Current Facebook Group is shutting down

Due to my more liberal moderating of my Facebook group, I have had a severe infestation of trolls, coming from a group appropriately called “The Dog Snob Rejects.”

Because I cannot ferret out who is doing screen shots to that harpie-filled den of soulless fockin’ eejits, and drama queens I am deleting the current Facebook page for this blog on Saturday, and I will revive it with a more selective group.

I’m sorry for any convenience this might cause.

Also, Facebook needs a better system to report harassment and bullying.

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Ivy enjoying Deep Creek Lake

Ivy was having fun with the family (including Cammie the Jack Russell) in Western Maryland this weekend:

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Is the Virginia opossum the only marsupial native to North America?

The yapok or water opossum is a marsupial that ranges into Mexico and Central America.

Americans are an unusually insular sort of people. We fail at geography big time. Don’t ask the average American what the capital of Canada is.  Don’t tell tell us that Mexico City is the largest city on the continent.

“Because Mexico ain’t on our continent!”

That attitude even affects how we view nature.

When I was a little boy, I accepted without any question that North America’s only marsupial is the Virginia opossum.

It seems this claim is so widely-accepted that it is usually mentioned within the first sentence of any description of the species.

There is, of course, a big problem with this description. North America isn’t just the US and Canada.

This is North America:

Yes. All that territory from Mexico to Panama is part of North America, and in those countries, there are multiple species of marsupials. Central America has 11 species. Mexico alone has has 8!

It is correct to say that the only marsupial in the US and Canada is the Virginia opossum, but it is geographical ignorance that only an American could conjure that says the Virginia opossum is the only marsupial found on the continent.

So when you see someone saying that Virginia opossums are the sole representatives of marsupials on this continent, realize that this person hasn’t thought through what he or she is actually saying.

Or is totally unaware that there isn’t continent between “North America” and South America.

There is also a subconscious racism at work, which sees only a community with Anglo-America as the true North America and casts aside that which lies to our south as being the other.

It may all be a silly little thing, but it grinds my gears.

And when we write about nature, we need to be more careful with our language.

 

 

 

 

 

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The problem with using modern wolves in dog domestication studies

Gordon Buchanan with a wild arctic wolf on Ellsmere. Photo by the BBC.

For really long time, the mystery of human bipedalism vexed us. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are all knuckle-walking apes, and there was an assumption that the common ancestor of all three species was a knuckle-walker. At some point, the lineage that led to our species rose up on its hind legs, perhaps to make it easier to gaze over tall grass, and we became bipedal.

The current thinking, though, is that humans never derived from any knuckle-walking ape. Instead, the common ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos was likely a brachiator.  The modern brachiators are the gibbons and siamangs, the so-called “lesser apes.” These animals are highly arboreal, and because they lack tails, they rely upon their long limbs to move swiftly through the trees. When on the ground, brachiators walk bipedally, swinging their long arms to the side for balance.

Humans evolved bipedalism from these brachiators, while the chimps and bonobos became knuckle-walkers. In this scenario, humans never were knuckle-walkers, and it is misleading to think that humans rose up on our hind-legs from creatures that moved like chimpanzees.

What does this have to do with dogs?

Well, there have been quite a few studies that have compared dogs and wolves that have been imprinted on humans from an early age in hopes that we might figure out the domestication process from studying how tamed wolves behave when compared to domestic dogs.

These are interesting studies, but I think they oversell what they can answer.

It should be of no secret that I am very much a skeptic of the Raymond Coppinger model of dog domestication. His model contends that dogs necessarily evolved from scavenging wolves that gradually evolved not to fear people and then became village dogs. Our specialized breeds are thus derived from village dogs that were later selectively bred.

Coppinger thought that wolves were just too hard to domestic without this scavenger-to-village dog step that lies between truly wild wolves and their evolution to domestic dogs.

Modern wolves are hard to tame. They must be bottle-raised from an insanely early age.  Coppinger thought that it would be impossible for people living during the Pleistocene to provide that kind of care for young wolf pups.

Like the people who assumed that humans evolved from knuckle-walkers, Coppinger assumed that wolves that exist today are good models for what wolves were like during the Pleistocene. These wolves are reactive and nervous to the point of being paranoid. It is well-known that many wolves won’t even attempt to den near human settlements, and if they catch wind of humans, they soon leave.

