Quora post dump/archive

[Hardcastle]

I'm gonna make a thread to put quora posts, in case we get banned and get our history deleted or anything like that, we can post our good big quora posts here. I'm gonna start right away...

[Hardcastle]

How did dogs come to be domesticated? Why are they so dependent on humans for survival, compared to other animals like cats or horses that seem far more independent in their behavior than dogs?

Dogs took on many different niche roles within human society, and became animals adapted to their respective lifestyles and roles.

In doing so they had to stray from an “independent survivalist” design and sacrifice certain independent survivalist attributes. This was to achieve excellence and specialisation for their new role. It’s no different really to an oxpecker adapting to eating parasites off buffalos and in specialising for that new lifestyle they had to sacrifice their ability to be a starling (the bird from which they are derived). Now an oxpecker isn’t suited to fly in great flocks catching insects on the wing (like a starling), but it is perfectly adapted to hanging around buffalos and eating the insects and parasites that buffalos attract. It can do this better than a starling could.

Think of humans like buffalos, and dogs like ox peckers. Dogs adapted to us and the “ecosystem” that surrounds us.

This ecosystem grew increasingly complex and varied after our relationship formed. Initially dogs were just one type of dog- a pariah.

This was a dog that was adapted to coexisting near slightly hostile stone age humans, scavenging scraps and eating rodents the humans attracted. People weren’t taking care of these dogs at all (sometimes quite the opposite- killing and eatin them), they were independent survivors, BUT they figured out how to exploit humans. Where most predators gave them a wide berth (for very good reason, humans have always been extremely dangerous and nasty), pariah dogs weaseled their way closer and closer using cunning, perception, caution and frankly also yes, cuteness.

(This is honestly a little closer than the earliest pariahs would have weaseled, lol).

The pariah would slowly demonstrate it’s ability to assist humans with hunting, it wasn’t immediately obvious because humans and dogs naturally have fairly different hunting styles, but when they started to gel, life started to get easier for all involved.




Even at this stage dogs are fairly independent and can look after themselves. In fact the fully wild dingo descends from dogs who were living this lifestyle in Asia. They readily reverted back to being fully wild independent survivalists when they came to Australia and found a land with few humans and wide open spaces.

Pariahs and spitz (arctic pariahs) would acquire a variety of roles, like hunting (small game, big game, and everything in between), guarding, pulling sleds, even herding, but retain a general survivalist design because no one was really looking after them.

It was after the agricultural revolution that specialised dogs arose which had started losing the ability to survive independently in the wild. These were;

• Sighthounds
  
• Livestock guardians
  
• Herders
  
• Terriers
  
• Gripping dogs
  
• Scenthounds

These dogs emerged from humans actively providing the basic needs for dogs, and thus allowing them to specialise on their focussed area of expertise. The better the care, the more they could focus, and the more advanced their specialisation could become.

It was like being a professional athlete who does nothing but eat sleep and train and compete at your sport. The amateur athlete who has to work as a garbage man and pick up his kids from school and go fishing all night and etc etc isn’t gonna be able to reach the heights of a focussed professional.

This rang true for the adaptation and evolution of dogs, so even if a spitz was doing the exact same role as a gripping dog (hunting boar, for example), it wasn’t ever going to reach the same heights in ability to perform that task. The fact it had to still worry about largely looking after itself and being fairly independent, was a weight hanging on it’s neck, inhibiting it’s potential to flourish as a boar hunting maestro/savant.

How exactly? Well a dog that needs to look after itself may need to travel miles for hours a day searching for food. This means it’s bones need to be light, it’s muscles and hide as well, it’s carriage needs to be efficient for minimal energy expenditure, etc etc. It may not find much food either so it needs to be especially “fuel efficient”.

A professional that only hunts boars can sleep all day, and wake up to be fed an ample amount with no energy expenditure. Therefore it can have heavier stronger bones to withstand heavier harder collisions without injury, a thicker hide to withstand more slashing injuries, denser heavier muscle for more explosive exertions of strength which will allow for it to hold and contol boars more powerfully, a wider stance to give a lower centre of gravity and sturdier balance for struggling with an unruly beast, would have negatively impacted the energy efficiency for long distance travel but that doesn’t matter anymore. Etc etc.

This is one example specifically comparing the gripping dog with the spitz/pariah, but it applies when comparing all the different specialised varieties of dogs to ancient pitz/pariahs. There’s a balance of traits every dog has, attribute points stacked in different categories. A wild dog has them balanced at a medium level. A specialist drops some that would be necessary for survival, but are irrelevant to it’s job, so it can stack them up high in it’s area of expertise and be amazing at it’s job.
--------------------------------------------------
How did dogs come to be domesticated?

