This is in the city of Braşov.
This wolf bitch raises her litter without a mate or helpers.
Because she is not entirely paranoid about people, she can utilize the excesses of our civilization to raise her offspring.
Do you think this might have say something about the benefits of domestication for the ancient Canis lupus who joined forces with us?
Of course, hunter-gatherer camps really didn’t produce that kind of excess waste, but if a bitch wolf had her pups near a human camp in order to scavenge off of the humans, her puppies could easily be taken as pets.
Pet keeping is nearly universal among people– including hunter-gatherers.
I couldn’t help but notice that she had a tracking collar on. I suppose she gets less grief from humans because of it.
I was amazed at how many pups she had. Wow! All in the wild on her own. That is one resourceful and strong wolf.
I always wondered, though… why do humans take pets?It’s a great advantage for the animals, but I don’t understand why this instinct would survive amongst humans.
Maybe it’s related to the instinct that led to domestication of animals in the first place? There’s a always an intermediate stage, where the cost of pets/domesticated herds outweighs the benefit; it could only have started in a period of relative surplus, and had to remain deeply ingrained to survive the many, many periods of scarcity.
With wolves, it happened during a period of great surplus:
1. http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/Science/Coevolution03.pdf
2. http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
I think domestication started this way: Men used cute baby animals to get women to like them.
It worked, and those animal loving traits got passed onto the next generation.
Then other evolutionary benefits were realized from having domesticated animals– guards and hunters from dogs and hides, wool, leather and meat from the rest.
I bet people tried to domesticate everything. Like the Ainu who kept bear cubs as pets until they were big enough to eat.
South American natives keep all kinds of wild animals as pets, including giant otters, bush dogs, crab-eating foxes, jaguars, margays, and ocelots. Many keep tapirs.
Jared Diamond has a long section on all of this in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Men used cute baby animals to get women to like them.
Some things really never change…
it’s interesting that the W6 /D6 clade ties to Romanian wolves. By the way, Italian wolves also make forays to the garbage dumps. But so do bears, and that didnt make them domesticated. Most carnivores/omnivores will take advantage of a free dinner and human “waste piles” are pretty much the top of the list in that regard (what were you saying about sloths????).
It’s sad that they conclude that they never saw this wolf again after her collar stopped transmitting. Hopefully some of that large litter went on to continue the species there.
Men may have used cute baby animals, but children just tend to make pals of them. “it followed me home” — it only takes ONE animal that was injured or young (or both) that bonded with one human and provided even the least advantage (by alarm barking, by defending that human against a threat, by helping in hunting) — we tend to think that it had to be some big advantage as if a wolf had to herd like a BC or it was of no value. No. It only had to help you get dinner a little bit better than “stupid cousin Ugg”.
VR, Peggy Richter
its too bad that she disappears later in the season; as that i far too early for her pups to be self-sufficient, i can only presume they all died.
somewhere around 1/4th to 1/3rd in, she is limping on her rear – its just after she crosses the RR-track that it is obvious –
and i did not watch it a second time, i will go back + do so –
but it appeared to change from RIGHT-rear to left-rear –
she holds the foot up and runs 3-legged, but walks + trots on all-4.
the narrator speculates its an injury from a run-in with a dog; i wonder if she did not step on glass + cut a pad, puncture her foot with a nail, etc; DUMPS are not friendly places for scrabbling around in, barefoot.
infection is an easy subsequent scenario to either a bite or a puncture / cut.
a shame this whole little family was a dead-end.
after her radio-collar quit, they never saw her on the camera-trap, either –
which sounds as tho someone shot her + removed the batteries. :—(
— terry
i watched it again –
27-secs its the LEFT-rear, emerging from behind the train;
45-secs its the RIGHT-rear/near-leg, emerging from behind the car-roof.
i wonder if shes simply sore-footed from running 10km each way, probably daily, with so much of it over paved-surfaces; concrete and macadam are never as kind to pads as dirt.
— terry
More than any other trait, even more than tool use, even more than language, the universal taking and keeping of pets defines humanity. It’s a universal trait among all humans, from the least developed tribal peoples to the most urbane of urbanites.
People are also very much given to adopting orphans and cast-outs of our own species. I believe that the two traits must be related. People take and keep all kinds of pets, from insects to reptiles to birds to nearly every mammal known. But it’s dogs and cats that we almost ubiquitously take into our homes.
I also think that many canine species, not just Canis lupus, were tamed and possibly even partially domesticated by early humans. The fossil record is incomplete, and how would we be able to discern the difference in a semi-domesticated jackal and a truly wild one? Russian breeders are developing a breed of super-sniffer dogs using jackals: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1977094.stm .
People take and keep puppies because they are “cute” and they appeal to some deep-seated instinct that we have to adopt and rear babies. Probably people have been doing this ever since they could be called “people”. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two animals that we have consistently kept as companion animals often exhibit the same behavior. Dogs, especially nursing females, will sometimes adopt babies of other species. And nursing female cats will usually adopt nursing babies of other species whenever presented with the opportunity.
Then there is the human love of the novelty. Any puppy (or kitten or whatever) that is different, is desirable. So if Ugg and his cousin did run across a litter of wolf pups (or jackals or foxes or whatever), and one of them was unusually colored (for instance), they would be that much more likely to take that one home. It might even have barter value.
We may never know just exactly which species went into the soup that distilled dogs for us. Some species may have been lost to assimilation. Subspecies of gray wolf probably are predominant. Possibly dingos or dingo-like species. And dholes. I look at dholes and think “chow chow”. Some foxes, too, especially Arctic foxes, and various jackals. Also there is the Ethiopian wolf: it’s in the process of being lost through habitat destruction and assimilation by interbreeding with domestic dogs even today.
I know that some people say the DNA evidence does not bear this out, but I think that we don’t know nearly as much about DNA as we think we do.
I’ve just wrote a post on this.
The only jackal that I think could possibly have contributed to the dog genome is the golden jackal. The other two probably have not, although I think it is worth an SNP study, like the one done at UCLA recently that compared the dog genome with various population of wolves to see which population they were most closely related to. (It was the Middle Eastern wolves, Canis lupus arabs.) We know that if there are some jackal or even coyote genes in them, those genes are going to be small.
I discuss some of this on my black-backed jackal post, and it is possible that there were semi-domesticated black-backed jackals before the arrival of domestic dogs to southern Africa.
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/the-bizarre-natural-history-of-the-black-backed-jackal/
It wasn’t long ago that geneticist found evidence of another species of wild chicken, besides the red jungle fowl, is probably an ancestor of the domestic chicken.
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000010
Yes. Most of our domestic animals’ ancestry is more complex than we generally assume.
Our species is nomadic, and wherever we have roamed across the Earth, our domestic animals, semi-domestic animals, and pets have traveled with us. For the vast majority of the thousands of years that people have been keeping pets (and later, livestock), the animals that we kept were almost certainly free-roaming, held to us only by food, habituation, and affection.
There was no birth control for animals other than confinement (or, possibly, castration). Just as pets will do today if allowed to roam free, those long-ago pets would have mated in their seasons, and the mating urge is very strong. If the same species is not available during mating season, a closely related species will often suffice. The resulting hybrid offspring, if they survived, may have exhibited hybrid vigor, and their unusual appearance would have added to their novelty. Sometimes hybrids have a range of coloration different than the parent species, and that would be interesting to people too. People tend to select for novelty, even over utility sometimes (which is why we have some truly bizarrely deformed breeds of pets and livestock today). They would have selected those unusual offspring, which might possibly have not survived without human intervention, and raised them, and those that were fertile would eventually breed and produce more novel animals, and so on.
The semi-domesticated animals that people kept by them in those long-ago times would have been closer to the wild forms than the inbred, over-selected types that exist as breeds today, and offspring of those animals may be more apt to have been fertile, or at least, some of them probably were, thus contributing various genes from other species into the general pool.
There would not have been specific “breeds”, but several distinct landraces developed across the globe. It was after people became more agricultural, living in more or less permanent settlements, the local races began to be developed into breeds, often by inbreeding to fix traits. By then the dog, especially, had probably been domesticated in various places and whatever wild genes were going to go into the mix had long since done so.
I think that there is room for much more controlled research in this area, especially with jackals, coyotes and dholes.
We celebrate the instinct of this wolf to provide for her offspring. But if a poverty-stricken human mother decides to sell or pass on her baby, we abhor it.
In the end, we love the wolf mother but hate the human mother because we believe the human mother “should know better” than to transfer or sell her baby. But, in the end, the human mother also has instincts to save or protect her children, whether the newborn or the older children.
While we celebrate wolf mothers, let us not judge human mothers. Some human mothers in certain parts of the world face as arduous task in raising children as the wolf mother in the video.
Don’t judge. Change.
Totally agree!