pups and adults and sick adolescents.
Sorry, not very prolific tonight.
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That was certainly a fascinating part of the talk: the idea that dogs are terrible mothers, even in their natural evolutionary niche, they are dependent on humans to raise their young. All the other canids have complex social behavior for taking care of their young, but dogs don't. And you don't learn maternal behavior. So the successful adaptation of dogs is that they've figured out how to get another species to raise their young.
ReplyDeleteHe talked about how healthy the scavenger/dump dogs were in his book, but I really got it when he showed his photos of the Tijuana dump and rhapsodized about how robust and good looking the dogs were, comparing them to the lines of show dogs. Looking at them through the eyes of an evolutionary biologist, they DID look great, and a lot of purebred (artifical selection) dogs do look like freaks--and I'd put Opal as example no. 1. He called the dump a food and social paradise for dogs.
I was also fascinated by all the things he labeled as foolishness--sterilizing village dogs, or euthanizing them as a control measure, because there will always be more; the idea that dogs are attached to certain people--rather, they hang around you to get food.
Even tho' Coppinger was such a crank, albeit a very entertaining one, I still felt, hey we live in the culture we do, and I love having dogs around, so what can you do? I was very appreciative of Professor Blumberg's takeaway for pet owners: capture that 4-6 week socialization period.