The Posthuman Dog

https://aeon.co/essays/who-could-dogs-become-without-humans-in-their-lives

by bryanrasmussen • 5 years ago

60 33 5 years ago

aeon.co

pcrh• 5 years ago

This reminds me of After Man: A Zoology of the Future, by Dougal Dixon

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/586677.After_Man

tuyiown• 5 years ago

It reminds me of one of my favorite SF novel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)

The fixup[1] novel describes a legend consisting of eight tales that the pastoral, pacifist Dogs recite as they pass down an oral legend of a creature known as Man.

BruceEel• 5 years ago

It's one of my faves too, so many wild ideas in that book!

I've seen Simak's writing being characterized as 'pastoral scifi', I think that's accurate and we don't really have a contemporary equivalent to it.

adminscoffee• 5 years ago

cats or any domesticated animal for that matter

sandworm1014• 5 years ago

This article, like many before it, seem to think that we altered the wolf as some sort of project, a one-way manipulation. We have altered wolf into dog, but most of that was very recent. What is missing is how, very long ago and perhaps before modern language, wolf altered us.

Why do we find puppies cute? Is it because they have evolved to look cute in our eyes? Why then do we find wolf cubs equally cute? They certainly don't care about our opinions. We have done some evolving too. The humans that found wolf cubs cute adopted them. The humans that could best take care of and communicate with wolf cubs gained massive hunting and safety advantages. A spear or shotgun cannot wake you up when a bear gets near your tent. An adopted wolf certainly will.

Just look at any baby interacting with a dog. They know what they are doing. The babies that got along with the adopted wolves were more likely to survive the winter. Parents that allows their babies to play with the adopted wolf were more likely to see those kids thrive, their genes live on. We made wolf into dog, but wolf also made us.

hn_cj• 5 years ago

I don't believe this is true. Humans also find other animals, mostly mammals cute too. Eg: cats big and small, rabbits, squirrels, birds. Why? I don't know. Dogs/Wolf's are just one the animals that we find cute.

sandworm1014• 5 years ago

Unless our evolved traits to find puppies and kittens cute came first and that has transferred to other animals.

PopePompus• 5 years ago

We find animals, even cartoon animals, cute if they have some of the visual characteristics of human infants: relatively large heads, relatively large eyes (preferably not compound) etc. I think this has more to do with evolution favoring mammals that care for their young offspring than anything contact with dogs has done.

zeckalpha• 5 years ago

Most mammals find other mammal babies cute. I’ve heard it posed as an adaptive survival tactic encouraging inter-species care of young.

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

Why? I don't know

Cuteness is pretty well studied, it basically comes down to evolutionary selection towards liking things that resemble human babies in terms of proportions. Mainly about the size of the eyes and heads. You can see it in cartoons where characters are drawn with big eyes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness

sdfjkl• 5 years ago

This article sounds very naive. Couldn't be bothered to read further after these silly questions:

How would you stay warm?

Just like any regular outdoor dog. Find shelter, huddle together, grow winter fur and eventually adapt to the climate. Meanwhile, spend the nights in sleepless shivering fits - but survive. Evolution is brutal, but it works.

What would you do when it rains?

Get wet! So what?

What would you eat?

Whatever is available! In any place with a stray dog population, this quickly becomes obvious: Any other animal you can take on (unless it has guns), including other, smaller dogs. Forage for trash or vegetable matter. If humans weren't so crafty and well armed, they'd be yummy too. Stray packs certainly do have a history of nomming the occasional lost human (post-war Croatia for example).

And most importantly, wouldn’t you be lonely without me?

Hell no. Most of the strays I've seen formed packs or sometimes pairs if they were strong enough to defend their territory.

blkhawk• 5 years ago

This article sounds very naive.

I am getting PETA vibes from this article actually. Plus the listing of pain management via acupuncture as a benefit makes me question the author.

ajuc• 5 years ago

To be fair most of the questions were rhetorical, not naive, the answers were a few paragraphs lower.

As for eating it's not so simple. Stray dogs are still depending on humans for food in many ways, either by random people feeding them occasionally, them eating our trash, or hunting prey that human hunters feed so they can shoot it (at least in my country hunters are notorious for feeding wild animals in the winter which causes overpopulation which in the spring and summer they use as an excuse to shoot most of them).

I've had 2 stray dogs adopted - a medium size mongrel that was doing pretty well in the wild (hunting and begging random people for food), and then an irish setter abandoned in the woods and living in the wild for months. She was barely alive when my sister (who is a vet) found her, I've never seen dog that was so starved, despite being a hunting dog supposedly.

mabub24• 5 years ago

In general, the death rate of wild dogs/abandoned dogs is very high, especially as puppies. Dogs evolved to have a willingness to essentially eat almost anything. They are obsessed with food sources out of necessity of survival. Wild dogs will eat basically anything they think is edible and keep eating it if they find that it is edible. Abandoned dogs are less conditioned to eat just anything, so they are much less able to survive in the wild (that's dependant on age of abandonment, though).

By evolving to also be extremely open to human partnership, they have much longer lives when living with humans because humans are extremely consistent and persistent food sources. Their "loyalty" and "love" is, instinctually, to our supply of food.

shimonabi• 5 years ago

It's funny, I have been wondering myself this morning about the eventual evolution of dogs before seeing this article.

Well, I didn't see humans disappear. I was just thinking how two intelligent species might co-exist: when dogs will eventually start walking on two legs, start speaking... because of accelerated selection pressure. It's amazing that a grey wolf could be turned in all the different kinds of breeds in such a relatively short time.

motohagiography• 5 years ago

Was just thinking if we managed to land on a planet that had more sophisticated civilizations than us, humans may be adopted essentially as dogs, just the way we adopted them as pets, and after a few thousand years, pets will be all we have ever been.

popcube• 5 years ago

this sounds like the relationship between some gods and us

jjtheblunt2• 5 years ago

Why is it assumed "dogs" are derived from wolves, rather than both derived from a shared ancestor?

If one looks at feral dogs (dingos, so-called American dingos, the middle east strays brought to the west with soldiers) they look very very similar, as if some fixed point of feral qualities is being approximated.

While a Husky and Malamute both clearly resemble a wolf, the vague fixed point of feral dogs that, across the world, look so very similar (vaguely like a yellow lab breed, but not quite), makes me question the wolf origin.

(I say that having invested career on the topic)

quercusa2• 5 years ago

Would the standard feral dog color suggest an origin someplace sandy?

jjtheblunt2• 5 years ago

good question, but central American / Caribbean is lush vegetation, so another guess might be reflecting sun?

ericmcer• 5 years ago

What would happen is probably the same thing that would happen to humans if the supply chain fell apart completely suddenly. Most die and a handful manage to eke out a rough existence.

Nux• 5 years ago

Which would then turn back into wolves or very similar. They'll do just fine.

kijin• 5 years ago

One of the big surprises for us was that the gains column was significantly longer and more robust than the losses column.

Most of the purported gains are matters of freedom, whereas most of the losses are matters of life and death.

I don't know how dogs themselves would rank freedom against life if asked about it, but even humans often trade quite a lot of freedom for a hint of food and safety. Nobody has a right to tell other people to risk a much, much higher chance of death in pursuit of someone else's ideal of freedom. When you do it to humans, that's called a cult. I wonder why anyone thinks dogs will be okay with it.

The Posthuman Dog

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