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There’s a big paper in Cell about dog breed genetics based on genome scans of over 4,000 dogs. Basically, it confirms what you figure about modern dog breeds: current breeds started out being bred for work rather looks, and brain-oriented genes were selected as well physique genes. From the write-up in the NY Times science section:
Brains, Brawn or Both: What Drove the Creation of Modern Dog Breeds?
Genetic variants associated with brain development help distinguish breeds designed for different physical tasks, a new study reports.
By Emily Anthes
Dec. 8, 2022In creating modern dog breeds, humans sculpted canines into physical specimens perfectly suited for a wide variety of tasks. …
Now, a large study, published in Cell on Thursday, suggests that behavior, not just appearance, has helped qualify these dogs for their jobs. Breeds that were created for similar roles — whether rounding up sheep or flushing birds into the air — tend to cluster into distinct genetic lineages, which can be characterized by different combinations of behavioral tendencies, the researchers found.
“Much of modern breeding has been focused predominantly on what dogs look like,” Evan MacLean, an expert on canine cognition at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study, said in an email. But, he emphasized, “Long before we were breeding dogs for their appearances, we were breeding them for behavioral traits.”
The study also found that many of the genetic variants that set these lineages apart from each other appear to regulate brain development, and many seem to predate modern breeds. Together, the results suggest that people may have created today’s stunning assortment of breeds, in part, by harnessing and preserving desirable behavioral traits that already existed in ancient dogs, the researchers said.
… Still, major questions remained, some scientists said, including whether humans deliberately set out to create breeds with specific behavioral tendencies. “We don’t have a ton of evidence for intentional selection,” said Elinor Karlsson, an expert in dog genomics at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School who was not involved in the research.
… The researchers studied the genomes of more than 4,000 canids, including samples from more than 200 different dog breeds, as well as mixed-breed dogs, semi-feral village dogs and wild canids, such as wolves and coyotes.
The scientists used computational tools to map out the genetic trajectories by which ancient dogs became, for instance, generic herding dogs and then distinct breeds, like Border collies.
They found that domestic dogs could be divided into 10 distinct lineages, which generally included breeds that were developed to perform similar jobs. The terrier lineage included breeds designed to hunt down vermin, for instance, while the scent hound lineage included breeds that track game using their sense of smell, rather than eagle-eyed vision or speed.
Although some of the lineages do have defining physical characteristics, these features alone cannot entirely explain this sorting, the researchers noted. “If you look at the scent hound lineage, dotted throughout there are breeds that have short legs or long legs or different shapes of tail or different coat colors,” said Emily Dutrow, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute and the first author of the study. …
Dogs seem to cluster genetically pretty much exactly the way dog fanciers have long assumed. There’s no mention in the paper of any breed that is stereotypically considered a terrier or retriever or whatever but is actually closer genetically to a herding dog.
In other words, scientifically, breed does exist, and “folk breeds” are more or less exactly correct.
To identify the behavioral traits that best defined each lineage, the researchers analyzed behavioral surveys completed by the owners of more than 46,000 purebred dogs. …
Although there was plenty of overlap — no single breed has a monopoly on trainability — in general, breeds created for similar jobs tended to have similar behavioral traits. And each lineage was characterized by its own pattern of behavioral tendencies.
For instance, herding dogs, terriers and scent hounds all displayed relatively high levels of what is known as “nonsocial fear,” such as fear of loud noises or strange objects. This predisposition might indicate a heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli that could be useful in all three types of canine work, the researchers say.
Still, there were differences: Terriers displayed higher levels of predatory chasing than herding dogs, while herding dogs scored higher on measures of trainability, the researchers found.
“There is meaningful behavioral diversification among dogs,” Dr. Dutrow said.
(The scent hound lineage, alas, scored low on trainability. But that characteristic, the researchers noted diplomatically, is actually “consistent with selection for traits advantageous to an independently driven working style focused on following instincts rather than seeking out human cues.”)
To identify the genetic underpinnings of these lineage-defining traits, the researchers conducted a genome wide association study, looking for specific genetic variants that were unusually common in certain lineages.
The vast majority of these lineage-associated variants were in stretches of DNA that do not code for proteins but instead regulate the expression of protein-coding genes. Many appeared to regulate genes involved in brain development.
“When we look at the genes involved in the differentiation of dog lineages, a lot of the action is in genes related to neurodevelopment, suggesting that selection for cognitive and behavioral features has probably been very important,” Dr. MacLean said.
For example, the sheep herding breeds were characterized by genetic variants associated with a neurodevelopmental process known as axon guidance, which helps ensure that neurons are wired together correctly.
Perhaps it’s not so much that border collies have more neurons as that their neurons develop more according to blueprint.
Some of these variants were specifically associated with genes that have been linked to anxiety and maternal behaviors, including pup retrieval in mice.
One hypothesis — still unproven, the scientists note — is that a sheep dog’s drive to herd is a product of the same anxiety-related neural pathway that motivates animal mothers to care for their young.
“When you watch these mice, these mothers gathering up their young, it’s just like watching a Border collie herd sheep,” Dr. Ostrander said. “And so you could throw out a hypothesis that maybe that’s the ancestral behavior that’s been co-opted.”
(Dr. Ostrander, who used to have a Border collie, has seen this herding drive firsthand. “I used to be able to bring mine to the lab and she could herd people up for lab meetings,” she said.)
When scientists talk about dogs’ brains, they usually wind up talking about border collies. Of course, that doesn’t mean you want to get a border collie. In eight months of taking the dog to the evening dog party at the park, I don’t believe I’ve yet seen a border collie, this not being prime sheep ranching terrain.
Still, many of the variants that were closely associated with specific lineages did occur, at lower levels, in other lineages or even in gray wolves, suggesting that they predated the creation of modern breeds.
Presumably, most dog breed traits go back at least to personality variants in wolves.
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We just better pray that the less-cognitively bred dogs don’t start lobbying for preferential treatment in the allocation of Snausages.
So, if one can extrapolate, I have in common, with that recent NY City monster, the genetic predisposition to clobber a passing stranger on the back of the head with a baseball bat. Less of that gene, but still, I’ve got some of that trait. I guess that’s true, but it sure is depressing. I like to think that I’ve got none of that, zero, nil. Anyway, the dog aspect is fascinating and poignant. My Shelties, over the years, have had virtually no interest in playing fetch. But when I have put on my kneepads and pretended I’m a sheep, and they herd me around the house into a corner, barking, and wagging furiously, they are in Sheltie heaven!
Also,
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658615 (#85)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658650 (#88)
https://archive.ph/386lD/f1e920ecef5c07ea14b7d0dacd394bdd32dccbf5.png
@NewsfromScience
Border collies are known for their strong work ethic—but why is that the case?"
WTF--??
Is this really what passes for science these days? Really?
Border collies do not have a "strong work ethic". They have a strong herding instinct. By the same token, when a dog misbehaves and then cringes when its owner notices, the dog does not know it has done something wrong. The dog merely knows it has displeased its owner.
Dogs, like leftists, are not concerned with ethics. Unlike leftists, however, they are generally good companions, capable of love and loyalty.
[Also, it's not just economic factors. Bad kennels play a role as well.]
There is no such thing as a “folk breed”.
A breed is a group of domestic animals or plants with homogeneous genotype and phenotype, created by humans for a particular purpose, i.e. through artificial selection. Although humans do show some phenotypic and genotypic variation by geographical origin, the concept is decidedly more complicated. Geographic isolation and natural or sexual selection have resulted in some alleles being more frequent in some groups that in others, and ancestry determines the distribution of some genes. That is basically it, from a biological point of view.
Furthermore…
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y
You're desperate, aren't you?
Look: blacks can be stupid. It's okay...just accept it.
as a rule of thumb a 0.1% selective advantage becomes dominant in 200
generations. Increased advantages - like neutering all that do not pass a literacy test -
greatly speed up the process.
Bantus e. g. evolved under selective parameters that weeded out the peacable,
thoughtful and hardworking as "unfit" - and the result was highly successful:
They ate most of the preexisting diversity in SSAfrica
(cf. also the Soviet fox experiments).
Indeed. Very few people have four legs, or a tail. Humans and dogs are different! So any analogy about how natural selection works is debunked! Case closed.
Oh, and ancestry does not determine the distribution of some genes. Ancestry determines the distribution of all genes. You don't get some of your genes from your ancestors and other of your genes from the gene store.Replies: @Corvinus
So your comment is a go-nowhere nothing burger. Thanks for your contribution.
Border collies are working dogs. They are supposed to be out there chasing sheep from dawn to dusk. If you leave it in your house with nothing to do, it will eat your house out of boredom.
‘…I don’t believe I’ve yet seen a border collie…’
Border Collies are disturbed. Avoid them.
‘…Geographic isolation and natural or sexual selection have resulted in some alleles being more frequent in some groups that in others, and ancestry determines the distribution of some genes. That is basically it, from a biological point of view…’
You’re desperate, aren’t you?
Look: blacks can be stupid. It’s okay…just accept it.
Interesting that the NYT is willing to publish a story about genetically based behavioral differences between different races within a species.
No, my comment represents truth. You choose not to accept it.
Dogs in general need far more activity and attention than they receive in modern society. The difficult fact is that we have far more dogs than we should, nowadays. The shelters where I live are bursting at the seams.
Regarding pit bulls? I’m all for sterilizing every one, but only if we sterilize their owners too.
Oh wait, having scored his personal best with nearly 700 comments on the movie thread, is Steve now trying out the dog thing? IDK, could work. Someone please mention Ukraine and Abortion if you want to help out. And Elon. Work them all into a single post. Better yet, a single sentence. TIA.
Also,
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/8893c36e555fa8dbddfb7ada11cd944a465d019a14c85101388e5a7667ef4256_1.jpg
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658615 (#85)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658650 (#88)Replies: @MEH 0910, @Kylie, @James Forrestal
https://archive.ph/386lD
I agree, it represents truth: All kinds of b.s. purports to be truth.
“Breeding” is, in technical terms, naught but increasing selective pressure;
as a rule of thumb a 0.1% selective advantage becomes dominant in 200
generations. Increased advantages – like neutering all that do not pass a literacy test –
greatly speed up the process.
Bantus e. g. evolved under selective parameters that weeded out the peacable,
thoughtful and hardworking as “unfit” – and the result was highly successful:
They ate most of the preexisting diversity in SSAfrica
(cf. also the Soviet fox experiments).
What’s interesting — obviously — is applying this to human evolution.
I long ago noticed that the success of the various North American Indian tribes in adapting to white civilization seemed to vary — and seemed to correlate to whether they were farmers themselves, advanced hunters like the Sioux, or primitive hunter-gatherers like the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area. The first have often done alright — Choctaws have median incomes comparable to gentile whites. The Sioux, on the other hand, have really serious issues. Groups like the Ohlone died out completely.
I’ve tended to assume that the distinction must be cultural. White farming life is a lot more comprehensible if you farm yourself. A man works. Stealing from the neighbors is not a wholesome recreational activity. Etc.
But what if the difference was also at least partially genetic? Hunters are genetically handicapped when it comes to adapting to a sedentary life of disciplined toil? Comanche really are intrinsically less able to make the transition than Hopi?
Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran had a similar insight in their 10,000 Year Explosion: farming is harder work than foraging, and should select for traits such as endurance, perseverance, and delayed gratification.
Europeans had varying reactions to different tribes, some more warlike some more clever or not. Each tribe or grouping of tribes seems like a family of it's own so maybe thats the reason.
Darwin began ‘Origin of Species’ with ‘Variation under Domestication’ and indeed illustrates that, contrary to popular imagination, most breeding didn’t (and doesn’t) consist of crossing strains but finding random advantageous mutations (apparent as phenotypical traits) and reproducing those over and over to the best of their ability. He was aided in this realization by his gaining honorary membership to the British pigeon fanciers society.
BTW OoS contains zero math, strictly verbal reasoning, despite his inspiration, Malthus’s Principal of Population, containing a goodly amount of math and numerical data.
BTW Part II — Librivox has OsS and other Darwin works in several audio formats. Well with the download, two-three listenings while washing the dishes or puttering in the garden and you’ll have most of the ideas solidly planted in your brain.
I heard a story about someone hosting a cocktail party, while their border collie was allowed to roam freely. The dog nipped at people’s heels till they were all huddled in a corner. They had to put the border collie in a separate room.
Subsaharan Africa used to be blanketed in laid-back pygmies, but the smaller, physically larger negroes wiped them off the face of the map. Now they’re a tiny minority, their gene pool effectively cancelled, as modern negroes hunt them down, kill and sometimes eat them, even today!
It’s still one of Africa’s best kept ugly secrets!
