The remains of an 18,000-year-old puppy might be those of a common ancestor of domestic dogs and modern gray wolves

A two-month-old puppy died 18,000 years ago, and it was preserved the permafrost near Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia.  I knew about this discovery a few weeks ago, but I was waiting DNA tests to see exactly what it was.  The late Pleistocene is when we start to see the beginnings of domestic dogs, and we do have some tantalizing subfossils of wolves with what might be exhibiting morphological characters suggesting domestication that date to even earlier than this puppy.  So it is an interesting find.

Indeed, any of these late Pleistocene gray wolves that are found in Eurasia could hold some mysteries about dog domestication.

But the initial DNA analysisrevealed that it does not match domestic dogs or extant gray wolves. This suggests that it might come from the ancestral population that leads to both.

Or it could mean that it is of a lineage of gray wolf that has since died out.

Of course, most media coverage of the discovery hint at this puppy being from the ancestral form, but it’s more likely that the latter is the disappointing answer.

More extensive genome analysis is going to be needed to determine what this gray wolf pup was.

Whatever it was, this puppy shows that these discoveries hold many mysteries in their DNA.

The puppy has been named “Dogor,” which means “friend” in the Yakutian language.  And he might have been just that– a friend to some band of Pleistocene hunters.

But for now, we can only speculate and wonder.

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Changing the Bullenbeisser

When Europe was a wilder place, there were lots of big game animals. Bison, brown bears, aurochs, and vast sounders of wild boar were all abundant. Before the Neolithic Revolution entered Europe, these animals were often hunted for their meat and hides, but after the Neolithic, man began to consider these animals pests.

Dogs were used to hunt them, but as the Neolithic gave way to the Ancient World, the dogs began to change. For big game, heavy-headed, big-framed dogs were used to hunt this often dangerous game. The first of these dogs appeared in Assyria, but they soon spread to Europe. Drop all that nonsense you may have heard about mastiffs being the ancient Molossus or have their origins in Tibet. Their origins are in Western Eurasia, and they began as big game hunters.

Supposedly the Alans brought their own form of hunting mastiff in Europe when they wandered west into the Roman Empire. This dog gave rise to the rootstock of the various bulldog breeds.

For centuries after, various European countries had their own rough bulldogs. Spain is pretty much the only one that has held onto its alano dog. Everyone else has greatly modified this creature.

The bulldogs evolved once the big game of Europe ceased to exist. Some of them were turned into a bull and bear-baiting dog. Others were kept at butcher shops to control half wild cattle and swine. Some were still utilized as catch dogs in Medieval hunts. They became symbolic creatures that reminders of a more savage past.

But by the nineteenth century, Europeans turned against bloodsports. The bulldogs were out of a job. The British began repurposing the bulldog into a pet. The original pet bulldog was 3/4 bulldog and 1/4 pug. This “Philo-Kuon” bulldog was heavily promoted as a pet, but other strains were being developed. One was the Sourmug, which eventually replaced the Philo-Kuon as the desired bulldog in England. There were also several smaller bulldogs, which had more pug and some terrier ancestry. These eventually gave rise to the French bulldog and the Boston terrier.

This repurposing of the bulldog in England did not go unnoticed in Germany. The Germans had two rough bulldog types the Danziger and Brabanter bullenbeissers. Brabant is, of course, in Belgium, but this lither bullenbeisser was fairly common in parts of Germany.  It was this breed that was crossed with the Philo-Kuon bulldog to form the modern boxer breed. The Brabanter dog was preferred in the later days of German hunting as a catch dog on wild boar and deer, and it was favored among Bavarian huntsman.

Crossing the Philo-Kuon bulldog with the Brabanter bullenbeisser was an attempt to create a uniquely German pet bulldog.

The modern boxer’s history began at roughly the same time as the modern German shepherd dog.  The SV for German shepherds began in 1899, but earlier attempts to create a standardized shepherd dog in Germany started with the Phylax Society in 1891. The first attempts to standardize the bullenbeisser/Philo-Kuon crosses began in 1894 in Munich, and the Boxer Club was founded in 1896.