These animals would not be easily tamed by anyone, much less people living with Stone Age hunter-gatherer technology.

I generally accepted his arguments, and in the early days of this site, I largely parroted them.

A few years ago, I was watching a documentary about the tigers of the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest that straddles the border between India and Bangladesh. These tigers are notorious for their man-eating behavior, and there have been many theories posited about why these tigers so readily hunt man. Among these is the argument that the Sundarbans tigers drink so much salt in their water intake that it destroys their kidneys, which disables them and makes them more likely to hunt man.

But the documentary contended that the real reason these tigers are more likely to hunt man is that all other tigers descend from populations where humans have hunted them heavily. In British India, tiger hunting was a popular activity among the colonial administrators, and this intensive hunting cause tiger populations to drop.  This hunting left behind only tigers that had some genetic basis to fear man more, and thus, man-eating tigers are exceedinlg rare now.

The Sundarbans never received this hunting pressure, so the tigers left behind had the same innate tendencies to hunt humans that the ancestral tiger population possessed.

I found this argument utterly intriguing, and I began to weigh it against what I knew about wolves. Wolves across their range have experienced even more persecution than tigers have.  In North America, we have four hundred years of humans coming up with more and more creative ways to kill them. In Eurasia, this persecution has gone on for thousands of years.

The persecution of wolves surely has had some effect in how wolves behave, including their innate tendency to accept humans and other novel stimuli in their environment.

Wolves are often so fearful that they won’t cross roads.  They just avoid people at all costs, and it just seems that this is an animal that we couldn’t possibly domesticate or even habituate to our presence.

This has led some people to suggest that dogs aren’t derived from wolves, but some Canis x creature that is related to dogs and wolves, but it is ancestral to the former but not the latter.

Genome comparisons have shown that such claims really don’t work. Dogs are derived from an archaic wolf population, and in this way, they are sort of genetic living fossils, holding the genomes of a Pleistocene wolves that no longer exist. But these wolves that became dogs were still part of Canis lupus, and thus, we have to maintain dogs as part of Canis lupus as well in order to retain the monophyly of the species.

Except for dogs that have modern wolf ancestry, no dog is actually derived from a wolf population that exists today.

And the wolf populations that exist today just seem so hard to tame and work with that it makes sense then to consider the need for Coppinger’s scavenging wolf-to-village dog stage between wild wolves and modern dogs.

The thing is, these studies using modern wolves are only using wolves that are derived from these heavily persecuted populations, and it is very unlikely that these animals are representative of the wolves that lived during the Pleistocene.

We know that when wild dogs have never experienced human hunting, they are intensely curious about us. Timothy Treadwell had a pack of tame red foxes that followed him around like dogs while he was off communing with the brown bears. Darwin killed the fox that was named after him by sneaking up on one and hitting it with a geological hammer.

Lewis and Clark came onto the American prairies where there were vast hordes of wolves lying about.  The wolves had no fear of people, and one wolf was actually killed when it was enticed in with meat and speared in the head with a spontoon.

After these wolves experienced the persecution of Western man, the only wolves left in the populations were those that were extremely wary and nervous.

In fact, the only wolves that exist now that have never experienced widespread persecution by man are the white wolves that live in the Canadian High Arctic.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching two documentaries about these wolves. The first was by Jim Brandenburg.  Brandenburg and L. David Mech spent a summer living with and filming wolves on Ellesmere.  These wolves showed no fear of them, and they allowed them to observe their natural behavior in the wild, including allowing them near their den sites.

Virtually the same documentary was recently made by Gordon Buchanan of the BBC. Buchanan came to Ellesmere and became accepted by a wolf pack, which eventually trusted him enough to allow him to babysit their pups while the adults hunted.

These wolves hunt arctic hare and muskox. They live hard lives, but because they have no real history with man, they are oddly curious and trusting of people.

It seems to me that these wolves are much more like those described by Lewis and Clark, and they are likely to have behaved much like the ancient Pleistocene wolves did. They had never undergone extensive persecution by man, and thus, they were probably quite curious about man.

If these ancient wolves were more like the Ellesmere wolves, then it seems domestication would have been a pretty easy process. In fact, it appears to me that it is so easy to have happened that the struggle would have been preventing it from happening in the first place.

So if these High Arctic wolves are a better model for the ancient wolves that led to dogs, why aren’t they included in the studies?