I guess if, by glaring omission, you assume mass concerted genocide to be a process of “natural selection,” that’s your call. However, a major reason the Americas aren’t currently enjoying a majority of docile teeny negroes is primarily due to their violent mass extermination authored by the big bloodthirsty ancestors of the dynamic and large negroes you see stealing from Macy’s today.
In short, when it comes to gene pool dynamics, mass genocides matter. As for the vicious victors, genes is destiny.
So the wife wants a dog. We’ll be moving this Spring to a big plot in the Philippines of about an acre with high walls and solid gates. Right now just a couple of Filipino neighbors and vacant land on three sides but the area is planned for more “resort” development.
I can tell you that “village dogs” do exist, at least in the PH, and they are bred for barking and scrounging for food. (“stranger vigilance” might be the better term.) I do NOT want one of those unless one can train limits of protection.
I’d think a smart, medium size dog of calm temperament might work best. Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable? There will be small children visiting from family members.
Suggestions welcome.
2. How long can the dog repeat the task before retraining for the task is required.Temperament is an issue, as well as other traits. The border collie enjoys the highest IQ in the dog world, but the dog always needs something to do, and if he doesn’t, he will will drive you nuts with compulsive behavior. That is, if you don’t have something for him to do, he’ll make up things to do by his own volition. Every single day.Anyway, a "smart dog" is trainable, by definition.
If you're looking for a dog that is child tolerant, Golden Retrievers and Labradors are a good bet, but if you want to dogs that will bark at intruders, they are pretty useless.
If you just wanted a dog to be ornamental and in the house, a pug might meet requirements.
With a 1-acre walled compound, it might make more sense to have two dogs, then they will have the run of the place and provide company for each other.
If not experienced with dogs, it makes a lot of sense to get a young puppy rather than a grown-up rescue dog, then you can mold their behavior to your taste with regards to barking and scrounging. In my opinion females are usually better domestic pets than young males, which tend to be full of testosterone.
There is nothing wrong with mixed breed dogs.
You can get some idea of the character of a dog from the dam (mother). The worst kind of dogs to get are those that are "highly strung" and excitable.
While a dog may not attack a child and just wants to play, if it jumps up and scratches a toddler's face, tears will be shed.
My serious suggestions:
1- do the barb wire and/or broken glass across the top of the fence.
2- make sure the gate is truly solid + secure and that somebody isn't going to just climb over it
3- install video surveillance + motion detection
If you do all of that, you're not needing to rely on dogs for protection from human intruders. That's important because all of the best guard dogs do not make for the ideal pets.
Assuming that you've done the above and want a pet, I would then suggest a labrador retriever. They are more tolerant of heat than goldens. And even if you don't know the parents/lineage of any specific pup, you're still likely to get a happy, harmless, goofy, non-aggressive dog.
Do not get a mixed-breed and do not get some rare esoteric animal unless you hedge your bets by learning about what their personalities and quirks are going to be.
Do not get something with long or thick fur, it only makes it more difficult if you're checking for fleas/ticks or some kind of skin condition.
Do get something significantly larger than a village dog so that they're not tempted to pick on your dog if you go out for a walk.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Somsel
Depends on who is being trained. I’ve got two dogs of one of the smarter and smaller herding breeds. They’ve spent a lot of time seeing how well I can be trained. So far I’ve learned the whine for ‘let’s wake up’, there’s a dance for ‘I want kibble’, there’s a different bark for ‘open the door’ and a series of back and forth racing with backward glances for ‘take me outside’. There’s also different barks for various possible threats and intruders from squirrels to people to other dogs to postmen as well as vocalizations for other humans they know and like.
King Abubakari Keita of the Malian Empire crossed the Atlantic to South America and peacefully mixed with the natives in 1200 AD. He was a Muslim
https://culverduck.com/product/halal-duck-5-0-7-0lbs/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/20/from-daniel-pearl-to-james-foley-the-modern-tactic-of-islamist-beheadings/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-six-severed-heads-found-car-roof-report/
But remember kids, this only applies to dogs. Human lineages are necessarily the same in neurodevelpment genes. And, anyway, there is no such thing as human lineage. Got it? Ok. Carry on.
From the article you link:
Agreed.
Indeed. Very few people have four legs, or a tail. Humans and dogs are different! So any analogy about how natural selection works is debunked! Case closed.
You’ve just conceded that races exist, that they are biological constructs, and that genetics could account for disparate social outcomes among races.
Oh, and ancestry does not determine the distribution of some genes. Ancestry determines the distribution of all genes. You don’t get some of your genes from your ancestors and other of your genes from the gene store.
Remember, natural science consists of mental constructs, created with the objective of explaining sensory experience of our world. Human beings affix labels to make sense of our environment. For example, the California spotted owl is an animal, i.e. biological construct. The name of the creature is a human designation—strix occidentalis, i.e. human construct. That is, binomial nomenclature refers to a formal system, developed by people, to name species. The California owl was not a “California owl” until someone actually and specifically labeled it. Race, biology, ethnicity–all are concepts created by man as an organizational tool to offer a consistency about the natural world in which they observe.Replies: @mc23
I.e., Liberal Creationism.
Taming is the process of bending the animal to the human subject’s will. Domestication is taming applied generation after generation. Behavior modification is at the very heart of the process. The dog that does what you want lives; the one that doesn’t gets eaten.
In the early stages of domestication I have no doubt that behavior took priority over physical attributes. Also, I think it’s clear that breed morphology follows behavior rather than the obverse, e.g. breeds that guard herds become big and formidable because among those dogs that tend to guard the big ones are more effective.
The thing that most jumps out to me is how remarkably differentiated the PHATE plots are. Those must be among the most differtiated PCA plots in all of genomic science, which isn’t surprising, since dogs are probably the most deliberately bred creature in the world.
It would be interesting to know if there are measurable differences between the breeds out at the tips of the “star arms” versus the breeds down near the center of the “star”. In other words, can we measure the cost/benefit of the extreme breeding we have subjected canines to?
The Cell paper doesn’t seem to provide much detail of that type. Still, a few details can be gleaned from studying the plots. Spaniels are more “bred” than Poodles, for instance. Basenjis more than Afghans. Bloodhounds and Otterhounds more than Grand Basset Griffon Vendéens, whatever those are. Surprisingly, Labradors, which I had always thought of as morphologically tending toward Steve’s “Default Dog“, turn out to be way out at the tip of a genetic peninsula, so much so that they are practically on an island of their own. Newfoundlands, on the other hand, are a more basal breed. Collies are another “tip” breed, but perhaps surprisingly, show Collies are less so than working Collies. That seems to confirm Bill P’s comment that “breed morphology follows behavior”.
Looking at breed descriptions, there does seem to be correlation between basal-ness and multipurpose-ness, while the highly bred “tip” breeds often have strong behavioral traits that don’t translate to other purposes well.
Visualizing Structure and Transitions in High-Dimensional Biological Data
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073148/
The idea is PHATE is better at revealing structure in data.Not exactly what you mean, but I think Figure S3 provides some hints in that regard.
But remember, human genetic evolution stops above the neck.Replies: @Almost Missouri
In his interview with Alex Kaschuta, Steve describes his common sense view of common sense, namely that it should and does jibe with quantifiable science. Here we have another example of that truth.
We dog lovers can tell you that we notice how dog breeds exist, and that behaviors and intelligence levels are part of that. We can tell you that races of people are analogous to this. There is nothing in this genetic science that doesn’t confirm what we already know, but it is nice to see.
https://twitter.com/liberalnotlefty/status/1578913389757071360Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Bill P
“I used to be able to bring mine to the lab and she could herd people up for lab meetings,” she said.
What a stupid collie she had. Does all that work, then hands the people over to a lab.
I long ago noticed that the success of the various North American Indian tribes in adapting to white civilization seemed to vary -- and seemed to correlate to whether they were farmers themselves, advanced hunters like the Sioux, or primitive hunter-gatherers like the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area. The first have often done alright -- Choctaws have median incomes comparable to gentile whites. The Sioux, on the other hand, have really serious issues. Groups like the Ohlone died out completely.
I've tended to assume that the distinction must be cultural. White farming life is a lot more comprehensible if you farm yourself. A man works. Stealing from the neighbors is not a wholesome recreational activity. Etc.
But what if the difference was also at least partially genetic? Hunters are genetically handicapped when it comes to adapting to a sedentary life of disciplined toil? Comanche really are intrinsically less able to make the transition than Hopi?Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Cato, @mc23
The most populous modern tribe are the Navajo, who are herdsman of European sheep. I don’t believe any Amerindian tribe herded domestic animals before 1492. Other tribes like the Sioux and Comanche got really good at herding horses after 1492.
Population density was too low in the parts of N. America where herding might have developed, although if agriculture had had more time to spread north and west some of these animals likely would have eventually been domesticated.Replies: @Muggles, @Colin Wright
I can tell you that "village dogs" do exist, at least in the PH, and they are bred for barking and scrounging for food. ("stranger vigilance" might be the better term.) I do NOT want one of those unless one can train limits of protection.
I'd think a smart, medium size dog of calm temperament might work best. Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable? There will be small children visiting from family members.
Suggestions welcome.Replies: @Anonymous, @Jonathan Mason, @Jeff, @Curle
Dog IQ is measured by two correlates:
1. How quickly does the dog learn a new task.
2. How long can the dog repeat the task before retraining for the task is required.
Temperament is an issue, as well as other traits. The border collie enjoys the highest IQ in the dog world, but the dog always needs something to do, and if he doesn’t, he will will drive you nuts with compulsive behavior. That is, if you don’t have something for him to do, he’ll make up things to do by his own volition. Every single day.
Anyway, a “smart dog” is trainable, by definition.
Where are German shepherds? From appearance, they’ve always looked wolfish to me. Also have some similar traits of aggression and intelligence.
Whenever topics of dogs and intelligence come up, I’m reminded of an old joke,
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says ” actually he ain’t smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail”.
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-
and companion (Berner Sennenhund) breeds but none better in overall
trainability - as close to the egg-laying woolmilksow as it gets; of these, the
East German ones may not look like like much but they never abolished the
Leistungsprüfung, and it shows.
The only breeds that come close are Riesenschnauzer and Bouvier-Flandres
(even the police are beginning to have trouble getting good Germans, and of course
there are the political connotations).
Our family had what was objectively the Best German Shepherd In The World, Ever (Frankwyn al-Sahib of Genoa - known as Zaab), and when I was a toddler we had the prior holder of the same title ("Pissy Missy").
But people who don't fund their lives from a captive tax base, but need the traits you listed - people who raise large flocks of vulnerable animals - go for something more like a Patou (le Montagne des Pyrénées)... they get "majestic looking" as a side-benefit.
In Italy they'll have a Merimma (Cane da pastore Maremmano-Abruzzese) - and every place in Europe has a variant on the theme, from Brittany all the way to the Caucasus.
I've had the pleasure of knowing two patoux: Djedi and Baci.
Djedi was a male and a farm dog on a beef farm in the Auvergne - he was probably a cross-breed because he was black. Baci was female, a town dog, and a pet - who lived in a 'maison de maître' in the village a couple of kilometres from the farm where Djedi worked.
Djedi visited us every day - we would watch in absolute awe as he loped across the fields up the hill to our door... which he would do the moment he saw us open the bedroom shutters.
When Baci visited (a couple of times a week) she and Djedi would race around like crazy animals until they were basically exhausted, and then Djedi would saunter back to work.
This guy in Oklahoma has a patou called Mojo. Being American, Mojo is WAY too fat and has bad hips - they'll be concrete in another few years - but his demeanour exemplifies the breed: smart, diligent, powerful, demonstrative, and always willing to offer unsolicited advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUzA6BDEjp4
Djedi and Baci were the same height at the shoulder and the same breadth in the chest as Mojo, but were lean and had good hips. Baci was almost unbelievably photogenic - unless she had found some rabbit-shit to roll in.
https://twitter.com/TranslatedCats/status/1602136059324030976?s=20&t=Fs4DliqA--pfw-R8kdfN1AReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
…….in 1200 Abubakari disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean ……. but, on the upside , hagfish gotta eat too.
https://culverduck.com/product/halal-duck-5-0-7-0lbs/
Not that it’s wrong, but that much is presented as a revelation rather than background for naïve. The news here is the genetic science. What genes were selected and how some were repurposed.
Seriously? I’d bet this is out of context. If this means the genetic record doesn’t leave much evidence of intentional selection, well OK. Just like “no court has found evidence of election fraud”.
But no evidence intentional selection for behaviors? It’s as though the writer had never heard of “animal husbandry”. Or WRT to plants, how about Karl Pearson!
That is about as insultingly stupid as anything the NYT has printed.
Or, they are pivoting to some other narrative?
As I’ve said before , a great example is the Jack Russell whose Reverend eponymous breeder built to spec in about 15 years or so.
The main reason to like the yappy little rats is that the Ur Russell was called Trump.
It was, of course a Bitch.
They’re still breeding true two hundred years later.
We dog lovers can tell you that we notice how dog breeds exist, and that behaviors and intelligence levels are part of that. We can tell you that races of people are analogous to this. There is nothing in this genetic science that doesn't confirm what we already know, but it is nice to see.Replies: @ic1000
> We dog lovers can tell you that we notice how dog breeds exist
On the occasion of that ill-fated family whose beloved pet turned on them a couple of months ago, a Tibetan Mastiff owner offered a rant on pitbull owners that begins:
She segues into a discussion of mental instability as a distinct and unappreciated trait that was bred into pitbulls.
Will her intuition (folk wisdom?) be borne out by genetic studies? That’s how I’d bet. First tweet of that thread below the fold.
Pit bulls are terriers, which have high prey drive. A rat terrier will aggressively go after rodents by nature. A fox terrier after foxes, etc.
Pit bulls have been bred to have prey drive toward their own species, which is not a common natural characteristic for obvious reasons. Because dogs consider humans part of the pack, pit bulls' same-species prey drive is sometimes turned on humans. Other dogs, lacking this breed-specific same-species prey drive, will sometimes bite and attack but rarely try to kill.Replies: @Ralph L, @Anonymous
Breeds do exist, but posts like this are not the way to prove it.
You cannot just say “Aha, their genes are different, therefore they are different!” as if genes were the mediators of ontological truth. This is an unmotivated conclusion.
Nucleic acids are physical things. They are part of the body. They are just as physical as the bones and the hair and the shape of the snout, or any other trait you might qualify as a breed characteristic. And we already know that breeds differ, or we would not be talking about these things. When you point out that different breeds of dog have different gene sequences, you are not strengthening the claim that breeds exist. You are just repeating something that we already know.
What evolutionists do not realize is that they are simply degraded and half blinded essentialists who are trying to put “genetics” in the place of “forms,” but this does not work, as forms are necessarily immaterial. Genes are simply one of the material properties by which bodies are differentiated, and they are not therefore “the form of the body.”
As I have stated elsewhere, breeds are the result of plasticity within the form. When the organism is forced to survive under adverse circumstances it develops grotesqueries, exaggerations and deviations from its normal habitus; and artificial selection is a highly adverse circumstance. These are what we call “breed characteristics.” It is only necessary to say the words once and it becomes obvious that all domesticated plants and animals are grotesques, i.e. not perfections but perversions of nature.
The breed, therefore, is not a positive quality. It is rather a privation, a sign that here nature has been frustrated in a certain way. This is an accidental not an essential characteristic.
And yes, this dazzling property of genes does mislead some superficial thinkers to mistake genes for "ontological truth", but their error doesn't change the fact that different physical attributes have different properties, and that some very very small physical attributes (i.e., barely in existence—incarnated—at all) lead to, or at least indicate, very large facts about the organism. And that, given the mathematical nature of genetics, it is possible to discuss these matters in a quantitative, objective, and dispassionate way.
BTW, what circumstances would not quality as adverse?It seems to me that all circumstances necessarily impinge on a creature in some way, so all physical attributes that vary from a featureless sphere are in some way grotesque deviations. We can and should argue about what deviations are just and what are not, but I don't see any way of escaping deviations entirely, they are simply inherent in existence—incarnation—itself.
Genes affect brain development? Cognitive and behavioral features?
Just when did it become ok for Nazis to publish in Cell?
Border Collies are disturbed. Avoid them.Replies: @Known Fact, @James Speaks, @Ed Case
Especially Open Border Collies
Even mixed-breeds strongly present the traits and behaviors that went into the mix, although perhaps they’re more well rounded overall. Age also takes off some of the rough edges — we had a big female border collie mix, a senior, who was alert outside but mellow and perfectly well behaved inside. Liked people and loved little kids.
Now we have an older Pointador, also a gem
Do you by any chance steal luggage in airports?
I can tell you that "village dogs" do exist, at least in the PH, and they are bred for barking and scrounging for food. ("stranger vigilance" might be the better term.) I do NOT want one of those unless one can train limits of protection.
I'd think a smart, medium size dog of calm temperament might work best. Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable? There will be small children visiting from family members.
Suggestions welcome.Replies: @Anonymous, @Jonathan Mason, @Jeff, @Curle
I don’t know what kind of dogs are available in the Philippines. Here in Ecuador you can get just about every kind of dog and every kind of mixture that you could possibly think of.
If you’re looking for a dog that is child tolerant, Golden Retrievers and Labradors are a good bet, but if you want to dogs that will bark at intruders, they are pretty useless.
If you just wanted a dog to be ornamental and in the house, a pug might meet requirements.
With a 1-acre walled compound, it might make more sense to have two dogs, then they will have the run of the place and provide company for each other.
If not experienced with dogs, it makes a lot of sense to get a young puppy rather than a grown-up rescue dog, then you can mold their behavior to your taste with regards to barking and scrounging. In my opinion females are usually better domestic pets than young males, which tend to be full of testosterone.
There is nothing wrong with mixed breed dogs.
You can get some idea of the character of a dog from the dam (mother). The worst kind of dogs to get are those that are “highly strung” and excitable.
While a dog may not attack a child and just wants to play, if it jumps up and scratches a toddler’s face, tears will be shed.
Llamas and alpacas? But yeah, none in N. North America. Aside from buffalo, which presumably would require horses to herd, only caribou and some mountain goats and sheep might have been candidates for domestication here. Oh, and javelinas.
Population density was too low in the parts of N. America where herding might have developed, although if agriculture had had more time to spread north and west some of these animals likely would have eventually been domesticated.
These Siberian American immigrants weren't and aren't known in their Siberian homelands for being either farmers or herders. Some have tended reindeer herds but they exist only in regions where reindeer can survive. Mostly they exist by hunting and fishing (some gathering) as Siberia is very harsh.
Some northern tribes in Alaska/Canada eventually followed caribou but even now they are not domesticated.
As you note, had they been here longer (and settled down, not wandering around eating the larger mammals first) they may have developed some domestication. Though it is an open question as to whether native Western Hemisphere animals are open to that. Yes llamas, alpacas and some South American species. Maybe eventually pigeons, which were very numerous.
The Western Hemisphere was not a great place to find and domesticate edible animals.Replies: @TWS, @Bill P
Breeds and races have something else in common: both are the result of human decisions. Dogs themselves have no reason to discriminate (in the literal sense), and likely don’t.
Of course, they will behave differently according to the attributes of the other dog. Tiny dogs sometimes set off our beagle’s prey instinct, as if they were hares or squirrels. (However, small dogs are themselves notorious for ignoring size differences.)
The aggressive breeds no doubt give off an aggressive odor, and Fido would pick up on that. He might pick up on aggression in the pitbull’s owner as well.
https://twitter.com/liberalnotlefty/status/1578913389757071360Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Bill P
There is zero need for these traits outside specialized roles such as guarding rural livestock or K9 units, or patrolling your rubber tree plantation in Africa. Dogs should be bred for amiability with humans. After all, we ruthlessly cull bears, cougars, wolves and coyotes, and even alligators when they get too intrusive or aggressive. But since “dog breeds” are just one short, step across to “human races,” we can’t solve our problem of vicious dogs maiming and killing humans lest a liberal thoughtpoliceperson arrive and hand out citations for hatescience.
https://twitter.com/liberalnotlefty/status/1578913389757071360Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @Bill P
I don’t think it’s mental instability.
Pit bulls are terriers, which have high prey drive. A rat terrier will aggressively go after rodents by nature. A fox terrier after foxes, etc.
Pit bulls have been bred to have prey drive toward their own species, which is not a common natural characteristic for obvious reasons. Because dogs consider humans part of the pack, pit bulls’ same-species prey drive is sometimes turned on humans. Other dogs, lacking this breed-specific same-species prey drive, will sometimes bite and attack but rarely try to kill.
I don't know why people want them--they're just plain ugly IMO. Even in a mix, the wide set eyes look like trouble. But there are a lot of hideous but popular dog faces.Replies: @Bill P
A Pitbull will apparently go after a Tesla by nature.
Fuck this breed.
https://youtu.be/InKdw6AAfcEReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
Right. He has various tactics to garner attention. Obviously, one is to be insulting. Another, if someone actually engages him, is to pose a series of Socratic questions.
Finally! An explanation of how widely separated regions with no apparent contact developed identical cultural traditions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/20/from-daniel-pearl-to-james-foley-the-modern-tactic-of-islamist-beheadings/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-six-severed-heads-found-car-roof-report/
Border Collies are disturbed. Avoid them.Replies: @Known Fact, @James Speaks, @Ed Case
As I have stated before, if you don’t train your border collie, your border collie will train you.
“There is no such thing as a ‘folk breed’”.
I disagree. The Canaan was bred from Bedouin pariah dogs. The Basenji is also more or less a pariah dog whose value to the local folk is based on how eager it is to join in the hunt. Dingoes were once likewise partially domesticated. The Chow is a notorious biter because it was mostly just a backyard guard dog whose coat provided good fur (and whose insides provided good meat) to the local villagers, so that good manners were not a priority. Whereas if the “folk” in the area are invested in fishing and other such nautical activities, that impacts the skills that the more desirable dogs in the area will tend to possess, as in “I want one of those”. So there is a logic to how the Newfoundland and Labrador got their names, their webbed feet and the other attributes they are variously known for. Same goes for the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever and the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, And since there’s not much use for retrievers up where the Samoyed people live, the dog they are known for, like the Siberian husky and Alaskan malamute, are better for pulling sleds. Same goes for sheep herding folk, both in terms of the kind of herding their dogs are required to do, and the kinds of predators they are supposed to defend against.
The dog shelter I used to live near has far too many pit bulls so they occasionally do a swap with shelters out in rural areas that have far too many hounds to even things out. Everyone knows what those breeds are useful for, and the reason a given community has too many of them has very much to do with the corresponding “folk” that make up that community.
Now do people.
Great apes, etc.
Neanderthals, Denisovans, Cro Mags, Homo Sapiens, etc.
Sub Saharan Africans as a group today didn’t like to travel, or wouldn’t. Other modern human populations did. Of course many of the much earlier humanoid populations who did travel away from Africa (according to current theory) eventually died out.
Leaving Africa was risky.
Of course “race doesn’t exist” (as of a few decades ago). Or “Race is paramount” since some bear the burden of humanity’s evil (science, knowledge, skills, engineering, exploration) while others remain in a perfect State of Nature. That is the gospel as of about 2010.
The more advanced, the more evil.
Somehow dog breeds have escaped the moral condemnations. Other than pit bulls.
Population density was too low in the parts of N. America where herding might have developed, although if agriculture had had more time to spread north and west some of these animals likely would have eventually been domesticated.Replies: @Muggles, @Colin Wright
Possibly. Though aside from some dogs, American Indians didn’t domesticate anything else.
These Siberian American immigrants weren’t and aren’t known in their Siberian homelands for being either farmers or herders. Some have tended reindeer herds but they exist only in regions where reindeer can survive. Mostly they exist by hunting and fishing (some gathering) as Siberia is very harsh.
Some northern tribes in Alaska/Canada eventually followed caribou but even now they are not domesticated.
As you note, had they been here longer (and settled down, not wandering around eating the larger mammals first) they may have developed some domestication. Though it is an open question as to whether native Western Hemisphere animals are open to that. Yes llamas, alpacas and some South American species. Maybe eventually pigeons, which were very numerous.
The Western Hemisphere was not a great place to find and domesticate edible animals.
They simply ate them. My native blood is thin, but my friends and family have members that can track elk or man by scent. We were hunters not farmers or pastoralists.
The Eurasian folks domesticated horses at least twice, sheep, goats, caribou are called 'the animal that domesticated itself', then there's elephants and two varieties of camels.
North and south America combined to domesticate a couple of smallish camels, turkeys and dogs.
Now plants are another story and they domesticated the most useful plants in the world. Cotton, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, corn, winter squash, beans and were on the way to domesticing the camas. Camas can make you windy and it grows pretty well on its own, my grandma grew up with it and it grows where I park the car. They had creatures to domesticate they just didn't have the mind set. The Nez Perce are the only folks I know who practiced deliberate breeding gelding substandard colts.Replies: @Muggles
I don't know whether, say, Salishan tribes might have eventually put mountain goats and bighorn sheep in pens and started the process of domestication if they'd learned to grow and hoard corn, but it doesn't seem too far fetched. They'd already bred a dog specifically for its fur (the wool dog) and had a highly developed material culture.