So this dog went from being a big game hunter to a pet, but by the time the First World War started, it was then shifted into a dog of war. It was the only war in which it was widely used, though.

There has been a tension in boxers about whether to maintain them as pets or working dogs. Some of these dogs have been good at protection sports, but the vast majority of them are kept as pets.

I know of no one who uses them as catch dogs, but I have heard of a few people using boxer crosses in this way. The Dogo Argentino has a lot of boxer blood.

So here, we have dogs that were used for hunting, then for various sports, then for war, and now are mostly family dogs.

 

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Dare is seven months old today

Wanting me to throw the ball.

Getting ripped.

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Hound pack implicated in the death of a pregnant woman in France

France has a long tradition of hound packs.  Indeed, France is a country where hounds are such a tradition that more breeds of scenthound originate there than any other.

For those of you who aren’t aware of these traditions, the French hound packs are quite similar to those of foxhounds or beagles in the US or the UK.  Yes, there are plenty of small-time houndsmen who run a few dogs, but these big packs are connected to mounted hunting.

Throughout France, these packs run deer. They used to run wolves, which are now a protected species.

A few days ago, Elise Pilarski was out walking her dogs in the Forest of Retz, when she encountered a pack of deer hounds*.  She phoned her partner that she was afraid the pack might attack her, and not long after, she was found dead. She had been attacked by dogs.

It is not clear if she had been attacked by the hounds or by her own dogs.  DNA tests are being conducted on the dogs in the pack and her own dogs. The pack apparently consisted of over 60 dogs, which is in keeping with the tradition of pack hunting.

Pilarski was pregnant, and she may have given off some sign of weakness towards the dogs, which could have elicited the attack response.  Her own dogs, at least one of which appears to be a bull-breed of some sort, might have caused problems with the pack as well.

When you have that many dogs in super prey drive and a competing group of dogs that could potentially become amped, there could be issues with predatory drift.

Once that many dogs enter that zone, it can be a dangerous situation.

This death was a tragedy, and we await DNA tests to see exactly what happened.

However, it is clear that new protocols are going to be necessary around pack hunts to ensure public safety.

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*Not to be confused with the Scottish deerhound, which is a sighthound.

 

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Is it a wolfdog?

One of the great controversies in the dog world is whether the German shepherd is a wolf dog. I will admit that I am agnostic on the subject. It might be, and one of the component regional German sheepdogs from which they were derived was rumored to have been crossed with wolves.

I have never been able to track down the exact truth of the wolf in the German shepherd, but I should note that lots of breeds have wolf in them and not all of them are as lupine in phenotype.  Several French griffon hounds, one of which was crossed into the otterhound, were mixed with wolf, because the French houndsmen believed such crosses were better hunters of wolves. The Plott hound is said to have at least one wolf crossed in at some point in its history, and various livestock guardian breeds, including those in Georgia and Turkey, are known to have wolf blood. And we know that Norwegian elkhounds and related Scandinavian spitzes have wolf ancestry, and some Russians have crossed their laikas with wolves, too.

In the annals of this blog, I have documented wolves being used in much the same way dogs have. I have documented wolf and dog crosses that proved useful as working and hunting animals.

So I am not at all unwilling to accept that German shepherds are wolfdogs. I just need proof. The GSDs that I have had tested with Embark have all come back with “low wolfiness” scores. “Wolfiness” is just the amount of ancient wolf DNA that a dog might possess, but it can also be indicative of some wolf crossed into the dog’s ancestry.

I have hear rumors that the original SV (Schäferhund Verein) studbooks do list wolves in foundational pedigrees of German shepherds, but I have not seen them.

I have come across this dog on Pedigree Database. The name “Wolf Rüde” translate as “Wolf Male Dog.”  Its pedigree is mysterious. The sire line is the typical tightly-bred sheepdog strains that are the basis of the breed. But the dam line is a mysterious creature called “Gerta Hündin.” The terms Hündin and Rüde mean “bitch” and “dog” in English. I cannot figure out who these dogs were, but the name of one of them is tantalizing in that it might be the name of an actual wolf in the foundational pedigree.

People have been breeding wolves to German shepherd ever since German shepherds became a breed. We have several off-shoot breeds that are wolf-German shepherd crosses. Only the Czechoslovakian wolfdog and the modern Russian Volksoby have shown any promise as being able to do the German shepherd’s job as a military dog. And they aren’t nearly as good at it.

I do know of a story of a first cross between a German shepherd and a wolf in Czechoslovakia that turned out to be a superior working animal. This dog apparently passed all requirements for breeding a German shepherd in that former country, and it even made it as a guide dog.  I have been unable to track down the full story of this dog, but it has always interested me in that this creature might be the hopeful monster that could have led to greater crossings between wolves and German shepherds in some working dog programs.

Also, we must tease apart some of the eighteenth and nineteenth century zoological ideas about sheepdogs and wolves. Buffon believed that sheepdogs of France were the closest to the wolf. I have even come across accounts of collies and what became border collies in which the author mentions how wolf-like the dogs are. In that sort of intellectual milieu, it is possible that someone might mis-translate or even get lost on a flight of fancy that these German herding dogs were wolves.

Further, it is one thing to have independent working dogs like scenthounds, hunting spitz, and livestock guardian dogs with wolf blood. It is quite another to breed a wolf to a herding dog, and it is even more to expect that herding dog with wolf ancestry to become an extremely biddable utilitarian working dog.

I will just say I want the evidence. I actually do want to believe that these dogs do have wolf in them, but the evidence is lacking– at least in English.

I am also fully aware that when the breed was introduced to the English-speaking world, there would have been a definite reason to downplay wolf ancestry in the dogs. Most of the English-speaking countries were major sheep producers, and in Australia and North America, wild canids were heavily hunted to make way for sheep husbandry.

So if anyone has the goods. Please let me know. I am certain that German shepherd blood has entered the wild wolf population in Europe. German shepherd makes up a large part of the street dog population in Eastern Europe, where there are still lots of packs of wolves.  We now know that the majority of Eurasian wolves have recent dog ancestry, and German shepherd blood course through the veins of some of these wolves.

It just isn’t clear to me that the introgression went the other way.

 

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Banned Down Under

Australia is a place that has good reason to worry about invasive species. Invasive species have run amok across that continent and have done so even before European colonization.

It always makes me cringe when I hear a German shepherd dog referred to as an “Alsatian” or an “Alsatian wolfdog.”.   Yes, there is debate as to how much wolf is in this breed or if there is any wolf blood in them at all.  The only people who call them by this name live in parts of the former British Empire, which once shed blood by the millions against the German Empire in a truly senseless war.  However, the Germans did create this breed, but the jingoism of the times has led to that Alsatian name becoming fully fixed in some sectors of the English-speaking world.

And this led to a particular problem in Australia. Australia lived by sheep grazing. Anything that got in the way of sheep grazing.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Australia was quite concerned about the importation of the German shepherd into that country under the assumption that it was a high content wolf dog that would go feral and breed with dingoes. Adding that blood to the dingo would make them even more murderous on sheep, and major livestock interests pushed the Australian government into banning the importation of the breed. The state of Western Australia went even further with its Alsatian Dog Act of 1929, which require all dogs of the breed that had already been imported to be sterilized.

Robert Kaleski, Polish-Australian who wrote at length about dogs in that country in his Australian Barkers and Biters, had a definite bias against the breed. He believed the dogs were derived from German zoo wolves that were crossed with dogs. Kaleski’s parents were both from Poland, and they probably possessed a strong anti-German bias that was passed onto their son, which obviously may have tainted his views on them.  In his text, Kaleski was adamant that these dogs were wolfdogs, and they would be dangerous if allowed to mate with dingoes in the Australian bush.

We can debate about how much wolf is in a German shepherd, but one thing we cannot debate is what a German shepherd is primarily.  The German shepherd is a sheepdog, a sheepdog that was later re-fashioned into a military and police dog. But the dogs still possess strong herding instincts, and many are capable of managing stock.