Well, these wolves are hard to access, and what is more, because they represent such a special population, it might not be wise to remove any of these wolves from the wild.

So the socialized and imprinted wolf pup studies really can’t be performed on them.

But we could still get DNA samples from them and compare their behavior-linked genes to those of dogs and wolves from persecuted populations.

All these other studies are ever going to do is tell you the difference between dogs and certain wolves from persecuted populations. They aren’t really going to tell you the full story of why dogs came to behave differently from wolves.

So for the sake of science, we need to understand that evolution through artificial selection has affected wolves as well as dogs. Dogs have been bred to be close to man. Wolves have been selected through our persecution to be extremely fearful and reactive.

So as interesting as these studies are, they have a big limitation, and the assumption that these wolves represent what ancient wolves were like is major methodological problem.

 

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The persistent myth of the English origins of the Eastern red fox

There is a famous myth in North American wildlife. It has been repeated so many times and by people of such impeccable authority over the years that it really hasn’t been questioned.

The story goes as follows:  Red foxes were not found south of the boreal regions of New York and New England, and in order to get red fox-hunting established in the English colonies south of those regions, red foxes were imported from England.  Therefore, all red foxes living the Eastern and Midwestern US, except those in the aforementioned northern regions of the North east, are derived from English imports. Thus, the red fox is a fully invasive species in the most of the East, most of the Midwest, and the entire South.

Stories about when the red fox first arrived in a region are written as a sort of passage.  For example, in William Henry Bishop’s history of Roane County, West Virginia, the author makes a rather pointed discussion about the extinction of the gray fox in that county around the year 1882 and the triumph of the red fox in agricultural areas.  The history of the modern running Walker foxhound is intimately tied to the arrival of the red fox in Kentucky in the 1850s.  Had the red fox not colonized Kentucky, it is very unlikely that this hound would have ever been bred.

It was always assumed that the red fox derived from those English imports that were brought over in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but the documentation on these arrivals is rather dubious at best.

The origins of this myth come from Pehr Kalm, the Swedish naturalist who traveled extensively in the English colonies in the 1700s. He claimed that a wealthy person in New England brought the foxes over from England and that all the red foxes of New England were thus derived from his imports. The other story goes that tobacco merchants in Maryland brought red foxes to the Eastern Shore in the early 1700s in attempt to introduce this fox to their part of North America.  They did well in that region, even spreading into Delaware and Pennsylvania, but it took a hard freeze of Chesapeake Bay in the winter of 1789-90 to give the foxes passage into the main part of Virginia, where they thrived. Some stories say the foxes came from Germany or France rather than England, but in all cases, the story goes that the red fox is an import.

A recent evaluation of these stories by Jennifer Frey of New Mexico State University shows that none of these stories is particularly well-documented.  Both of these stories were derived from second-hand sources, pretty much the historical equivalent of stories you might hear at the barber shop or the local cafe.

This analysis came at about the same time that several genetic studies were being performed on red foxes in North America. The first mitochondrial DNA study of North American red foxes revealed the existence of no Old World red fox lineages in the Eastern or Southeastern US.  The authors found that the Southeastern red foxes were very closely related to foxes in Eastern Canada and that their likely origin came about through natural range expansion.

The second study examined large amounts of nuclear DNA and the y-chromosomes of red foxes from throughout the world.  It found that red foxes in North America, including those that live in the Southeast and Eastern US have been genetically isolated from Old World red foxes for 400,000 years.  The only Old World red foxes that have contributed to North American red fox genetics since that isolation are those found in Alaska, which have a mitochondrial DNA lineage that was introduced from Russia some 50,000 years ago.

The red fox of the Eastern US came south from Canada in much the same way that the coyote came East:  by its own feet. Clearing off the land to establish settlements made it harder and harder for Eastern gray foxes to live in an area, and it is actually well-established in the literature that the Eastern gray fox, which is roughly the same size as a red fox in terms of body mass, will tend to dominate the red when the two occur in the same region.

Further, more open agricultural land is very good habitat for mice and rabbits, and the red fox prefers to hunt those species, while the gray fox is much more omnivorous.

So the cleared forests are much better for the red than for the gray, and the gray

The coming of the red fox was almost always associated with European settlement, and thus, it became an assumption that the foxes came from England or from somewhere in Europe.

And perhaps subconsciously, it came to be accepted as the absolute truth that red foxes are an invasive species brought over by man.

It has only been in recent years that these fanciful notions have been tested as hypotheses, and they have been found to be wanting when examined through careful historical research and analysis of genetic material.

So this myth has been put to bed. I really wish people would stop promoting these erroneous romantic stories about red foxes and start to respect them as native wildlife.

Of course, this problem is a lot more complicated in California, where there is a native red fox subspecies and the Eastern red fox has also been introduced– and the Eastern red fox does behave as an invasive species.

But for my part of the world, the red fox came here on its own volition, and as the forests return, habitat conditions greatly favor the gray fox, making life much harder for these Canadian wanderers once again.

Wildlife distributions are not static.

Red foxes are known from the Pleistocene in Virginia, and though they were absent through much of the Holocene, they are now thriving in much of the East and South because of anthropogenic factors.

I should note that one reason I became skeptical of the claims of the English origins of the Eastern red fox is that the Eastern red fox has always been a widely trapped animal. Even the ones trapped in relatively temperate states have been well-known for having good pelts, but it is widely known that red fox pelts from England are not valuable at all. Red foxes are heavily hunted as vermin in England, and I always wondered why no one ever tried to do anything with their pelts. It turns out that the reason is that their pelts are of inferior quality to North American red foxes.

The reason why is that England is a much more temperate place than Eastern Canada, and the foxes that roam the East have their origins in that cold country and not the gentle green country off the northwest of Europe.

So red foxes came from Canada, not England. I think we can at least say this is true, and their supposed European origins are simply a myth.

 

 

 

 

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My totem animal

The totem animal of my Westphalian people is the white horse, a symbol of the white steed that the Saxon Widukind rode when he finally cast aside his paganism for the Christian faith of Charlemagne.

But my personal totem is far closer than some symbolism of the conversion of some long-dead Saxon warlord. My totem is a creature whose eyes have stared back at mine and stopped me silent at my approach.

This creature is the gray fox, a species with a drab, banal name, one that makes you pass it by when you read about it in some field guide or tome of natural history.  Gray foxes are almost always mentioned with the much better-known and far more studied red fox, an animal that also plays an important role in European cultures and thus provides a deep tradition in literature and art in Western Civilization.

But the truth is the gray fox is a truly uniquely American thing. Their ancestors diverged from the rest of the dog family 8-12 million years ago, and the entire evolutionary history of their lineage is in North America.

There is no Old World equivalent of gray fox.  It is wholly of this hemisphere.

Poor for the sport of foxhunting with hounds than the red fox, the gray fox always got second billing among the indigenous canids of this continent.  Less cunning, more remote and distant, and its existence in American culture has always been downplayed.

Yet they roam the wild ridges here. The thickets are their home.  They course cottontails on old logging roads, jump deer mice among the oak leaves, and eat the corn scattered down from deer feeders.

They live without our understanding but without our dominance, and in this land that man has abandoned to grow back to woods, the gray fox has found refuge to stretch its legs and sweep its tail and dig its claws into the tree bark.

We killed the big predators that would hunt the gray fox. The red fox, the migrant from Canada, gets hunted and trapped harder, and what’s more, it doesn’t thrive without some open land in which it can go a-mousing.

The gray dog likes the brush thickets of November, where the thorny brush sticks out like concertina wire along the forest floor and the approach of man, dogs, or coyotes would soon be announced in the mere traversing of such ground.

It loves the strong oaks where it can seek refuge when danger comes, but the oaks also provide it a place to bask in the sallow winter sun of January and warm its platinum silver pelt when the chill winds die down. These same oaks hold the gray squirrels, which provide some sporting good coursing and a little bit of meat should the bushy-tail mess up its escape.

In this abandoned world, the gray fox is given a piece of paradise, a place where it can exist in all its ancient foxiness.  There is no domination, only prey and predation, to set the course of day into night.

I see in this animal my ideal for myself. I imagine myself as remote and distant and free as a gray fox, but I know these ideals are flights of fancy.  I am the species I am, and I have its privileges and responsibilities and anxieties and pleasures.

But a big hole in me wishes that I could be as my totem in the gray November woods.  I wish to be in that existence, to live that sort of life in which the natural history of my line and my life were not so severely severed.

So this is my totem, the long ignored little gray dog with the long, sweeping tail and the sharp claws to grip the oak bark.

Wild beast, let me be. Let me be like you.

 

 

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Outer Banks gray fox hunt, 1930s

In the 1930s, the only fox on the Outer Banks of North Carolina was the gray fox, and this is a photo of the Goosewing Club on a mounted hunt in an attempt to be subtropical English.

Red foxes did not become fully established in most of the South until well into the twentieth century, so when you read accounts of fox chasing south of Virginia and Kentucky and outside the Appalachian Mountains from an earlier time period, they are almost certainly running hounds on gray fox.

The gray fox is less suited for this type of pursuit because it doesn’t go to ground when pressed to hard. Its usual defense is to shoot up the nearest tree, and this behavior makes for a rather poor mounted hunt.

The Eastern Canadian red fox is much better suited to this sort of thing.  The red fox of the Eastern and Midwestern US is derived from that animal. It is not an import from England as was once commonly believed. The red fox came south after the clearing of the forests created better habitat for this more open land species.  They were the first canids to expand their range dramatically after European contact and colonization. The coyote was the second.

Gray foxes are the most divergent species of canid still in existence. Their exact lineage split off from the rest of the dogs some 8-12 million years ago, and they are the only species of dog still in existence that has a fully North American evolutionary history. Everything else, including the coyote, has derived from Eurasian ancestors that came back into the continent.

They are truly America’s most special dog, one that really doesn’t get much attention, but the history of foxhunting in what became this country was largely based upon this animal in the early years.

If I were to choose my own animal totem, it would be a gray fox.  It lurks in the deep thickets on far distant ridges. It lives in defiance of our world, unsullied and unfettered by our desires.  A wild dog that is truly out on its own journey, one that began millions of years ago in the ages before their were truly things called wolves or modern humans.

Remote and distant goes the gray fox.

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Jack bite

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. This came from a deer hunting page on Facebook.

Supervise your little dogs in coyote country, which is pretty much all of North America at this point.

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Final monarch of the year

Summer’s final grasp on the land is slowly but surely being released.

We had a bit of frost at the end of September. Then we had a few weeks of balmy weather.

But the weather is about to change again.

And this monarch butterfly will soon be on its way to Mexico. The leaves will be off the trees, and the deer will be in full rut.

Snow will  soon be on everyone’s mind.

 

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Class and the evolution of whippet temperament

As a result of my recent experiences with a whippet, I’ve been thinking a lot about how a breed can evolve such a strong bond with its special human.

Some of this strong social bond has some roots in their origins as sighthounds. Most sighthound breeds are somewhat more primitive in their development compared to more derived breeds.

With whippets, though, this devotion to just a select handful of people borders on separation anxiety.

It seems that the evolution of this trait has to do with the development of the whippet as a commoner’s dog.  The origins of the whippet come from the larger greyhound, which have been bred in the British Isles for centuries for the pursuit of deer and hares.  Coursing was mostly a pursuit of the wealthy, especially in the Middle Ages, but within greyhound kennels, there would be born smaller individuals that obviously could not handle a deer.

So these dogs were either killed or given to the commoners. Commoners had to have their dogs “expeditated” to prevent the dogs from bothering deer. This procedure involved cutting off two of the toes on the front feet, so the dog could not run a deer at all.

The commoners had an incentive to breed for smaller size. Smaller dogs eat less food, and a smaller dog would not get the attention of authorities that might lead to a dog being confiscated.

Further, there was a selection pressure placed upon a commoner’s greyhound that would select for dogs with a stronger tendency to bond to one owner or family. Dogs that wandered in the forests would be killed, but dogs that stayed at home had a much stronger tendency to pass on their genes.

As time progressed and the poaching became a way of survival in much of rural England, the need for a dog intensely bonded to its owner became even more of a necessity.  Any dog that ran off and got lost would either be killed by the gamekeeper or offed by the fierce “night dogs” or mastiffs that would be patrolling the estates.

So the evolution of the whippet as a commoner’s greyhound forced the breed to evolve a tendency to bond to just a handful of people.

Now, these thoughts could be entirely wrong, but breed temperament often follows its history. The super social temperament of golden and Labrador retrievers has to do with their use as retrievers on shoots where lots of strange people would be wandering about.  Livestock guardians have been selected for a very strong distrust of strange dogs, while pack hounds have been selected for super tolerance of other dogs living near them.

So it is very possible that the whippet’s strong devotion to just a select few people has to do with its evolution as a breed among the working class of England.

 

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