[Hardcastle]

To which species are golden jackals more closely related: wolves or coyotes?

Wolves and coyotes are closer to one another, so kind of equally distant from the the golden jackal as they share a common ancestor that was related to the golden jackal. That ancestor was more like the golden jackal and coyote, than like the wolf. So the Coyote and Golden Jackal are very “close” in that they are quite similar. The coyote could actually be considered an “American Jackal” and has been given that moniker in the past (or “prairie jackal”). It is a “jackal” by functional design. A cunning sly opportunist, often scouting about alone with very loose and flexible social behaviour.

Wolves are kind of weird, because they descend from these “jackals”, which are like the dog design actually “devolved” in a sense. The dhole and african wild dog are elite highly coordinated pack hunters, intuitively you’d actually be compelled to assume they are the most “modern” and “advanced” canine design. But it’s simply not the case, they are a very ancient type of dog, and a lot of extinct dogs were similar to them. With large highly organised tight-knit social units, very minimal sexual dimorphism because fighting among themselves was very minimal. It seems like a “logical destination” for the canine design to ultimately evolve to be like dholes and AWDs (and dire wolves, who weren’t like wolves really at all but like giant dholes).

However, this isn’t what happened. These tight knit highly social canines kind of devolved into scrappy generalist cunning jackals, their specialisation for pack hunting dulled. Now the wolf is actually “jackals” turning back into dogs. As in turning back towards pack cohesion and big game hunting.

Keep in mind, earlier still, the earliest canines were probably more jackal like, this is indicated by foxes and also black back and side-striped jackals which seem to pre-date the dholes/awds/dire wolves of the world. So it seems through the history of canine evolution they have actually repeatedly fluctuated back and forth between highly social hunters and loner cunning opportunists, multiple times.

Anyway TL;DR- equally related, more like a coyote.
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To which species are golden jackals more closely related: wolves or coyotes?

[Deleted]

www.quora.com/What-are-the-natural-predators-of-wild-boars/answer/Bolushi

Depends on the boar. Few predators can successfully prey on boars, and the ones that do regularly fail.

The young male boars are full of testosterone and are fast and capable of goring a predator pretty quickly, but are also a bit easier to kill.

Sows are also danger when they’re younger for similar reasons but they can’t do damage as quickly.

Mature male boars are more durable, but they’re not as fast. So while they’re offensively compromised their durability should be enough to thwart off attacks.

After mature male boars you get older boars which are even more durable and even more offensively compromised.

Regardless of the size of the boar, various animals find them extremely difficult to kill. Even tigers have a hard time with boars, but boars are a viable prey item for them. That’s how big a cat needs to be to consider boars a sustainable prey item.

Leopards and cougars are dominated by boars where they coexist. Boars are quite confrontational with wild predators. They’ve usurped kills from leopards, likely cougars as well considering cougars never ever kill adult boars while boars will confront a cougar pretty confidently based on their behavior with other predators.

Here are some cases of predators interacting with boars or closely related suids:

Peccary fends off a jaguar:

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d161da2631b71c3f334acc5e05f35313
Pot bellied pigs repel a black bear:

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-236a4097a4a44373dd75f90a3f0ac6f6

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-067a24f0e0386f24255231f4840f08eb

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b3a7d96733dcab943ef2faf8c81a70fa
Wild boars beat up a leopard:

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d23cba715b8c2e7aacb9c29e27928298
Wild boars kill leopard (someone told me it was actually hit by car, so if that’s true then they’re just scavenging roadkill):

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-940c583d5d5247c325d00e44c9a0c25a
Boar outfights a tiger:

qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0fbe45240182cd8b923712efc1d73650
So while some predators can kill a wild boar, they have one hell of a time doing it and only for male tigers is it a viable prey option. Jaguars can pull it off occasionally, but they prefer boars around 50kgs and avoid bigger boars. Cougars completely avoid them in Texas and South America. Leopards can prey on them occasionally but only on rare occasions and only the large leopard subspecies like Persian leopards can do it with any sort of regularity. It’s just absurd to think that a deer/antelope/elk specialist can suddenly start killing adult boar, the larger leopard subspecies evolved that way for cattle and boar predation.

Wolf packs can also kill boars but only in packs, 2 is not enough unless the boar has undergone a long weakening process. I seen a video of 4 wolves killing a smaller boar and it was a difficult task but eventually 1 wolf grabbed onto it and the others all jumped on it.