Kaleski was a major chronicle of the Australian herding dog, including what became the kelpie and the Australian cattle dog. His knowledge of the practical uses of dogs was formidable.

But his erudition on dog origins left a lot to be desire. He was certain that dogs and red foxes could hybridize. He even devoted a whole section of his book to such nonsense, including a photo of a supposed dog-fox cross that looks a lot more like a border collie crossed with a terrier than anything else.  He was certain that dingoes and foxes were crossing in the wild in Australia, and that the dingo-fox was going to be a major agricultural threat as well.

Australia has since allowed the German shepherd in, and I’m absolutely certain that German shepherds have bred with dingoes in the wild. Dingoes are not unicorn creatures that maintain blood purity in the wild. They are feral primitive dogs that will cross with less feral and less primitive dogs whenever they meet them. “Pure” dingoes are almost nonexistent. I don’t think we can say that the scare-mongering lived up to reality. Dingoes and dingo-cross dogs do kill sheep, but nature has a way of selecting out those that would approach the German shepherd in size. Larger dogs require more red meat to survive in the wild, so it would be harder for them to thrive in a land mostly devoid of large prey.

And yes, classifying the dingo and how to handle dingo-domestic dog introgression are controversial topics, but even with our more nuanced understanding of taxonomy, it is difficult to see that importing the German shepherd into Australia led to massive pressures on the sheep industry.

Also, notice that the main concern of Kaleski and the various government entities of Australia was agricultural. They were not at all bothered by what such creatures might do to kangaroos or to other native animals. After all, he was writing at a time when settlers of Tasmania were wiping out the thylacine, an animal that was truly unique to the continent. I guarantee you that the idea of possibly setting up a conservation population of wild thylacines on Australia’s mainland would have as much an anathema to these people as the importation of the German shepherd.

Kaleski was living in a society that was running sheep in the British way. Once the Enclosure had cleared the land of most human inhabitants and the last wolves were finally killed off, sheep were left to graze in nearly wild conditions in parts of the British Isles. Some sheep became “hefted” to the land. The migrated over the mountains and moorland, possessing ancestral knowledge of where to go through the grazing year in much the same way wild sheep roam their mountain territories.

Australian sheep grazers did the same thing. It’s just when they did it, they had to deal with dingoes and thylacines.  They massacred the predators and built huge fences to hold them back.

However, if Kaleski had more knowledge of how Germans used sheepdogs, he would not have been as biased against the breed. German sheep grazers grazed on concessions that often lacked fences. The dogs moved the sheep and kept them in these grazing concessions. The sheep were tame, and the dogs used their large size and wolfy physiques to control the stock.

He may not have seen a use for such a dog in Australia, but he could have seen that it was a very useful herding dog in Europe and would not have joined in the fury that led to the German shepherd ban.

That Alsatian wolf-dog name has not served the breed well, and in the case of Australia, it almost led to its very extirpation from that country.

 

 

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German Shepherds in the Snow

We got our first real snow of the year today.  The German shepherds loved it.

Dare does the border collie stalk when playing firt pole.

Fetching her kong wubba in the driving snow.

Tuna is half American/half West German show lines that we have co-own with Quest’s breeder. Pending health testing, she will be bred to Quest, a breeding that could produce puppies that could definitely be shown in the AKC ring.

If you see her posted on here, she might be hard to tell apart from Dare because they are both roughly the same coloration and have similar pedigrees. But dare is significantly larger is built in that way that triggers so many keyboard warriors, while Tuna is much more moderate. The genes that make the type are different in American showlines vs German showlines, so when you cross them, you get pretty moderate puppies. The genes are still there, though, so when you breed them back, you can get the type again.

These dogs really love the snow, more so than the other breeds with which I am familiar. They aren’t even from a particularly cold country in Europe, but they have nice, thick coats that are quite functional for harsh conditions. They aren’t arctic breeds, but they are good cold country dogs.

