Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [141]
This is similar to what was discovered by midcentury behaviorist researchers who exposed laboratory dogs to an electric shock from which they couldn't escape. Later, put in a chamber from which there was a visible escape route, and shocked again, these dogs showed learned helplessness: they did not try to avoid the shock by escaping. Instead, they froze in place, seemingly resigned to their fate. The researchers had essentially trained the dogs to be submissive and accept their lack of control of the situation. (They later forced the dogs to unlearn the response and end the shock.) Happily, the days of experiments wherein we shock dogs to learn about their responses are over.
Not on this list are hyenas. Dog-sized and -shaped, with erect German shepherd–like ears, and prone to howl and vocalize like many garrulous canids, hyenas are in some ways doglike, but are not in fact canids. They are carnivores more closely related to mongooses and cats than to dogs.
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Raisins are now suspected of being toxic to some dogs, even in small amounts (though the mechanism of toxicity is unknown)—leading me to wonder whether Pump was instinctively averse to raisins.
What (some) genes do is regulate the formation of proteins that assign cells their roles. When, where, and in what environment a cell develops all contribute to the result. Thus the path from a gene to the emergence of a physical trait or a behavior is more circuitous than one might initially think, with room for modifications along the way.
There is some debate over whether dogs should be considered a separate species from, or a subspecies of wolves. There is even debate over whether the original Linnaean classification scheme that demarcates species as a fundamental unit is still helpful or valid. Most researchers agree that describing wolves and dogs as separate species is the best current description. Although the two animals can inter-breed, their typical mating habits, their social ecology, and the environments they live in are very different.
Mitochondrial DNA are chains of DNA within the energy-producing mitochondria of cells, but outside the cell nucleus. They are inherited, without any change, from the mother by her offspring. The mtDNA of individuals has been used to trace human ancestry, and to estimate the evolutionary relationships among animal species.
There is also a large breed difference. For instance, poodles don't show avoidance behaviors or begin to play-fight until weeks after huskies do—when weeks represent a goodly chunk of the puppy's life. In fact, huskies develop more quickly than wolves in some ways. No one has studied how this affects their rapport with humans.
As the domestication process probably began with early canids scavenging around human groups—eating our table scraps—it is a particularly silly stance to feed dogs only raw meat, on the theory that they are wolves at heart. Dogs are omnivores who for millennia have eaten what we eat. With very few exceptions, what is good on my plate is good for my dog's bowl.
Temperament is used to mean roughly the same thing as personality, without the overtone of anthropomorphism. It is perfectly acceptable to talk about a dog's personality, if we mean the dog's "usual pattern of behavior and individual traits": behavior and traits are not exclusive to humans. Some researchers use temperament to refer to the traits as they appear in a young animal—the genetic tendency of the dog; while reserving personality to refer to adult traits and behaviors, the result of that particular temperament combined with whatever they confronted in their environment.
There is no evidence, however, that any currently existing breed can lay claim to being the descendents of the original breeds. Descriptions of both the Pharaoh and Ibizan hounds cite them as the "oldest" dog breeds, which claims seemed supported by their physical resemblance to the dogs of Egyptian paintings. However, their genomes reveal them to have emerged much more recently.
The named occupation