Bears can too, but they need a decent size advantage. And their method of killing is terribly inefficient so they have to gnaw on the boar for 10 minutes just to paralyze it, saw it on a video with a black bear and a razorback.

Then the obvious, crocodilians can kill boars pretty easily:
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-eeac308f1195b9276a84424738bdd87f
Outside of crocodilians, adult boars can repel any predator, but a few predators can take them out.

[Deleted]

How do you do it so quickly? It's painful to have to paste it and then get rid of the random spaces and manually add in the gifs, which don't show.

[Hardcastle]

How did humans domesticate horses from their ancestral species, Equus ferus?

With great hostility and brutality.

We know this from archaeological digs of the settlements in central asia of the people who domesticated horses. For actually thousands of years before horses were domesticated these people take on a peculiar obsession with horses, where they progressively eat more and more horses until there are scarcely the remains of any other hunted animals. They became horse-specialised and horse-focussed. They seem to even have had special dogs evolve that were also horse specialised. Large broad mouthed dogs.



This engraving it should be understood was not made by these people, but it WAS made a couple thousand years later by their ancestors who settled in Syria. In fact these people are responsible for taking horses… everywhere. They spread rapidly across Eurasia and in to north Africa. They ate horse meat, they drank horse blood and they also carried around chunks of horse cheese they could nibble at on the hoof. Empires would not only value the gift of horses from these men, they valued the men themselves as horse tamers, horse trainers, mounted warriors/cavalry, charioteers and chariot makers. They also valued their dogs, who had a knack for grabbing animals by the head and holding them still. The descendants of these dogs (alanos, so named for the “alan” tribe of scythians from central asia who introduced the dogs to western europe) would go on to become bulldogs and mastiffs. Perhaps more accurately we could consider them “horse dogs”, as that seems to be where at least the embryonic stages of their development lay.

Basically people domesticated horses by obsessively hunting and killing and eating them for thousands of years, and through that gradually realising they could be useful in other ways.
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How did humans domesticate horses from their ancestral species, Equus ferus?

[Hardcastle]

Nov 2, 2022 5:08:32 GMT Bolushi said:

How do you do it so quickly? It's painful to have to paste it and then get rid of the random spaces and manually add in the gifs, which don't show.

Yeah gifs are gonna be tricky. I haven't tried to post a gif here yet, I guess it's just posted as an image?
With the images I'm just right clicking on them, "open image in new tab" and then copying the address and adding it to the image box. It is slightly tedious but not so bad.

[Hardcastle]

test

[Deleted]

www.quora.com/What-are-the-five-dog-breeds-one-should-never-choose

Well there isn’t a dog one should ''never choose'' but these dogs are some of the worst for unprepared people to have.

Chow Chow
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-38c99dd6d4d1a1b654496e5b16b9d8ef-lq
Husky
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2d2e145dabfaa07dae4f90d30eb7c5bc-pjlq
Belgian Malinois
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9b381ac7695fe0bb72164a2c13ec60fd-lq
Akita Inu
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-867ddd92374237f10ee2308106a214cf-lq
Tibetan Mastiff
qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-699b959f1700100f5cf597d9d3bb9d83-lq
Chow Chows are just mean, my grandma’s husband had 2 chow chows who pinned a guy on top of a car.

Huskies are extremely energetic, they WILL escape. And then on top of that, this goes for most of these dogs, they are unreadable for many people and aren’t the type of dog to mess around with. For example, it might playfully let you take its toy and then whip around and bite you because it changed its mind.
The Belgian Malinois is energetic and also snappy and belong in military bases, if you try to own one in a suburban home you are going to have a bad time.

The Akita is one of the more readable Spitz but it also enjoys guarding and biting people.

The Tibetan Mastiff is the best one in the list, but they’re big, strong, and they have guardian instincts. You want a scruffy village dog to guard your house? Sure. If you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t train it thoroughly, it will tear your house down and be aggressive.

You can own any of these dogs if you’re smart though.

[Deleted]

Nov 2, 2022 5:11:49 GMT Hardcastle said:

test

I guess I'm doing something wrong because my gifs and images don't show.

[Hardcastle]

How did domesticated dogs become such close companions of human beings? How did they get attached to us?

They evolved to be, it was a winning adaptation. No different really to how a clownfish is so “attached” to a sea anemone.



The ancestors of the clownfish noticed (unconsciously over time) the sea anemone had a good thing going, and they adjusted themselves to be more compatible with the sea anemone. For them this involved becoming immune to the sea anemone’s sting by developing a layer of protective mucus on their skin.