 

 

 

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The Enduring One

 

Ruminant ungulates are among the most amazing species that evolution has produced. Their multi-chambered stomachs give them an ability to turn what is essentially indigestible into energy. They are specialists in their diet, though most eat multiple species of plant, they are bound to eat plant matter. Their fortunes are dictated by the sun, the soil, and the rain. In abundant lands, all they must do is eat, eat and keep an eye or an ear open for the predators.

Their place in nature is meat on the hoof and pervasive predators of plants.  The white-tailed deer predates most of its predators in its ecosystems. The dire wolf,  the Armbruster’s wolf, the Edward’s wolf, the coyote,  and the gray wolf all were new on the land when the white-tails first blew their warning calls at them.  Same with the bobcat and the cougar and the Smilodon and the American lion.   In most of their range, a white-tail will never smell the faintest scent of a wolf or cougar.  The coyote and the bobcat and the odd predatory black bear take their toll, as does the human nimrod.

Humankind knew this continent only in the very recent past. Paleolithic Siberian hunters were the first to take their toll upon the deer. They were later replaced with Europeans and then the whole Anglo-American civilization came to the fore. It hunted the white-tailed deer nearly to extinction. Hides and meat, all of which could be sold the the highest bidder.

But this civilization, the one that almost did the species in, turned out to be its greatest benefactor. Hunting peoples were cleared off.  The age of plastics made leather from hides mostly irrelevant for most household use. Leisure hunters with money began to push for deer conservation and deer reintroduction.

And so the land was turned into this great deer thicket. The oak woods dropped the acorns, and acorns are fine tack for the deer, though their palate evolved in woods dominated with the great American chestnut.  It was felled by an invasive blight, so the deer know the acorn from the white and red oak as its primary food to fatten in the autumn and to corn them through the frigid days of winter.

Sportsmen plant food plots for them. They buy food at the feed store to feed them, which comes in many different brands and innovations.

Farms are being abandoned left and right. And the native lands are returning to thickets. These thickets are cut with the highways of deer. Vast herds of bison and elk are not making their cut upon the same land, so the thickets grow in thick and heavy. The tunnel trails through the jungles cannot accommodate a fully-grown human without the overgrowing branches holding back your wanderings.

The white-tailed deer is the enduring one, relishing the ruins of its North American kingdom, which has, for the moment,  been perfected for its existence. So they go with ruminant stomachs, turning the sunlight and carbon dioxide into muscle and fat.

They endure. And I suspect they will outlast us when it all comes crashing down as ecology’s laws catch up to us.

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Multiple cryptic species of jaguarundi?

One must be very careful using studies of mitochondrial DNA to make conclusions about the natural history of animals. The DNA is inherited matrilinearly. It does not follow the entire genetic legacy of an organism.

However, it can point to the possibility that our understanding of taxonomy is incorrect, and these studies have pointed to multiple cryptic species in what we once thought was only a single one. Gray foxes and black-backed jackals have deep divergences in mitochondrial DNA lineages in populations that are not contiguous, which suggests that there are more species than the single one currently recognized.

Of course, these findings do require more study to figure out if these divergences are reflected in the nuclear DNA. But these studies are just the beginning.

Recently, I came across this paper from PLoS ONE that was published 2017. It looked the mitochondrial DNA of the jaguarundi, a neotropical cat that is most closely related to the cougar. It does range into the United States, but it hasn’t been seen here in decades.

This species has been a bit of problem for molecular biologists, because it is been quite difficult to figure out subspecies. There is little correlation between mitochondrial DNA sequences and morphology, which has made classifying them quite difficult.

But the authors discovered a rather unusual discovery. Using calculations of mutation rate, they found that the two main clades of jaguarundi diverged 3.2 million years ago. The same metric found that jaguarundis and cougars diverged 3.9 million years ago, and the divergence between the two clades of jaguarundi happened earlier than the divergence between lions and common leopards and the divergence between the tiger and the snow leopard.

This discovery does suggest that there at least two species of jaguarundi, which are morphologically indistinguishable.  Of course, the authors make it clear that more evidence from nuclear DNA needs to be included in the analysis, but the discovery does suggest that our classification of the jaguarundi as a single species may be faulty.

 

 

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