And I don't think the ancestral old world animals were much better than American animals, with the obvious exception of equines. The mouflon and ibex are pretty similar to our wild sheep and goats here in the NW.
qatar bans alphabet pipo symbol.
US bans animal rights symbol.
the difference is les etats unis merdeux is WORSE. like WAY.
I can tell you that "village dogs" do exist, at least in the PH, and they are bred for barking and scrounging for food. ("stranger vigilance" might be the better term.) I do NOT want one of those unless one can train limits of protection.
I'd think a smart, medium size dog of calm temperament might work best. Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable? There will be small children visiting from family members.
Suggestions welcome.Replies: @Anonymous, @Jonathan Mason, @Jeff, @Curle
You haven’t said what you want out of this future dog.
My serious suggestions:
1- do the barb wire and/or broken glass across the top of the fence.
2- make sure the gate is truly solid + secure and that somebody isn’t going to just climb over it
3- install video surveillance + motion detection
If you do all of that, you’re not needing to rely on dogs for protection from human intruders. That’s important because all of the best guard dogs do not make for the ideal pets.
Assuming that you’ve done the above and want a pet, I would then suggest a labrador retriever. They are more tolerant of heat than goldens. And even if you don’t know the parents/lineage of any specific pup, you’re still likely to get a happy, harmless, goofy, non-aggressive dog.
Do not get a mixed-breed and do not get some rare esoteric animal unless you hedge your bets by learning about what their personalities and quirks are going to be.
Do not get something with long or thick fur, it only makes it more difficult if you’re checking for fleas/ticks or some kind of skin condition.
Do get something significantly larger than a village dog so that they’re not tempted to pick on your dog if you go out for a walk.
No, but even the best pets make pretty good guard dogs.
That's because the dog doesn't really need to actually do much -- just make the burglar decide to go rob your neighbor instead.
We used to live in a neighborhood in Richmond, California that more or less had a community burglar. It seemed like everybody got hit -- except us.
We had a Labrador Retriever. Of course he wouldn't have actually attacked anyone -- we saw this when a neighbor who was a beer short of a full six pack wandered into our yard -- but he was hell on barking. Yes, Ralph, someone's walking past the house. Thanks for the news...asshole.
But we never got robbed.
The kicker was when he got so old (he made it to fifteen) that all he did was snooze. And bingo: we got robbed. Guy kicked open the door and found the six hundred dollars cash I'd taken out for a shade tree mechanic.
But even then...Ralph was snoozing in the room with my computer, and dude apparently didn't try going in there.
A sixty pound dog is a sixty pound dog is a sixty pound dog. It has a deterrent effect.
Short hair should have gone without saying given the tropics I mentioned Growing bigger than the local village dogs is a darn good suggestion as is having the dog being an intimidating barker as the locals are often light-fingered AND poor AND hungry. I can see taking the dog on a walk on a leash through the neighborhood and down to the village. Our 2 meter wall doesn't have barbed wire along the top - yet - but my German neighbor does. We call his place "Das Stalag."
I think that equating intelligent with trainable as Anominous does is a bit too simple, especially when used with his example of border collies making up their own antics if they have nothing to do. Is there free will in dogs, even a little bit?
German Shephards and Labradors sounds like good breeds to investigate. What about Weimaraner? I've met a couple and was impressed with their temperament and intelligence, clean and graceful too although I not looking for a show horse status symbol.Replies: @P. Cleburne
Great apes, etc.
Neanderthals, Denisovans, Cro Mags, Homo Sapiens, etc.
Sub Saharan Africans as a group today didn't like to travel, or wouldn't. Other modern human populations did. Of course many of the much earlier humanoid populations who did travel away from Africa (according to current theory) eventually died out.
Leaving Africa was risky.
Of course "race doesn't exist" (as of a few decades ago). Or "Race is paramount" since some bear the burden of humanity's evil (science, knowledge, skills, engineering, exploration) while others remain in a perfect State of Nature. That is the gospel as of about 2010.
The more advanced, the more evil.
Somehow dog breeds have escaped the moral condemnations. Other than pit bulls.Replies: @Jack D
Generally speaking, you can’t introduce traits that were not there to begin with, but you can emphasize certain traits. For example, you could never get a dog to meow. But you can’t get a wolf to bark either – adult wolves howl, they do not bark. However, wolf pups yip to get their mother’s attention. One of the reasons why humans liked dogs hanging around their campfire is that they would make noise whenever there was an intruder so over time they selected for dogs with a loud yip which became a bark. A lot of dog behavior is wolf PUPPY behavior – dogs are sort of Peter Pan wolves that never grow up (because when they grow up they are MEAN mf’ers that you really don’t want to have around your babies).
Generally speaking, except for a few breeds, dogs are much smaller than wolves. Even the breeds that resemble wolves only resemble them when they are not side by side. An adult male gray wolf can weigh 150 lbs. or more and looms over a German Shepherd.
Did he bring his fighting dogs? The duskier shaded folks sure like their violent blood sports.
You cannot just say "Aha, their genes are different, therefore they are different!" as if genes were the mediators of ontological truth. This is an unmotivated conclusion.
Nucleic acids are physical things. They are part of the body. They are just as physical as the bones and the hair and the shape of the snout, or any other trait you might qualify as a breed characteristic. And we already know that breeds differ, or we would not be talking about these things. When you point out that different breeds of dog have different gene sequences, you are not strengthening the claim that breeds exist. You are just repeating something that we already know.
What evolutionists do not realize is that they are simply degraded and half blinded essentialists who are trying to put "genetics" in the place of "forms," but this does not work, as forms are necessarily immaterial. Genes are simply one of the material properties by which bodies are differentiated, and they are not therefore "the form of the body."
As I have stated elsewhere, breeds are the result of plasticity within the form. When the organism is forced to survive under adverse circumstances it develops grotesqueries, exaggerations and deviations from its normal habitus; and artificial selection is a highly adverse circumstance. These are what we call "breed characteristics." It is only necessary to say the words once and it becomes obvious that all domesticated plants and animals are grotesques, i.e. not perfections but perversions of nature.
The breed, therefore, is not a positive quality. It is rather a privation, a sign that here nature has been frustrated in a certain way. This is an accidental not an essential characteristic.Replies: @Bert, @Chrisnonymous, @Almost Missouri
Yours is an excellent example of what passed for knowledge in 1000 A.D.
OT — “Western civilization is committing suicide” — WTF, you now love freed arms dealer Viktor Bout?
https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/bout_full_intv_1012:2
The original shepherd is different from the various modern lineages. My family has bred and trained working dogs for five generations. My grandfather disliked the shepherd breed. My uncle loved them and trained them for military work.
I selected line of German shepherd bred as companion dogs. They are biddable and more friendly than say an East German shepherd variety but still protective of their family and easily trained.
I also raised bullmastiffs. They started as a working breed but have been bred for head shape for generations. They were fine family dogs but need an experienced owner for proper socializing.
Our huskies needed a firm hand but my family had a soft spot for them. They were smart, and could learn quickly but could be animal aggressive especially wild animals and be very stubborn.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
The working lines of the German shepherd are my favorite dogs. Lovely in all ways and natural in appearance and temperament. Excellent animals.
Also,
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/8893c36e555fa8dbddfb7ada11cd944a465d019a14c85101388e5a7667ef4256_1.jpg
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658615 (#85)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658650 (#88)Replies: @MEH 0910, @Kylie, @James Forrestal
“News from Science
@NewsfromScience
Border collies are known for their strong work ethic—but why is that the case?”
WTF–??
Is this really what passes for science these days? Really?
Border collies do not have a “strong work ethic”. They have a strong herding instinct. By the same token, when a dog misbehaves and then cringes when its owner notices, the dog does not know it has done something wrong. The dog merely knows it has displeased its owner.
Dogs, like leftists, are not concerned with ethics. Unlike leftists, however, they are generally good companions, capable of love and loyalty.
Pit bulls are terriers, which have high prey drive. A rat terrier will aggressively go after rodents by nature. A fox terrier after foxes, etc.
Pit bulls have been bred to have prey drive toward their own species, which is not a common natural characteristic for obvious reasons. Because dogs consider humans part of the pack, pit bulls' same-species prey drive is sometimes turned on humans. Other dogs, lacking this breed-specific same-species prey drive, will sometimes bite and attack but rarely try to kill.Replies: @Ralph L, @Anonymous
Is it same-species or just any animal species? Do they attack squirrels and birds? Did some cat get in the mix somehow?
I don’t know why people want them–they’re just plain ugly IMO. Even in a mix, the wide set eyes look like trouble. But there are a lot of hideous but popular dog faces.
I agree with you about the aesthetics. They are particularly ugly, ignoble dogs. Personally I think this is a reflection of the qualities of the humans who bred them. As I wrote in a previous post, domestication is guided by the will of the human subject directing it. So I think we can say that pit bulls are a reflection of the uglier parts of human nature, and that's why many of us recoil against their characteristics while some are drawn to them.Replies: @TWS
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
This makes sense, because unlike dogs bred for single purpose, German Shepherds were bred to be all-purpose working dogs.
Border Collies, for example, were bred for herding, not guarding. I knew someone who raised sheep, and he used border collies for herding the sheep, but kept another dog (I don’t remember the breed) for guarding them against coyotes. According to him, Border Collies do not have a kill instinct at all, and would be useless for guarding livestock against predators. Dogs bred specifically to guard a flock, on the other hand, can be very aggressive when the animals are threatened, even if they have no ability to herd. Great Pyrenees are usually not good herders, but they can be very valuable for guarding livestock:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/georgia-sheepdog-fights-off-kills-coyotes-pack-attacks-sheep
Just as Border Collies were bred for herding, and Great Pyrenees were bred for guarding, German Shepherds were bred for both tasks. Other breeds are probably better at herding than German Shepherds, and others may be better as guard dogs, but the German Shepherd is more versatile, and is able to fill both roles.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
Agree.
I don't know why people want them--they're just plain ugly IMO. Even in a mix, the wide set eyes look like trouble. But there are a lot of hideous but popular dog faces.Replies: @Bill P
You know, it’s interesting how prey drive can be as well-adjusted as it is, but I can’t claim to understand why. I’ve just observed that when dogs are bred to go after a certain kind of animal that’s what they do. That said, I’ve never observed pit bull terriers that particularly care about squirrels or birds, but I’ve seen them go after other dogs and people quite a few times.
I agree with you about the aesthetics. They are particularly ugly, ignoble dogs. Personally I think this is a reflection of the qualities of the humans who bred them. As I wrote in a previous post, domestication is guided by the will of the human subject directing it. So I think we can say that pit bulls are a reflection of the uglier parts of human nature, and that’s why many of us recoil against their characteristics while some are drawn to them.
This ‘low trainability’ malarkey is often levelled at the English Setter, and is (of course) used as evidence that they’re not as smart as, say, Labradors.
Anyone who’s ever watched an English Setter ① doing the job for which it was bred ② in the environment for which it was bred (namely, ① flushing out prey ② in underbrush), you realise that they’re not wired to monitor the humans standing a couple of hundred meters away.
And – on border collies – having a border collie in an urban setting should be more frowned-upon than having a pitbull. It’s the canine equivalent of forcing a bright child to watch nothing but American ‘laugh-track’ sitcoms and eat a SAD diet.
He was a farmer, and I happened to be there when he hosted the annual meeting of that AKC board. I got to hobnob with the board members.
They were interesting people who bred Gordon Setters. One was an engineer from Alabama who was working on the Hubble Space Telescope. I played horseshoes against him; he won using a technique that involved using the rotation of the shoe for stability.
Your comment reminded me of the dogs my friend's farmer father bred:
https://spot-and-tango.s3.amazonaws.com/production/media/Gordon_Setter_2019-08-29T202936.jpgReplies: @Kratoklastes
Forget about dogs: can current genetics turn desirable recessive alleles into dominant ones?
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
There are better hunting (Deutsch-Drahthaar), herding (border collie)
and companion (Berner Sennenhund) breeds but none better in overall
trainability – as close to the egg-laying woolmilksow as it gets; of these, the
East German ones may not look like like much but they never abolished the
Leistungsprüfung, and it shows.
The only breeds that come close are Riesenschnauzer and Bouvier-Flandres
(even the police are beginning to have trouble getting good Germans, and of course
there are the political connotations).
Anyone who's ever watched an English Setter ① doing the job for which it was bred ② in the environment for which it was bred (namely, ① flushing out prey ② in underbrush), you realise that they're not wired to monitor the humans standing a couple of hundred meters away.