Dogs had a little more to do. Humans are arguably even angrier and meaner than sea anemones, they also have a deeply burning passionate hatred for the wolf as a rival apex predator. Dogs had to un-wolf-ify themselves by becoming small and changing their appearance, they also had to get very good at reading humans, and communicating with them through body language and facial expression. Humans didn’t immediately make friends with them when they showed up, they saw them as a nuisance, but as they became smaller and friendlier they became a less threatening nuisance and were begrudgingly tolerated. Mostly. Sometimes the apes would be enraged and kill a dog and eat it, and that event then factored into the evolution of the dog, and the dog changed in response to these “cullings” over time to be more and more agreeable, tolerable and sympathetic.

Still today you can see a clear trend in dogs where the more ancient the type of dog the less amenable and frankly the more annoying. Humans have been killing and killing and killing annoying dogs through the ages, and/or at least neglecting and dis-favouring them, and this has made dogs less and less annoying and more and more pleasant.

Dogs didn’t start as pets, even after becoming dogs they still weren’t pets. Dogs evolved as wild animals adapted to be being tolerated by humans, not unlike the clown fish and the anemone, and it may come as a surprise to know, that STILL most dogs take up this niche. In fact less than 40% of the world’s dogs are estimated to be owned pets, some estimates as low as 20% -
Free-Ranging Dog
The rest are wild animals being vaguely tolerated on the periphery of civilisation. Pariahs.

Some dogs found specialised roles in human society. This too, pre-dates the “pet”. After dogs adapted to man, man started adapting to dogs, and learning to work with dogs in ways which would make his life better. He discovered that allowing dogs to help with hunting would yield much improved results, and over time hunting beasts with dogs would morph into herding beasts with dogs, as the humans gradually allowed dogs to more and more “show them how it’s done”, and herding/managing a territory of wild ungulate herds is actually just what wolves naturally do. Domestic cattle and pigs stem from these hunting sub-cultures that emerged as humans learned to work with dogs.

Separately other pariah dogs, it was discovered, encouraged ibex and mouflon to linger closer to human settlements by barking at and warding off predators. This would ultimately give rise to goats, sheep and livestock guardian dogs.

These catalysts were breakthroughs for humans and offered new lifestyles where hunting and gathering no longer needed to be full time and all-consuming. All human innovation basically stems from this lifestyle change, and all human diversity, as well. Hunter gatherer was one design of human, but then suddenly we had niches for shepherds, and herdsmen, rice growers, merchants, etc etc. Dogs also facilitated the movement of humans into the arctic circle with dog sledding, and this generated new variants of human as well.

So the relationship between man and dog, make no mistake, is a very special one, and we haven’t even got to “pets”. Pets are what SOME dog types have become in retirement. Life got so good for humans and dogs, this joint endeavour was so overwhelmingly successful and spurred so much innovation and technological advancement, that relying on dogs tapered off somewhat. Humans and dogs live in the lap of luxury and now do “victory laps” with little beauty pageants that celebrate (and exaggerate, and mythologise) dog diversity. They also spend a lot of time sitting around on couches scratching each other's bellies, eating gluttonously and watching tv.

It’s a little depressing that “the dog” has come to be associated most with this status. As a pampered cute pet living high on the hog, when you understand the history of work they have put in for us, and also understand the reality that STILL most live as wild pariahs on the outskirts of society.
----------------------------------------------------
How did domesticated dogs become such close companions of human beings? How did they get attached to us?

[Hardcastle]

Nov 2, 2022 5:14:39 GMT Bolushi said:

What are the five dog breeds one should never choose?

Well there isn’t a dog one should ''never choose'' but these dogs are some of the worst for unprepared people to have.

Chow Chow

Husky

Belgian Malinois

Akita Inu

Tibetan Mastiff

Chow Chows are just mean, my grandma’s husband had 2 chow chows who pinned a guy on top of a car.

Huskies are extremely energetic, they WILL escape. And then on top of that, this goes for most of these dogs, they are unreadable for many people and aren’t the type of dog to mess around with. For example, it might playfully let you take its toy and then whip around and bite you because it changed its mind.
The Belgian Malinois is energetic and also snappy and belong in military bases, if you try to own one in a suburban home you are going to have a bad time.

The Akita is one of the more readable Spitz but it also enjoys guarding and biting people.

The Tibetan Mastiff is the best one in the list, but they’re big, strong, and they have guardian instincts. You want a scruffy village dog to guard your house? Sure. If you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t train it thoroughly, it will tear your house down and be aggressive.

