Red wolf. The best photo of one. They may not be a species like was hoped, but they are still beautiful animals.
I’ve moved on from domestic dogs. I’ve been searching for a topic for this blog for some time now, because I’m utterly disillusioned with the world of domestic dogs. I entered into that world in pursuit of the ghosts of dogs long past. I let them live a while here, but I never found them in their true essence again.
I will always love dogs, and at some point, I may write about them again.
But the world of domestic dogs is complex. It is firmly tied to the world of people, and people are complex. Dog people allow themselves to project their egos through the dogs to the point where it becomes really hard to have frank and honest discussions about anything.
So I’ve turned to the dogs that have not created a niche for themselves by attaching themselves to our culture. Some, like coyotes and red foxes, readily scavenge from the excesses of our civilization, but they are not part of human kind. Different cultures may have worshiped the wild dogs, as we do in our own sort of New Agey, ecological worldview.
But they remain distinct from us.
They get to roam without leashes or collars. They don’t follow commands or guard anything but their own territories. They hunt to feed themselves.
And they usually avoid direct observation by our kind.
They are dogs without licenses, except “license’ to be themselves, living out the lives for which eons of evolution have molded them. They choose their own mates. They roll in the stinkiest dung. The only masters they know are forces of nature.
And those masters can be incredibly cruel.
They die of starvation, of distemper or rabies, of mange, and of jaws of other predators, including the jaws of their own kind.
And they continue to be.
Dogs without masters are an affront to all that is holy.
And in their existence is true subversion.
So at this stage, I side with the rebel and the renegades and not the docile sagacity of the domestics.
They may yet return, but right now, I’m beguiled by the brush wolf in the gray March woods.
And it is upon his trail that I shall follow now.
Oh yeah.
Well you did the right thing.
However, imho, the closest domestic dogs to the wild dogs are the livestock guardian dogs guarding livestock on open planes unsupervised by humans.
To me, it’s the hunting spitz like the laikas and elkhounds. I think the original dog was something like them. We didn’t have livestock when dogs first came about, and we had to hunt for everything. The next to evolve from that type were the Central Asian sighthounds, which have a lot of primitive behaviors, and then the Central Asian lgds, which probably started out as big dogs for holding game then were adapted into livestock guardians.
And of course, the true feral dogs, like the dingo, are much closer to wild dogs than any of the ones we feed.
So I have a thought..I too have been curious about dogs and asked..And I was answered by the presence of an amazing Shetland Sheepdog who demonstrated who he was unequivocally and clearly..Showed he was a person with intentions and made choices..with a quality that humbled me to be in his presence and company..And among his expressions was to show off for a wolf/malamute female and tease and flirt and she fell for him, hard..And they became a mated pair. And I read the book, The Story of Edgar SAwtelle in which the dog chooses to remain in the woods and rejects the option of the hearth…and the dog waits for the farm to burn..And in the story the question is asked, ‘how do we breed a better dog’ and when do we want a dog to not obey..but to disobey because of its deeper loyalty..perhaps like a sled dog who refuses to take us across unsafe ice, knowing what we dont..Anyway this is what Scottie is looking into..Where do we find this dog who is the prophet who can take us back into the wild which we came out of with the help of dogs..into a sustainable future and back into the embrace of natural cycles and the power of the earth rather than industry and conquest..And Im very interested in the conversation!
It’s interesting. I don’t know if you’ve read Merle’s Door, but Ted Kerasote was getting at something like this. There is a beautiful scene where he sends Merle, who looked just like a fine field trial yellow Lab, out to fetch a pheasant. Merle hates retrieving, avoids it at all costs, but this one time, he retrieves and brings the pheasant in. And he looks with Ted with such contempt. I am smart enough to do this like the other dogs, he seems to say, but it’s not my metier. I do this to please you, but not because I live for it. And he never asked Merle to retrieve again.
I apologize. I meant that, behaviorally, the LGDs are closest to the wild dogs – no close supervision by their humans, almost fending themselves and their charges on their own, making decisions on who to attack and who not to attack on their own, etc.
LGDs are probably the farthest removed from their wild ancestors in terms of evolutionary timeline.
I think they do a task that is really complicated, perhaps as complicated as what guide dogs do. They have to know dog body language and society, but they also have to know about their stock and its body language and society. When you get into the more primitive ones, like those of Central Asia that breed on their own, and have to do some hunting on their own, you’re talking unbelievably complexity. The know how to hunt small game for themselves but never touch a sheep or a goat. They will kill a wolf that comes too near, but they will tolerate each other.
I figured that wild dogs are more beautiful to look at rather than some domesticated dogs Nothing beats watching them running freely in the wild.
I too enjoy watching dogs run in the wild.
thank you for keeping going