And - on border collies - having a border collie in an urban setting should be more frowned-upon than having a pitbull. It's the canine equivalent of forcing a bright child to watch nothing but American 'laugh-track' sitcoms and eat a SAD diet.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar
Not sure how relevant this is, but my friend’s father was the president of the Gordon Setter Club of America.
He was a farmer, and I happened to be there when he hosted the annual meeting of that AKC board. I got to hobnob with the board members.
They were interesting people who bred Gordon Setters. One was an engineer from Alabama who was working on the Hubble Space Telescope. I played horseshoes against him; he won using a technique that involved using the rotation of the shoe for stability.
Your comment reminded me of the dogs my friend’s farmer father bred:
That's what Sadie was like when she got into the underbrush in the forest at the back of my colleague's place in the country... in the city she looked more like this ->
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7gf2blt7o63j6d/IMG_0007.JPG?dl=1Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
My serious suggestions:
1- do the barb wire and/or broken glass across the top of the fence.
2- make sure the gate is truly solid + secure and that somebody isn't going to just climb over it
3- install video surveillance + motion detection
If you do all of that, you're not needing to rely on dogs for protection from human intruders. That's important because all of the best guard dogs do not make for the ideal pets.
Assuming that you've done the above and want a pet, I would then suggest a labrador retriever. They are more tolerant of heat than goldens. And even if you don't know the parents/lineage of any specific pup, you're still likely to get a happy, harmless, goofy, non-aggressive dog.
Do not get a mixed-breed and do not get some rare esoteric animal unless you hedge your bets by learning about what their personalities and quirks are going to be.
Do not get something with long or thick fur, it only makes it more difficult if you're checking for fleas/ticks or some kind of skin condition.
Do get something significantly larger than a village dog so that they're not tempted to pick on your dog if you go out for a walk.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Somsel
‘That’s important because all of the best guard dogs do not make for the ideal pets.’
No, but even the best pets make pretty good guard dogs.
That’s because the dog doesn’t really need to actually do much — just make the burglar decide to go rob your neighbor instead.
We used to live in a neighborhood in Richmond, California that more or less had a community burglar. It seemed like everybody got hit — except us.
We had a Labrador Retriever. Of course he wouldn’t have actually attacked anyone — we saw this when a neighbor who was a beer short of a full six pack wandered into our yard — but he was hell on barking. Yes, Ralph, someone’s walking past the house. Thanks for the news…asshole.
But we never got robbed.
The kicker was when he got so old (he made it to fifteen) that all he did was snooze. And bingo: we got robbed. Guy kicked open the door and found the six hundred dollars cash I’d taken out for a shade tree mechanic.
But even then…Ralph was snoozing in the room with my computer, and dude apparently didn’t try going in there.
A sixty pound dog is a sixty pound dog is a sixty pound dog. It has a deterrent effect.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
The second sentence is not implied by the first, because “police forces” – being an arm of the state – have state-derived behaviours. They do not select thngs based on fitness-for-purpose.
Our family had what was objectively the Best German Shepherd In The World, Ever (Frankwyn al-Sahib of Genoa – known as Zaab), and when I was a toddler we had the prior holder of the same title (“Pissy Missy”).
But people who don’t fund their lives from a captive tax base, but need the traits you listed – people who raise large flocks of vulnerable animals – go for something more like a Patou (le Montagne des Pyrénées)… they get “majestic looking” as a side-benefit.
In Italy they’ll have a Merimma (Cane da pastore Maremmano-Abruzzese) – and every place in Europe has a variant on the theme, from Brittany all the way to the Caucasus.
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing two patoux: Djedi and Baci.
Djedi was a male and a farm dog on a beef farm in the Auvergne – he was probably a cross-breed because he was black. Baci was female, a town dog, and a pet – who lived in a ‘maison de maître‘ in the village a couple of kilometres from the farm where Djedi worked.
Djedi visited us every day – we would watch in absolute awe as he loped across the fields up the hill to our door… which he would do the moment he saw us open the bedroom shutters.
When Baci visited (a couple of times a week) she and Djedi would race around like crazy animals until they were basically exhausted, and then Djedi would saunter back to work.
This guy in Oklahoma has a patou called Mojo. Being American, Mojo is WAY too fat and has bad hips – they’ll be concrete in another few years – but his demeanour exemplifies the breed: smart, diligent, powerful, demonstrative, and always willing to offer unsolicited advice.
Djedi and Baci were the same height at the shoulder and the same breadth in the chest as Mojo, but were lean and had good hips. Baci was almost unbelievably photogenic – unless she had found some rabbit-shit to roll in.
Sailer said “folk breeds”, a reference to different peoples, aka different races. It was his typical caginess.
That’s why I correctly stated there is no such thing. That’s the context.
You're always so damned sure you're right, and as a rule, you're wrong.
The worst of it is that your basis for your certainty that you're right isn't that you've considered the evidence, or even parsed the logic, but simply 'my views are orthodox, so they must be right.'
Intellectually, you haven't moved past the ninth century.
Only if you’re more concerned about dogs than children. Pit bulls shouldn’t be anywhere near kids. Border collie angst is a trivial concern in comparison.
Prompt:
GPTSailer v0.1.0:
Model base: GPT-J-6B
Fine tuning corpus: isteve blog
Oh, and ancestry does not determine the distribution of some genes. Ancestry determines the distribution of all genes. You don't get some of your genes from your ancestors and other of your genes from the gene store.Replies: @Corvinus
Race is linked to biology; ethnicity is linked to culture. Race is a biological and social construct. Ethnicity is a social construct. Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices. Certainly, race and ethnicity overlap, but they are distinct. For example, a Japanese-American would probably consider himself a member of the Asian race, but, if he does not engage in any of the practices or customs of his ancestors, he might not necessarily identify with the ethnicity, but rather consider himself to be American. Of course, American is not a “race”, it is a conglomeration of distinct ethnic groups all rolled into one, with a common cultural bond.
Remember, natural science consists of mental constructs, created with the objective of explaining sensory experience of our world. Human beings affix labels to make sense of our environment. For example, the California spotted owl is an animal, i.e. biological construct. The name of the creature is a human designation—strix occidentalis, i.e. human construct. That is, binomial nomenclature refers to a formal system, developed by people, to name species. The California owl was not a “California owl” until someone actually and specifically labeled it. Race, biology, ethnicity–all are concepts created by man as an organizational tool to offer a consistency about the natural world in which they observe.
Anyone who's ever watched an English Setter ① doing the job for which it was bred ② in the environment for which it was bred (namely, ① flushing out prey ② in underbrush), you realise that they're not wired to monitor the humans standing a couple of hundred meters away.
And - on border collies - having a border collie in an urban setting should be more frowned-upon than having a pitbull. It's the canine equivalent of forcing a bright child to watch nothing but American 'laugh-track' sitcoms and eat a SAD diet.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar
In the Northern Hemisphere, that’s spelled y-a-r-d-s. Especially when talking about hunting dogs.
Population density was too low in the parts of N. America where herding might have developed, although if agriculture had had more time to spread north and west some of these animals likely would have eventually been domesticated.Replies: @Muggles, @Colin Wright
‘Llamas and alpacas? But yeah, none in N. North America. Aside from buffalo, which presumably would require horses to herd, only caribou and some mountain goats and sheep might have been candidates for domestication here. Oh, and javelinas.’
Yeah — but the Jered Diamond ‘there just weren’t the right animals’ explanation is misleading.
You can’t ride the ancestral horse; its spine is too weak. Want to domesticate the original wild cow? Well, the bulls weigh one-two tons; bring some padding.
All those nanimals that made herding feasible in the Old World weren’t just available off the shelf; they had to be bred.
But there are ‘folk breeds.’ The strength of genetics in determining human characteristics is astonishing. See Robert Plomin, Blueprint.
Of course Plomin doesn’t want to get cast into the outer dark, and so he avoids spelling out the obvious conclusions, but they’re right there.
You just have to accept it. It doesn’t mean anyone’s good or bad; it does mean they’re different.
Show me where he employs that exact phraseology.
"Intellectually, you haven’t moved past the ninth century."
You must have stole that line from Bert, who said "Yours is an excellent example of what passed for knowledge in 1000 A.D."
"You just have to accept it. It doesn’t mean anyone’s good or bad; it does mean they’re different."
Plonin's work has holes in it. You just have to accept it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5
"You’re always so damned sure you’re right, and as a rule, you’re wrong."
Thanks for your projection.
‘…That’s why I correctly stated there is no such thing. That’s the context.’
You’re always so damned sure you’re right, and as a rule, you’re wrong.
The worst of it is that your basis for your certainty that you’re right isn’t that you’ve considered the evidence, or even parsed the logic, but simply ‘my views are orthodox, so they must be right.’
Intellectually, you haven’t moved past the ninth century.
It’s actually more like 300 BC, which makes it all the more embarrassing that you can’t keep up with it.
“But there are ‘folk breeds.’ The strength of genetics in determining human characteristics is astonishing. See Robert Plomin, Blueprint.”
Show me where he employs that exact phraseology.
“Intellectually, you haven’t moved past the ninth century.”
You must have stole that line from Bert, who said “Yours is an excellent example of what passed for knowledge in 1000 A.D.”
“You just have to accept it. It doesn’t mean anyone’s good or bad; it does mean they’re different.”
Plonin’s work has holes in it. You just have to accept it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5
“You’re always so damned sure you’re right, and as a rule, you’re wrong.”
Thanks for your projection.
‘…“Intellectually, you haven’t moved past the ninth century.”
You must have stole that line from Bert, who said “Yours is an excellent example of what passed for knowledge in 1000 A.D.”…’
Either that, or we both noticed the same thing. I was actually thinking of Saint Anselm, the Eleventh Century theologian, who is the first example I’m aware of a post-classical Western thinker actually engaging in critical reasoning.
You’re an idiot. You really are.
I agree with you about the aesthetics. They are particularly ugly, ignoble dogs. Personally I think this is a reflection of the qualities of the humans who bred them. As I wrote in a previous post, domestication is guided by the will of the human subject directing it. So I think we can say that pit bulls are a reflection of the uglier parts of human nature, and that's why many of us recoil against their characteristics while some are drawn to them.Replies: @TWS
Watched pits and pit mixes hunt cats. Tear them to shreds too. Aren’t fighting dogs grand?
I long ago noticed that the success of the various North American Indian tribes in adapting to white civilization seemed to vary -- and seemed to correlate to whether they were farmers themselves, advanced hunters like the Sioux, or primitive hunter-gatherers like the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area. The first have often done alright -- Choctaws have median incomes comparable to gentile whites. The Sioux, on the other hand, have really serious issues. Groups like the Ohlone died out completely.
I've tended to assume that the distinction must be cultural. White farming life is a lot more comprehensible if you farm yourself. A man works. Stealing from the neighbors is not a wholesome recreational activity. Etc.
But what if the difference was also at least partially genetic? Hunters are genetically handicapped when it comes to adapting to a sedentary life of disciplined toil? Comanche really are intrinsically less able to make the transition than Hopi?Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Cato, @mc23
Genes and culture “coevolve”. Gregory Clark’s Farewell to Alms finds that reproductive fitness in early modern Britain was highest among families that were part of the bourgeoisie — that part of the early modern population that adapted successfully to capitalism has disproportionally contributed to the genome of today’s English-descended.
Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran had a similar insight in their 10,000 Year Explosion: farming is harder work than foraging, and should select for traits such as endurance, perseverance, and delayed gratification.
He was a farmer, and I happened to be there when he hosted the annual meeting of that AKC board. I got to hobnob with the board members.
They were interesting people who bred Gordon Setters. One was an engineer from Alabama who was working on the Hubble Space Telescope. I played horseshoes against him; he won using a technique that involved using the rotation of the shoe for stability.
Your comment reminded me of the dogs my friend's farmer father bred:
https://spot-and-tango.s3.amazonaws.com/production/media/Gordon_Setter_2019-08-29T202936.jpgReplies: @Kratoklastes
That’s a magnificent dog, and the look on its face really does capture the breed’s nature – intense concentration on the middle-distance.
That’s what Sadie was like when she got into the underbrush in the forest at the back of my colleague’s place in the country… in the city she looked more like this ->
Pit bulls are terriers, which have high prey drive. A rat terrier will aggressively go after rodents by nature. A fox terrier after foxes, etc.
Pit bulls have been bred to have prey drive toward their own species, which is not a common natural characteristic for obvious reasons. Because dogs consider humans part of the pack, pit bulls' same-species prey drive is sometimes turned on humans. Other dogs, lacking this breed-specific same-species prey drive, will sometimes bite and attack but rarely try to kill.Replies: @Ralph L, @Anonymous
With an alleged biting strength of around 1800 psi, I don’t give fuck about whether a Pitbull could benefit from therapy. I don’t give a shit what their problems are. The breed should be outlawed. There is no good reason for the breed to exist, and plenty of reasons it shouldn’t.
