A Secret Service agent walking into the White House might expect to get an ass chewing on occasion, but not literally… Joe Biden’s dog Major apparently bit Secret Service agents in the White House not once but repeatedly. Happily, the dog was able to go live with a “family friend” and the White House is now home to another, less vicious dog of lower rank, Commander.
I had heard that dogs may have been domesticated as a food animal at some point, which is a somewhat dark tale for the modern dog lover. This Independent article says new evidence tells a different story. First, Siberian wolves started sniffing around garbage in human settlements during the ice age. Then, they settled in. Although it might seem like humans would feel threatened by wolves in their midst, they may actually have helped defend the human settlements against other animals, including other wolves. (You can imagine there might have been a few misunderstandings early on where hungry wolves ate people and vice versa.) And then, because they are so smart, a specific pack of wolves would pass behaviors down from generation to generation, and in just a few generations you would have a population with distinct behavior and over time even a distinct appearance. At some point, humans did start training and breeding them to perform specific tasks, like pulling sleds.
I never thought to even wonder how many dogs there are in the world. But according to this article, about a billion. I don’t know if that is morally right or wrong. I like dogs. They are generally benign, kind-hearted creatures, and you could certainly make an argument that the world would not be as good a place without them. But they certainly have an ecological footprint. The article contrasts dogs and wolves, which have been systematically eradicated in many cases. So while dogs are neat creatures in many ways there are probably many wild creatures that might exist out there if they did not. Now we could examine this same moral conundrum with respect to a certain species of intelligent hairless ape…