Yes, jackals do hunt!
Here’s a pack of them fighting over a fur seal pup:
Kipling wrote about the related golden jackal in The Jungle Book:
“It was the jackal — Tabaqui, the Dish-licker — and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the Jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way.”
And this is largely how we think of jackals. (I don’t think Kipling understood rabies or was deliberately using the term “madness” to demonize the jackal.)
The truth of the matter is jackals hunt and scavenge. They live in family groups, where offspring from the previous litter help rear their parents’ younger offspring. They later disperse to form their own territories. This is very similar to the way that wolf packs operate. However, wolves tend to stay with their natal pack longer, and because wolves operate in a different ecological niche than jackals, their pack hunting behavior allows for more group cohesion in their hunting behavior.
In the West, we have had a cultural shift in how we view the wolf. We see wolves as noble hunters that keep the large prey species in check. We still see jackals as Kipling did. It doesn’t matter that wolves sometimes scavenge kills. They sometimes surplus kill, and there are situations in which controlling their numbers make sense in terms of wildlife management (There aren’t that many situations in which this is the case, I should add.)
Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of ethology and winner of the Nobel Prize, wrote a book on dogs called Man Meets Dog. He postulated that some dogs were derived from golden jackals and others were derived from wolves. The ones derived from jackals were called “aureus dogs” (from the golden jackal’s scientific name– Canis aureus). These dogs were the wimpy ones that were easily scolded and always demanding human attention, never bonding closely with anyone. Those derived from wolves, however, were something else. These dogs demanded human respect before they would ever show affection. These dogs bonded much more closely to those humans they chose to accept.
It was obvious Lorenz, who loved chow chows, preferred the wolf-like dogs. Of course, he was merely projecting onto these dogs our cultural perceptions of jackals and wolves.
Today, we know that the so-called “aureus dogs” are actually dogs with higher levels of neoteny or pedomorphosis. Neoteny or pedomorphosis (there’s a debate on which one it is) prevents domestic dogs from developing the full wolf behavior. One study of body canine body language found that golden retrievers retained an unusually high number of wolf body signals. The only dog breed in the study that had a higher number of the signals was the Siberian husky.
Konrad Lorenz probably would’ve put the golden in with the aureus group.
So our cultural perceptions of the jackal have distorted with our understanding of canine ethology. Dogs are derived from wolves or, to be more accurate, the ancestors of wolves. They are not derived from jackals.
But even at that, why is it that even educated people like Lorenz would see the jackal as the desireable species?
Jackals are far easier to observe than wolves. I have seen lots of footage of jackals hunting seals and other animals. I’ve seen very little footage of wolves hunting.
Jackals make do with their situations, which is what all wild beasts must do if they are to survive. For us to project these images onto any wild beast is to do them a great disservice, for it keeps us from truly understanding them as they are.
So if there is the David Mech of the jackals, you have as my respect.
Update: I’ve found a source that argues that Lorenz’s theory about aureus and lupus dogs partially came from the anti-Semitic pseudo-scientific culture that existed in the German-speaking world. Here is the source. Lorenz was a Nazi scientist, who was captured by the Red Army. It was during his captivity that he began to realize the error of his thinking, and he recanted. He later would be one of the early supporters of the Austrian Green Party, which is a social democratic environmental party.
He also wrote an interesting and quite controversial book called On Aggression.
Not to be flippant, but given the choice I’ll bet that fur seal pup would rather have been clubbed than slowly killed by that jackal!
That’s the sort of thing the animal rights wingnuts just don’t get – Mother Nature is a CRUEL bitch!!
I’m not a big fan of the Canadian seal hunt, because it’s really poorly regulated and based on a flawed quotas system.
Further, a lot of sealers aren’t too well-versed with hakapik, and they do a lot of maiming.
But I do agree, that’s probably a better way to go than being torn apart by jackals.
Lorenz recanted his jackal-ancestor hypothesis late in life, when the DNA evidence was clear.
That’s what real scientists do.
Incidentally, he believed that the GSD was an aureus-derived dog.
There’s still plenty of room to apply his ideas about variable ancestry in the nordics v. other dogs; all dogs are descended from a small, more jackal or coyote-like central Asian wolf. Some dogs may have later infusions of more northern wolf blood
I knew that he said that his original theory was wrong, but I still see it quoted as if it were the latest scientific theory.
When we say they are descended from wolves, this isn’t exactly correct.
They are descended from the same ancestors of modern wolves.
Only one species of jackal will interbreed with dogs or wolves, and that’s the golden jackal. (The Simien jackal is no longer a jackal. It’s now the Ethiopian wolf. It does interbreed with dogs.)
I’ve not read Man Meets Dog, but I’ve read citations of it.
I can see where he got that GSD’s were aureus dogs. Some of them have markings that are somewhat similar to the black-backed jackals (well, some of them). But black-backed jackals can’t interbreed with dogs or wolves. He also had one that was very gentle with children. His chows bonded with him and him alone, as you could have expected from the old line chows.
Well, read it then. It’s really non-optional. For some background, get the latest edition, with the forward by Donald McCaig.
He did not class dogs as “lupus” or “aureus” based on markings, but primarily behavior.
And his chows had a smidgen of GSD in them — what did he care about what kennel clubs thought of purity? That GSD was a bitch so loyal and so beloved that when she died he vowed to never have any dog but her descendants.
Yeah, I’ve done some looking into his role in developing the Eurasier.
http://www.eurasier-online.com/geschichte_e.htm
Julius Wipfel was inspired by Lorenz’s work to recreate the ancient Eurasian spitz. He crossed wolfspitz (Keeshond) bitches with Chow dogs. When Lorenz heard of the dogs, he contacted Wipfel and fell in love with them. He thought they were like his Chow/Shepherd cross that he really loved. He eventually got one, a bitch named “Babett.”
http://www.eurasier-online.com/geschichte_e.htm
Didn’t Lorenz also have something to do with the creation of the Eurasier? It was supposed to be a recreation of the old spitz dogs that once followed the tribes across Eurasia.
The Germans were always trying to recreate ancient forms of domestic animals, like Heck Cattle (recreation of the Aurochs) and the Heck horse (recreation of the Tarpan). They also thought it would be a great idea to release raccoons into the German countryside.
He was also political, as in he was a member of a discredited German/Austrian party.
And no, I’m not talking about his later years as a founder of the Austrian Green Party.
“He was also political, as in he was a member of a discredited German/Austrian party.”
So were-to one degree or another-the guys who “put a man on a moon” for the country which, therefore. is “able to do anything”. Or so the tale went until recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_rocket_scientists_in_the_United_States
Yeah, I know about Werner von Braun.
Konrad Lorenz was an interesting fellow.
He was a Nobel Laureate in Medicine/Physiology, a prize he shared with Niko Tinbergen. Tinbergen was Dutch and was a POW during the Second World War. He had been involved in resisting the Nazis; his colleague, Lorenz, was developing Nazi science.
For a long time, the two never spoke to each other, but eventually, as Lorenz recanted of his Naziism, Tinbergen was able to forgive him
Frans De Waal has a great account of these two in his Ape and the Sushi Master