A Pitbull will apparently go after a Tesla by nature.
Fuck this breed.
As a professional sheep farmer I breed and work sheep dogs on a daily basis , all Kelpies. I’m not sure about the adapted mothering theory. My take is that man has adapted wolves hunting style into herding. I’ve seen film of wolves hunting in the north of Canada and Arctic and the pack seems to go out with a purpose and all members take a role with the Alpha male as leader. When I take my dogs out to herd a mob of sheep there is no doubt I’m the pack leader and with a well trained group of dogs only a few commands need to be given to modify their movements. If a weak sheep goes down or one breaks from the mob then you must be on guard for overzealous dogs taking it down. If so they usually look to me as the pack leader for approval.
Physical traits such as athletic conformation and stamina ( especially in Australia where heat and distance can be confronting) are important but intelligence , initiative and the ability to read sheep’s movements are definitely bred for. A good sheepdog is like Lionel Messi. It knows where a sheep will be 12 seconds before it gets there.
Border Collies are disturbed. Avoid them.Replies: @Known Fact, @James Speaks, @Ed Case
The only dogs i’ve ever seen with different color eyes, and i’ve noticed it a few times.
https://dogisworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SIBERIAN-HUSKY.jpgOne girlfriend owned one. I took him hiking in the mountains. He had an independent streak, and he was strong. I kept thinking he would do best harnessed to a sled in Siberia.She named him Stoli.
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8bdc36_fd8e6952fdbd47e581bdaed4719bddc5~mv2.jpeg/v1/fit/w_500,h_500,q_90/file.jpg
Physical traits such as athletic conformation and stamina ( especially in Australia where heat and distance can be confronting) are important but intelligence , initiative and the ability to read sheep’s movements are definitely bred for. A good sheepdog is like Lionel Messi. It knows where a sheep will be 12 seconds before it gets there.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
You cannot just say "Aha, their genes are different, therefore they are different!" as if genes were the mediators of ontological truth. This is an unmotivated conclusion.
Nucleic acids are physical things. They are part of the body. They are just as physical as the bones and the hair and the shape of the snout, or any other trait you might qualify as a breed characteristic. And we already know that breeds differ, or we would not be talking about these things. When you point out that different breeds of dog have different gene sequences, you are not strengthening the claim that breeds exist. You are just repeating something that we already know.
What evolutionists do not realize is that they are simply degraded and half blinded essentialists who are trying to put "genetics" in the place of "forms," but this does not work, as forms are necessarily immaterial. Genes are simply one of the material properties by which bodies are differentiated, and they are not therefore "the form of the body."
As I have stated elsewhere, breeds are the result of plasticity within the form. When the organism is forced to survive under adverse circumstances it develops grotesqueries, exaggerations and deviations from its normal habitus; and artificial selection is a highly adverse circumstance. These are what we call "breed characteristics." It is only necessary to say the words once and it becomes obvious that all domesticated plants and animals are grotesques, i.e. not perfections but perversions of nature.
The breed, therefore, is not a positive quality. It is rather a privation, a sign that here nature has been frustrated in a certain way. This is an accidental not an essential characteristic.Replies: @Bert, @Chrisnonymous, @Almost Missouri
I appreciate your posts,but sadly your perspective is wrong. It is not plausible once one realizes the extent to which forms proliferate and yet replicate each other. You may think this is proof of your theory, but it’s not. The idea that there is Dog, of which breeds are grotesqueries, is plausible only as long as your world is populated by a limited number of Forms recognized via human cultural touchstones. In reality, across space but especially across time, organisms bleed into each other and change so much that the idea that they are embodying certain essential Forms is not plausible. This is different from the argument that races or species don’t exist because they can interbreed. For races or species, we can look at genetic and phenotypic clusters during a snapshot in time and define them. This is not possible with eternal Forms, and if your Forms are not eternal, they are categorically meaningless.
As for organisms "bleeding into each other," I'm not sure what you mean here or what it has to do with anything. Even if we imagined the entire biosphere, spread out through space and time, as a single cytoplasmic slop out of which innumerable creatures arise and into which they fall again, it would still be the case that each individual creature would be a unitary and indivisible thing for precisely as long as it existed, which is exactly the problem that the forms address. That Heraclitan "river" of matter is always flowing through us; the ship of Theseus is always being refurbished. There is no principle in matter by which the unitary existence of creatures can be explained. The unitary principle, therefore, is immaterial.This is very wrong on multiple levels. First off, Eternal Forms (i.e. universals) are not substantial forms. These are two different animals requiring entirely different discussions. But even amongst the universals themselves, there is no requirement that they be instantiated everywhere and always. That is the difference between essence and existence. Only God Himself is ipsum esse subsistens.
…..HEY! according to Whoopi it’s part of their culture , it’s OK ,so show little cultural sensitivity and go to a dog fight already.
Your correspondent might not appreciate this cartoon, but IMO it is relevant. In the final panel, “iSteve” fits better than “Facebook.”
These Siberian American immigrants weren't and aren't known in their Siberian homelands for being either farmers or herders. Some have tended reindeer herds but they exist only in regions where reindeer can survive. Mostly they exist by hunting and fishing (some gathering) as Siberia is very harsh.
Some northern tribes in Alaska/Canada eventually followed caribou but even now they are not domesticated.
As you note, had they been here longer (and settled down, not wandering around eating the larger mammals first) they may have developed some domestication. Though it is an open question as to whether native Western Hemisphere animals are open to that. Yes llamas, alpacas and some South American species. Maybe eventually pigeons, which were very numerous.
The Western Hemisphere was not a great place to find and domesticate edible animals.Replies: @TWS, @Bill P
The western hemisphere was home to numerous equines, camels, and elephant species.
They simply ate them. My native blood is thin, but my friends and family have members that can track elk or man by scent. We were hunters not farmers or pastoralists.
The Eurasian folks domesticated horses at least twice, sheep, goats, caribou are called ‘the animal that domesticated itself’, then there’s elephants and two varieties of camels.
North and south America combined to domesticate a couple of smallish camels, turkeys and dogs.
Now plants are another story and they domesticated the most useful plants in the world. Cotton, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, corn, winter squash, beans and were on the way to domesticing the camas. Camas can make you windy and it grows pretty well on its own, my grandma grew up with it and it grows where I park the car. They had creatures to domesticate they just didn’t have the mind set. The Nez Perce are the only folks I know who practiced deliberate breeding gelding substandard colts.
What elephants? There were mammoths (same species?) but these are thought to have been quickly wiped out by Siberian migrants. No horses at all. While some South American animals (which I mentioned) might be camelids, they are not camels and were not present in most of the Western Hemisphere.
Dogs were brought over, sometimes eaten but also used for transport by some (travois).
Generally no birds (turkeys) were domesticated and raised for food. Not much meat on wild turkeys.
It took millennia to domesticate animals in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or ones like modern chickens brought from Africa as guinea fowl. Hundreds of generations of people. Also with selective breeding of crop seeds. Siberians were very small in number, many likely died along the way or while here, and had little experience with agriculture or animal husbandry. Drastic climate changes made survival difficult.
They were on the cusp of things in some places when Columbus arrived, but that was little more than 500 years ago.
Siberian migrants did pretty well with what they had and what they knew. It wasn't much. But they survived in small numbers and really spread out far and wide, on foot.
As some here noted, after 500 years of European arrival, they number 10 times or more today then what they started with in 1492, despite diseases and lack of technology.
I grew up in the American Northwest. I admire those people who could survive and endure with what they had available to them. In harsh climates with little food resources.Replies: @TWS, @MEH 0910, @Veteran Aryan
I long ago noticed that the success of the various North American Indian tribes in adapting to white civilization seemed to vary -- and seemed to correlate to whether they were farmers themselves, advanced hunters like the Sioux, or primitive hunter-gatherers like the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area. The first have often done alright -- Choctaws have median incomes comparable to gentile whites. The Sioux, on the other hand, have really serious issues. Groups like the Ohlone died out completely.
I've tended to assume that the distinction must be cultural. White farming life is a lot more comprehensible if you farm yourself. A man works. Stealing from the neighbors is not a wholesome recreational activity. Etc.
But what if the difference was also at least partially genetic? Hunters are genetically handicapped when it comes to adapting to a sedentary life of disciplined toil? Comanche really are intrinsically less able to make the transition than Hopi?Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Cato, @mc23
The Cherokee were adapting well until they were forced out west by Andrew Jackson. The early New England pilgrims evangelized a fair number of the natives. The converts were called the Praying Indians. They adopted farming as their main support and lived in segregated communities. During King Philips War they were mistreated but overwhelming fought very effectively on the side of the settlers and saved the rookie Pilgrims from their mistakes. Overtime most of them were absorbed into the European stock. The Cherokees and some of the Northeast tribes had limited agriculture before the colonists arrived.
Europeans had varying reactions to different tribes, some more warlike some more clever or not. Each tribe or grouping of tribes seems like a family of it’s own so maybe thats the reason.
Remember, natural science consists of mental constructs, created with the objective of explaining sensory experience of our world. Human beings affix labels to make sense of our environment. For example, the California spotted owl is an animal, i.e. biological construct. The name of the creature is a human designation—strix occidentalis, i.e. human construct. That is, binomial nomenclature refers to a formal system, developed by people, to name species. The California owl was not a “California owl” until someone actually and specifically labeled it. Race, biology, ethnicity–all are concepts created by man as an organizational tool to offer a consistency about the natural world in which they observe.Replies: @mc23
I take you’ve never been to a ethnic picnic. There some biology going on there, no where as much as race but looks and disposition are noticeable in cases.
Indeed. The Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. Don’t blame me for NOTICING, blame HbD.Replies: @mc23
It is not possible for organisms to exist without forms, so if your thought process is leading you to conclude that forms are not plausible, then something has gone serious wrong with it. The forms we’re talking about (you don’t need to capitalize the word; this isn’t Platonism) are the organism’s substantial reality. Matter alone is not a living being. For an organism, to be reduced to matter is called “death.” To exist in the world as a living being requires a union of matter and a substantial form, full stop. This is not something conjectural or hypothesized or imagined; it is a basic a priori necessity.
As for organisms “bleeding into each other,” I’m not sure what you mean here or what it has to do with anything. Even if we imagined the entire biosphere, spread out through space and time, as a single cytoplasmic slop out of which innumerable creatures arise and into which they fall again, it would still be the case that each individual creature would be a unitary and indivisible thing for precisely as long as it existed, which is exactly the problem that the forms address. That Heraclitan “river” of matter is always flowing through us; the ship of Theseus is always being refurbished. There is no principle in matter by which the unitary existence of creatures can be explained. The unitary principle, therefore, is immaterial.
This is very wrong on multiple levels. First off, Eternal Forms (i.e. universals) are not substantial forms. These are two different animals requiring entirely different discussions. But even amongst the universals themselves, there is no requirement that they be instantiated everywhere and always. That is the difference between essence and existence. Only God Himself is ipsum esse subsistens.
My serious suggestions:
1- do the barb wire and/or broken glass across the top of the fence.
2- make sure the gate is truly solid + secure and that somebody isn't going to just climb over it
3- install video surveillance + motion detection
If you do all of that, you're not needing to rely on dogs for protection from human intruders. That's important because all of the best guard dogs do not make for the ideal pets.
Assuming that you've done the above and want a pet, I would then suggest a labrador retriever. They are more tolerant of heat than goldens. And even if you don't know the parents/lineage of any specific pup, you're still likely to get a happy, harmless, goofy, non-aggressive dog.
Do not get a mixed-breed and do not get some rare esoteric animal unless you hedge your bets by learning about what their personalities and quirks are going to be.
Do not get something with long or thick fur, it only makes it more difficult if you're checking for fleas/ticks or some kind of skin condition.
Do get something significantly larger than a village dog so that they're not tempted to pick on your dog if you go out for a walk.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Somsel
The wifey wants a dog and I just want to make the best of it with the least hassles on my part.
Short hair should have gone without saying given the tropics I mentioned Growing bigger than the local village dogs is a darn good suggestion as is having the dog being an intimidating barker as the locals are often light-fingered AND poor AND hungry. I can see taking the dog on a walk on a leash through the neighborhood and down to the village. Our 2 meter wall doesn’t have barbed wire along the top – yet – but my German neighbor does. We call his place “Das Stalag.”
I think that equating intelligent with trainable as Anominous does is a bit too simple, especially when used with his example of border collies making up their own antics if they have nothing to do. Is there free will in dogs, even a little bit?
German Shephards and Labradors sounds like good breeds to investigate. What about Weimaraner? I’ve met a couple and was impressed with their temperament and intelligence, clean and graceful too although I not looking for a show horse status symbol.
I would NOT recommend a Weimaraner to anyone without a good bit of experience with dogs.
They are VERY high energy and have a strong "pursuit" urge.
They are VERY smart and if they can't burn off energy they become unhappy, destructive and unfocused. You have to get them under control and that energy harnessed.
They like to always be around their "family" and participate,or at least be present in whatever you might be doing. They aren't really yard dogs that just stay outside or live in a kennel. They were bred for close work with a human and it's DEEP in their genetic memory. They aren't happy away from their owner/companion.
They usually don't finish "growing up" for 3 or even 4 years and due to their size and energy level, those early years can be too much for an inexperienced owner.
All that being said, they grow into a loyal, loving HIGHLY intelligent family member.
There is a reason I've raised TEN of them. The payoff is worth the time invested and if you know what you're doing you'll have an ironclad friend for life..Replies: @Somsel
That was my initial reaction as well, but not sure how much of that is due to the methodology. See Figure 1 in this paper.
Visualizing Structure and Transitions in High-Dimensional Biological Data
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073148/
The idea is PHATE is better at revealing structure in data.
Not exactly what you mean, but I think Figure S3 provides some hints in that regard.
But remember, human genetic evolution stops above the neck.
Also, they do drill down on the genetics and associated behavioral traits. One particular lineage keeps coming up spades in this regard: the terriers, home of the (in)famous Pitbull. From mmc3.xlsx:IMHO, this definitively settles The Pitbull Question, rubbishing the "It's not the breed; it's the owner!" defense for Pitbulls.
A Pitbull will apparently go after a Tesla by nature.
Fuck this breed.
https://youtu.be/InKdw6AAfcEReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
• Agree
The theory is that this is how most domestication works, emphasizing friendlier juvenile characteristics. Same things with cats and arguably people.
That's what Sadie was like when she got into the underbrush in the forest at the back of my colleague's place in the country... in the city she looked more like this ->
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7gf2blt7o63j6d/IMG_0007.JPG?dl=1Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Thank you, and LOL for the picture.
That’s atypically large for a wolf. According to Wiki, typical size is about 80 #. GS are typically about 60#, males larger. So there’s a bit of a size difference for wolves, but not massive.
Apparently you’ve never known a Siberian Husky.
One girlfriend owned one. I took him hiking in the mountains. He had an independent streak, and he was strong. I kept thinking he would do best harnessed to a sled in Siberia.
She named him Stoli.
Steve:
Corvinus:
Steve was straightforwardly referring to “folk breeds” of dogs, and not cagily referring to “breeds of folk”, as in races of people.
They simply ate them. My native blood is thin, but my friends and family have members that can track elk or man by scent. We were hunters not farmers or pastoralists.
The Eurasian folks domesticated horses at least twice, sheep, goats, caribou are called 'the animal that domesticated itself', then there's elephants and two varieties of camels.
North and south America combined to domesticate a couple of smallish camels, turkeys and dogs.
Now plants are another story and they domesticated the most useful plants in the world. Cotton, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, corn, winter squash, beans and were on the way to domesticing the camas. Camas can make you windy and it grows pretty well on its own, my grandma grew up with it and it grows where I park the car. They had creatures to domesticate they just didn't have the mind set. The Nez Perce are the only folks I know who practiced deliberate breeding gelding substandard colts.Replies: @Muggles
Your comments are gross exaggerations at best. Though I agree that hunter-gatherer cultures do develop excellent hunting and tracking skills. Greatly admired and copied by European pioneers.
What elephants? There were mammoths (same species?) but these are thought to have been quickly wiped out by Siberian migrants. No horses at all. While some South American animals (which I mentioned) might be camelids, they are not camels and were not present in most of the Western Hemisphere.
Dogs were brought over, sometimes eaten but also used for transport by some (travois).
Generally no birds (turkeys) were domesticated and raised for food. Not much meat on wild turkeys.
It took millennia to domesticate animals in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or ones like modern chickens brought from Africa as guinea fowl. Hundreds of generations of people. Also with selective breeding of crop seeds. Siberians were very small in number, many likely died along the way or while here, and had little experience with agriculture or animal husbandry. Drastic climate changes made survival difficult.
They were on the cusp of things in some places when Columbus arrived, but that was little more than 500 years ago.
Siberian migrants did pretty well with what they had and what they knew. It wasn’t much. But they survived in small numbers and really spread out far and wide, on foot.
As some here noted, after 500 years of European arrival, they number 10 times or more today then what they started with in 1492, despite diseases and lack of technology.
I grew up in the American Northwest. I admire those people who could survive and endure with what they had available to them. In harsh climates with little food resources.
Horses evolved in the Americas. They were here when homo sap decided to visit. Yes I was referring to the various camelids as camels for ease of communication. Yes they did domesticate turkeys in Mexico and South Eastern America. Horses disappeared from the Americas long after humans got here. There were multiple horsey critters in the area.
Yes I was referring to the various mammoth, mastodon, and all the subspecies. None were domesticated here. Before you opine perhaps you could just check Google or wiki.
If you don't believe me about tracking elk or men I don't care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChickenReplies: @TWS
Horses went extinct on the North American continent approximately ten thousand years ago.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_dog
These Siberian American immigrants weren't and aren't known in their Siberian homelands for being either farmers or herders. Some have tended reindeer herds but they exist only in regions where reindeer can survive. Mostly they exist by hunting and fishing (some gathering) as Siberia is very harsh.
Some northern tribes in Alaska/Canada eventually followed caribou but even now they are not domesticated.
As you note, had they been here longer (and settled down, not wandering around eating the larger mammals first) they may have developed some domestication. Though it is an open question as to whether native Western Hemisphere animals are open to that. Yes llamas, alpacas and some South American species. Maybe eventually pigeons, which were very numerous.
The Western Hemisphere was not a great place to find and domesticate edible animals.Replies: @TWS, @Bill P
Domestication of stock animals seems to follow agriculture, and north of central Mexico agriculture was still in it’s earliest stages.
I don’t know whether, say, Salishan tribes might have eventually put mountain goats and bighorn sheep in pens and started the process of domestication if they’d learned to grow and hoard corn, but it doesn’t seem too far fetched. They’d already bred a dog specifically for its fur (the wool dog) and had a highly developed material culture.
And I don’t think the ancestral old world animals were much better than American animals, with the obvious exception of equines. The mouflon and ibex are pretty similar to our wild sheep and goats here in the NW.
What elephants? There were mammoths (same species?) but these are thought to have been quickly wiped out by Siberian migrants. No horses at all. While some South American animals (which I mentioned) might be camelids, they are not camels and were not present in most of the Western Hemisphere.
Dogs were brought over, sometimes eaten but also used for transport by some (travois).
Generally no birds (turkeys) were domesticated and raised for food. Not much meat on wild turkeys.
It took millennia to domesticate animals in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or ones like modern chickens brought from Africa as guinea fowl. Hundreds of generations of people. Also with selective breeding of crop seeds. Siberians were very small in number, many likely died along the way or while here, and had little experience with agriculture or animal husbandry. Drastic climate changes made survival difficult.
They were on the cusp of things in some places when Columbus arrived, but that was little more than 500 years ago.
Siberian migrants did pretty well with what they had and what they knew. It wasn't much. But they survived in small numbers and really spread out far and wide, on foot.
As some here noted, after 500 years of European arrival, they number 10 times or more today then what they started with in 1492, despite diseases and lack of technology.
I grew up in the American Northwest. I admire those people who could survive and endure with what they had available to them. In harsh climates with little food resources.Replies: @TWS, @MEH 0910, @Veteran Aryan
On the off chance you’re just uninformed, I’ll enlighten you. Yes I have friends and family who can spot and follow the scent of an elk herd or an individual. I could recognize my family and close friends by scent. It’s not something that gets advertised.
Horses evolved in the Americas. They were here when homo sap decided to visit. Yes I was referring to the various camelids as camels for ease of communication. Yes they did domesticate turkeys in Mexico and South Eastern America. Horses disappeared from the Americas long after humans got here. There were multiple horsey critters in the area.
Yes I was referring to the various mammoth, mastodon, and all the subspecies. None were domesticated here. Before you opine perhaps you could just check Google or wiki.
If you don’t believe me about tracking elk or men I don’t care.
What elephants? There were mammoths (same species?) but these are thought to have been quickly wiped out by Siberian migrants. No horses at all. While some South American animals (which I mentioned) might be camelids, they are not camels and were not present in most of the Western Hemisphere.
Dogs were brought over, sometimes eaten but also used for transport by some (travois).
Generally no birds (turkeys) were domesticated and raised for food. Not much meat on wild turkeys.
It took millennia to domesticate animals in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or ones like modern chickens brought from Africa as guinea fowl. Hundreds of generations of people. Also with selective breeding of crop seeds. Siberians were very small in number, many likely died along the way or while here, and had little experience with agriculture or animal husbandry. Drastic climate changes made survival difficult.
They were on the cusp of things in some places when Columbus arrived, but that was little more than 500 years ago.
Siberian migrants did pretty well with what they had and what they knew. It wasn't much. But they survived in small numbers and really spread out far and wide, on foot.
As some here noted, after 500 years of European arrival, they number 10 times or more today then what they started with in 1492, despite diseases and lack of technology.
I grew up in the American Northwest. I admire those people who could survive and endure with what they had available to them. In harsh climates with little food resources.Replies: @TWS, @MEH 0910, @Veteran Aryan
https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/origin-and-history-of-the-chicken/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken
Chickens appear to predate Columbus by a bit from new genetic studies and reexamination of early European accounts in South America. Probably came via Polynesians is my guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChickenReplies: @TWS
He is ignorant of the history of the Americas and of domestic animals. I’ve never met an adult who didn’t know horses were here when proto Indians arrived or that they domesticated the turkey.
Chickens appear to predate Columbus by a bit from new genetic studies and reexamination of early European accounts in South America. Probably came via Polynesians is my guess.
In order to train an animal correctly, one has to be smarter than the animal. Sometimes that’s a problem for people.
Short hair should have gone without saying given the tropics I mentioned Growing bigger than the local village dogs is a darn good suggestion as is having the dog being an intimidating barker as the locals are often light-fingered AND poor AND hungry. I can see taking the dog on a walk on a leash through the neighborhood and down to the village. Our 2 meter wall doesn't have barbed wire along the top - yet - but my German neighbor does. We call his place "Das Stalag."
I think that equating intelligent with trainable as Anominous does is a bit too simple, especially when used with his example of border collies making up their own antics if they have nothing to do. Is there free will in dogs, even a little bit?
German Shephards and Labradors sounds like good breeds to investigate. What about Weimaraner? I've met a couple and was impressed with their temperament and intelligence, clean and graceful too although I not looking for a show horse status symbol.Replies: @P. Cleburne
I have raised 10 male Weimaraners in my life, sometimes having 2 and 3 at a time. I’ve never owned another breed.
I would NOT recommend a Weimaraner to anyone without a good bit of experience with dogs.
They are VERY high energy and have a strong “pursuit” urge.
They are VERY smart and if they can’t burn off energy they become unhappy, destructive and unfocused. You have to get them under control and that energy harnessed.
They like to always be around their “family” and participate,or at least be present in whatever you might be doing. They aren’t really yard dogs that just stay outside or live in a kennel. They were bred for close work with a human and it’s DEEP in their genetic memory. They aren’t happy away from their owner/companion.
They usually don’t finish “growing up” for 3 or even 4 years and due to their size and energy level, those early years can be too much for an inexperienced owner.
All that being said, they grow into a loyal, loving HIGHLY intelligent family member.
There is a reason I’ve raised TEN of them. The payoff is worth the time invested and if you know what you’re doing you’ll have an ironclad friend for life..
Plus I have little experience with dogs or cats. I do NOT know what I'm doing with dogs so maybe I should stick with goldfish or koi.
But if the wifey wants to make the investment and chooses to take on a Weimaraner as a pet I could support that. Same with a German Shepard as Timur advocates.
Oh well, no decision needed for several months.
“I take you’ve never been to a ethnic picnic. There some biology going on there, no where as much as race but looks and disposition are noticeable in cases”.
Indeed. The Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. Don’t blame me for NOTICING, blame HbD.
“But no evidence intentional selection for behaviors? It’s as though the writer had never heard of “animal husbandry”. Or WRT to plants, how about Karl Pearson!
That is about as insultingly stupid as anything the NYT has printed.”
At least they didn’t talk about male dogs identifying as female! I’ve often wondered about the collision of woke persons with chicken [or, indeed,any] farmers – but the woke do not seem to stray from inner cities, for some reason.