You can own any of these dogs if you’re smart though.

[Hardcastle]

Just gotta press the image icon and paste the address of the pics into it.

[Hardcastle]

Nov 2, 2022 5:05:55 GMT Bolushi said:

What are the natural predators of wild boars?

Depends on the boar. Few predators can successfully prey on boars, and the ones that do regularly fail.

The young male boars are full of testosterone and are fast and capable of goring a predator pretty quickly, but are also a bit easier to kill.

Sows are also danger when they’re younger for similar reasons but they can’t do damage as quickly.

Mature male boars are more durable, but they’re not as fast. So while they’re offensively compromised their durability should be enough to thwart off attacks.

After mature male boars you get older boars which are even more durable and even more offensively compromised.

Regardless of the size of the boar, various animals find them extremely difficult to kill. Even tigers have a hard time with boars, but boars are a viable prey item for them. That’s how big a cat needs to be to consider boars a sustainable prey item.

Leopards and cougars are dominated by boars where they coexist. Boars are quite confrontational with wild predators. They’ve usurped kills from leopards, likely cougars as well considering cougars never ever kill adult boars while boars will confront a cougar pretty confidently based on their behavior with other predators.

Here are some cases of predators interacting with boars or closely related suids:

Peccary fends off a jaguar:

Pot bellied pigs repel a black bear:







Wild boars beat up a leopard:



Wild boars kill leopard (someone told me it was actually hit by car, so if that’s true then they’re just scavenging roadkill):



Boar outfights a tiger:



So while some predators can kill a wild boar, they have one hell of a time doing it and only for male tigers is it a viable prey option. Jaguars can pull it off occasionally, but they prefer boars around 50kgs and avoid bigger boars. Cougars completely avoid them in Texas and South America. Leopards can prey on them occasionally but only on rare occasions and only the large leopard subspecies like Persian leopards can do it with any sort of regularity. It’s just absurd to think that a deer/antelope/elk specialist can suddenly start killing adult boar, the larger leopard subspecies evolved that way for cattle and boar predation.

Wolf packs can also kill boars but only in packs, 2 is not enough unless the boar has undergone a long weakening process. I seen a video of 4 wolves killing a smaller boar and it was a difficult task but eventually 1 wolf grabbed onto it and the others all jumped on it.

Bears can too, but they need a decent size advantage. And their method of killing is terribly inefficient so they have to gnaw on the boar for 10 minutes just to paralyze it, saw it on a video with a black bear and a razorback.

Then the obvious, crocodilians can kill boars pretty easily:

Outside of crocodilians, adult boars can repel any predator, but a few predators can take them out.

[Deleted]

www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-husky-and-a-wolf-Why-do-they-look-so-similar-and-is-a-huskey-just-a-wolf-no-offense-to-husky-owners

I’ll talk about the Siberian Husky, as it’s likely what you’re referring to as opposed to Alaskan/Labrador/Sakhalin/whatever husky.

It’s very very close behaviorally/mentally and physically, but the husky is much smaller, like much much smaller, and also more geared towards running long distances. A wolf and husky will both be running the same 30+ mile trot each day checking on herds, but the husky will need to work harder as it has a shorter stride and is smaller. Luckily for the husky it has more endurance than the wolf, despite both having freakish endurance.

The wolf has weight shedding adaptations to compensate for its huge frame that allows for big game predation + marathon running, the husky doesn’t have the same dramatic adaptations as wolves, but its body is still geared towards marathon running. However, it can afford a bit thicker skin and more robust limb bones because it’s much much much smaller. Weight can not describe the difference, as the husky is more robust than the wolf is so it appears the wolf is merely 2x larger when it’s really 3–4x larger: 
When it comes to human interactions, the husky is better at reading humans. It’s required to have an innate sense of what a human is feeling, because it’s there to linger around human camps with humans that would happily smash it to pieces with a log and then also be a self sufficient, potentially pack hunting survivalist that kills to eat.

Both wolves and huskies are very good socially, and this is no coincidence. They’re both very much well suited for pack living, but a husky without a pack is much more comfortable than a wolf without a pack. And I’m not talking about just running errands I’m talking about having NO pack waiting for their return. Dogs in general dig burrows to deal with the cold like wolves, it’s not sled dog specific though:

Huskies actually don’t look THAT much like wolves, the modern show huskies sure, but the husky is just a snowy dingo, a feral dog adapted for snowy climates and human interaction:

Show breeding turned that ^ into this: