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Old 07-28-2024, 08:45 AM
One Tin Soldier One Tin Soldier is offline
Kobold


Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 163
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As I predicted I started feeling foolish about an hour after posting that. Oh well.

To respond to some of the stuff in this thread:

I don't believe people like dogs just because of the way they look. Yes, that is part of it. Personally, I believe that it wasn't just people selecting dogs for traits we liked. I believe that our relationship with dogs also had an evolutionary effect on us.

Think how long dogs have been with us. Native Americans had dogs before Europeans arrived which means they brought them to the Americas. Conservatively that happened at least 12,000 years ago.

Having dogs around gave humans some major advantages. Which means that groups of humans who liked dogs and were good with dogs did better than groups of humans who didn't like them. Which means the selective pressures went both ways. We shaped dogs but they also shaped us. At least to some degree.

As a side note I don't like the fact that people deliberately breed defects into dogs. I feel it's wrong. It also bothers me some that most dogs now are not selected for positive traits but rather are selected purely for some arbitrary standard of morphology and coloration. For the way they look and nothing else.
Last edited by One Tin Soldier; 07-28-2024 at 08:49 AM..
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