Indeed. The Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. Don’t blame me for NOTICING, blame HbD.Replies: @mc23
Agreed although many people, including Italians differentiate somewhat between the folk of Northern and Southern Italy.
I guess you enjoy dividing whites into competing groups. But I am curious—are you Nordic or Alpine?Replies: @bomag, @mc23
That is always the case with him. Honestly, whatever he supports as being true is invariably false.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three guys and a dog playing poker in the corner. The guy comments to the bartender if that this is the most intelligent dog he has ever seen.
The bartender laughs and says " actually he ain't smart at all because when he gets a good hand he starts wagging his tail".
I have had German Shepherds all my life and currently have a father and son. I know that I am biased but can anyone suggest a breed that would be superior because I have used them for hunting, herding, guarding, intimidating (it is different), pest control and of course peerless companionship.
Again subjective, but also the most, trainable, intelligent, obedient and majestic looking dogs bar none. Objectively this could be supported by the observation that police forces all over the world seem to be using this breed exclusively for their various requirements.
Cheers-Replies: @TWS, @Indiana Jack, @Buzz Mohawk, @nokangaroos, @Kratoklastes, @MEH 0910, @Anonymous
Even some cats would agree…
Did you know that North Korea has its own native breed? It was recently in the news.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pungsan_dog
Bill Kauffman’s Italian grandmother was from so far north she said she was “almost Swiss”.
“Agreed although many people, including Italians differentiate somewhat between the folk of Northern and Southern Italy.“
I guess you enjoy dividing whites into competing groups. But I am curious—are you Nordic or Alpine?
I can tell you that "village dogs" do exist, at least in the PH, and they are bred for barking and scrounging for food. ("stranger vigilance" might be the better term.) I do NOT want one of those unless one can train limits of protection.
I'd think a smart, medium size dog of calm temperament might work best. Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable? There will be small children visiting from family members.
Suggestions welcome.Replies: @Anonymous, @Jonathan Mason, @Jeff, @Curle
“Smart is more entertaining I would think but does that correlate with trainable?”
Depends on who is being trained. I’ve got two dogs of one of the smarter and smaller herding breeds. They’ve spent a lot of time seeing how well I can be trained. So far I’ve learned the whine for ‘let’s wake up’, there’s a dance for ‘I want kibble’, there’s a different bark for ‘open the door’ and a series of back and forth racing with backward glances for ‘take me outside’. There’s also different barks for various possible threats and intruders from squirrels to people to other dogs to postmen as well as vocalizations for other humans they know and like.
What elephants? There were mammoths (same species?) but these are thought to have been quickly wiped out by Siberian migrants. No horses at all. While some South American animals (which I mentioned) might be camelids, they are not camels and were not present in most of the Western Hemisphere.
Dogs were brought over, sometimes eaten but also used for transport by some (travois).
Generally no birds (turkeys) were domesticated and raised for food. Not much meat on wild turkeys.
It took millennia to domesticate animals in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or ones like modern chickens brought from Africa as guinea fowl. Hundreds of generations of people. Also with selective breeding of crop seeds. Siberians were very small in number, many likely died along the way or while here, and had little experience with agriculture or animal husbandry. Drastic climate changes made survival difficult.
They were on the cusp of things in some places when Columbus arrived, but that was little more than 500 years ago.
Siberian migrants did pretty well with what they had and what they knew. It wasn't much. But they survived in small numbers and really spread out far and wide, on foot.
As some here noted, after 500 years of European arrival, they number 10 times or more today then what they started with in 1492, despite diseases and lack of technology.
I grew up in the American Northwest. I admire those people who could survive and endure with what they had available to them. In harsh climates with little food resources.Replies: @TWS, @MEH 0910, @Veteran Aryan
Ashfall Nebraska offers the world’s premium example of horse evolution. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/evolution-world-tour-ashfall-fossil-beds-nebraska-6171451/#:~:text=The%20evolution%20of%20the%20horse%20is%20one%20of,just%20one%20%28the%20precursor%20to%20the%20modern%20hoof%29.
Horses went extinct on the North American continent approximately ten thousand years ago.
I would NOT recommend a Weimaraner to anyone without a good bit of experience with dogs.
They are VERY high energy and have a strong "pursuit" urge.
They are VERY smart and if they can't burn off energy they become unhappy, destructive and unfocused. You have to get them under control and that energy harnessed.
They like to always be around their "family" and participate,or at least be present in whatever you might be doing. They aren't really yard dogs that just stay outside or live in a kennel. They were bred for close work with a human and it's DEEP in their genetic memory. They aren't happy away from their owner/companion.
They usually don't finish "growing up" for 3 or even 4 years and due to their size and energy level, those early years can be too much for an inexperienced owner.
All that being said, they grow into a loyal, loving HIGHLY intelligent family member.
There is a reason I've raised TEN of them. The payoff is worth the time invested and if you know what you're doing you'll have an ironclad friend for life..Replies: @Somsel
Thanks for the explanation. You talked me out of Weimaraners. I’ve been impressed by the couple I’ve had contact with but I’m not a pet guy and don’t need that intimate of a relationship – LJBF is more like it from my end.
Plus I have little experience with dogs or cats. I do NOT know what I’m doing with dogs so maybe I should stick with goldfish or koi.
But if the wifey wants to make the investment and chooses to take on a Weimaraner as a pet I could support that. Same with a German Shepard as Timur advocates.
Oh well, no decision needed for several months.
I’d like to see the two best-known Japanese breeds, shiba and Akita, on the map with wolves.
My opinion is that both were developed by the Ainu, since the only dogs one sees in old prints or paintings are scavenger types, ‘village dogs’ according to a term in the article.
Also, the Ainu loved dogs, Japanese not much until recent decades.
Point is that both shiba and Akita breeds, except for the upraised tails, really look (are phenotypically very) like small wolves, more so than any other famous breeds I can think of.
Makes me wonder if it is also the case for genetics.
Why were the horses killed off in North America much earlier than in Eurasia? Just leaving domestication out of it, since that had not started. Why were wild horses present in one continent longer? Were the Indians better hunters? Or the terrain easier? Or some other pressure on the species?
More megafauna survived in Africa, probably because it co-evolved along with modern humans there and thus had time to adapt to realize these weird tall monkeys were dangerous.
The Clovis Indians hit Western Hemisphere megafauna fast and hard.
I guess you enjoy dividing whites into competing groups. But I am curious—are you Nordic or Alpine?Replies: @bomag, @mc23
Once again you demonstrate that you are unaware of the continuum paradox.
It states that. there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers, or equivalently, that. any subset of the real numbers is finite, is countably infinite, or has the same cardinality as the real numbers.Replies: @bomag
Also,
https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/8893c36e555fa8dbddfb7ada11cd944a465d019a14c85101388e5a7667ef4256_1.jpg
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658615 (#85)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-species-exist-biologically-wolves-coyotes-dogs/#comment-5658650 (#88)Replies: @MEH 0910, @Kylie, @James Forrestal
I can’t believe that openly breedist pseudoscience like the OP is still being published in the current year. As all truly educated people realize, there’s only ONE breed — the canine breed!
[Also, it’s not just economic factors. Bad kennels play a role as well.]
He’s not making a serious (or good faith) argument. The pseudo-Platonic blabbering is just a tool that he’s employing in a failed attempt to conflate the concepts of map and territory/ narrative and reality/ word and thing. Meaningless deconstruction, in other words.
https://twitter.com/TranslatedCats/status/1602136059324030976?s=20&t=Fs4DliqA--pfw-R8kdfN1AReplies: @Buzz Mohawk
When I was growing up, our family cat, Cutie, would sometimes suckle on the nipples of our family German Shepherd, Rusti.
There they would be in the living room — lounging in my father’s green, naugahyde chair, the green naugahyde chair of his father before him — Rusti lying in the chair and Cutie purring and nursing on her.
Were our pets trans-species?
Or was it the mid-century green naugahyde?
Ahh, family…
What is the continuum paradox?
It states that. there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers, or equivalently, that. any subset of the real numbers is finite, is countably infinite, or has the same cardinality as the real numbers.
I guess you enjoy dividing whites into competing groups. But I am curious—are you Nordic or Alpine?Replies: @bomag, @mc23
I see you’re an educated person. I only read Madison Grant for amusement. I’d advise you not to take him too seriously.
And if you do say to not take him seriously, then by extension we shouldn’t take you seriously when you agree that the Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. That’s what Grant believed in as well.Replies: @mc23
You certainly do take him seriously, as you agree with his premise of dividing whites along biological traits, because his argument has been retrofitted to reflect modern times. That’s why it’s relevant here to ask—are you Nordic or Alpine?
And if you do say to not take him seriously, then by extension we shouldn’t take you seriously when you agree that the Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. That’s what Grant believed in as well.
This is an unusual comment inasmuch as I am actually doing the exact opposite of what you accuse me of doing. Conflating material and formal causes is the very definition of confusing the map with the territory, and this is exactly what Darwinian materialists do all the time. I seem to be the only one interested in undoing it.
Visualizing Structure and Transitions in High-Dimensional Biological Data
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073148/
The idea is PHATE is better at revealing structure in data.Not exactly what you mean, but I think Figure S3 provides some hints in that regard.
But remember, human genetic evolution stops above the neck.Replies: @Almost Missouri
Yes, that was interesting. Where did you find it? From werbsearching PHATE?
Since my original comment, I’ve taken the time the look through the paper’s supplementary materials. It appears that with a bit of patience and effort, one could in fact construct an all-breed map from the raw data.
Also, they do drill down on the genetics and associated behavioral traits. One particular lineage keeps coming up spades in this regard: the terriers, home of the (in)famous Pitbull. From mmc3.xlsx:
IMHO, this definitively settles The Pitbull Question, rubbishing the “It’s not the breed; it’s the owner!” defense for Pitbulls.
You cannot just say "Aha, their genes are different, therefore they are different!" as if genes were the mediators of ontological truth. This is an unmotivated conclusion.
Nucleic acids are physical things. They are part of the body. They are just as physical as the bones and the hair and the shape of the snout, or any other trait you might qualify as a breed characteristic. And we already know that breeds differ, or we would not be talking about these things. When you point out that different breeds of dog have different gene sequences, you are not strengthening the claim that breeds exist. You are just repeating something that we already know.
What evolutionists do not realize is that they are simply degraded and half blinded essentialists who are trying to put "genetics" in the place of "forms," but this does not work, as forms are necessarily immaterial. Genes are simply one of the material properties by which bodies are differentiated, and they are not therefore "the form of the body."
As I have stated elsewhere, breeds are the result of plasticity within the form. When the organism is forced to survive under adverse circumstances it develops grotesqueries, exaggerations and deviations from its normal habitus; and artificial selection is a highly adverse circumstance. These are what we call "breed characteristics." It is only necessary to say the words once and it becomes obvious that all domesticated plants and animals are grotesques, i.e. not perfections but perversions of nature.
The breed, therefore, is not a positive quality. It is rather a privation, a sign that here nature has been frustrated in a certain way. This is an accidental not an essential characteristic.Replies: @Bert, @Chrisnonymous, @Almost Missouri
That’s a good point, … but I think the reason genes attract the attention they do is that it has now been demonstrated that if you splice in “foreign” genes, you can change the resulting form in a way that grafting on a foreign bone or snout would not. This does not change anything about metaphysics, it just means that genes are much nearer to the root of physical instantiation (if I’m using your terminology correctly) than are other physical attributes.
And yes, this dazzling property of genes does mislead some superficial thinkers to mistake genes for “ontological truth”, but their error doesn’t change the fact that different physical attributes have different properties, and that some very very small physical attributes (i.e., barely in existence—incarnated—at all) lead to, or at least indicate, very large facts about the organism. And that, given the mathematical nature of genetics, it is possible to discuss these matters in a quantitative, objective, and dispassionate way.
BTW, what circumstances would not quality as adverse?
It seems to me that all circumstances necessarily impinge on a creature in some way, so all physical attributes that vary from a featureless sphere are in some way grotesque deviations. We can and should argue about what deviations are just and what are not, but I don’t see any way of escaping deviations entirely, they are simply inherent in existence—incarnation—itself.
And if you do say to not take him seriously, then by extension we shouldn’t take you seriously when you agree that the Greeks, Italians, and the Serbians are notorious for their out of control behavior. That’s what Grant believed in as well.Replies: @mc23
Grant was an idiot. However there is some truth in ethnic sterotypes.
You’re out of your league here. Grant’s work was HbD based. His ideas serve as a foundational piece in Mr. Sailer’s ideology.
It states that. there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers, or equivalently, that. any subset of the real numbers is finite, is countably infinite, or has the same cardinality as the real numbers.Replies: @bomag
Q.E.D.