Pack mentality

As hard as it may be to imagine, dogs -- yes, all of them -- are the domesticated descendants of gray wolves.

Well, it's hard for me to imagine, anyhow.  I have three dogs whose wolf ancestry is, shall we say, rather well hidden.

This is Jethro.  He's half Plush Toy and half Dust Bunny.

This is Guinness, who is a full-blooded Tennis Ball Retriever.  He is also a very dapper gentleman.

And this is Rosie, who has had just about enough of your shit.

None of them, let's say, exactly screams out "Alpha Wolf of the Deep Forest Pack."  But nevertheless, all three of them descend from wolves that were domesticated by our distant ancestors something like twenty thousand years ago, in an encounter that went something like this:

Wolf (snarling): I will terrorize your villages, decimate your livestock, and eat your children!

Early human:  We have sofas, peanut butter, and squeaky toys.

Wolf:  ... I'm listening

What's fascinating is that despite a lot of selective breeding since then, wolves and dogs are still cross-fertile.  It's yet another example of how we think we have a good definition for the word species, then we keep finding exceptions, or at least situations that leave you thinking, "Wait... those are the same species?"  But yes: by the canonical definition of species -- a population whose members are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring -- dogs and wolves are the same species.

And new research by a team from the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution has found something even more astonishing; since domestication, dogs have been backcrossed to wolves multiple times, meaning that since domestication, wolf genetics has been reintroduced into dog lineages over and over.

Not always how you'd expect, either.  It isn't just "big dogs = lots of recent wolf ancestry, small dogs = not so much."  Mastiffs and Saint Bernards both show close to zero reintroduced wolf DNA.  Even chihuahuas have more (at around 0.2%).  The highest amount, unsurprisingly, is amongst the breeds associated with pulling sleds -- huskies, malamutes, Samoyeds, and Greenland dogs.  But most dog breeds have somewhere between two and five percent recent wolf ancestry, even the ones you might not suspect.

What's also fascinating is that the amount of recent wolf ancestry correlates strongly to personality.  Breeds were given descriptors by dog breeders and owners, and a significant pattern emerged.  Low recent wolf ancestry correlated to a breed being described as “friendly,” “eager to please,” “easy to train,” “courageous,” “lively,” or “affectionate.”  High wolf ancestry breeds were more likely to be described as “suspicious of strangers,” “independent,” “dignified,” “alert,” “loyal,” “reserved,” or “territorial.”

John Heywood's comment that what's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh apparently applies to dogs as well as humans.

It makes me wonder about how wolfy my own dogs are.  Jethro, I suspect, is pretty low on the scale.  High wolf ancestry is also correlated with intelligence, and -- to put not too fine a point on it -- Jethro has the IQ of a tuna salad sandwich.  I suspect Guinness is on the high end, because he's part husky, and also checks off most of the boxes for the personality traits of high wolf ancestry dogs.  Rosie is mostly Australian cattle dog, and she's probably in the middle.  All I know is that she's extremely sweet, stubborn as hell, and can give you a reproachful look that makes you feel like you have disappointed not only her, but all of her ancestors.

In any case, this is all an excellent example of introgression -- where populations that initially come from a common ancestry are repeatedly backcrossed to the wild type.  And that, plus twenty thousand years of selective breeding, is why we have the great variety of dogs we have.

But you'll have to excuse me.  Guinness wants to play ball.  I wonder if "extremely demanding and will not take no for an answer" is a wolf trait?

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