How did they domesticate dogs enough so that they were not wild animals anymore?

Question

i know that dogs, orginally, started off as wolfs.

but i always hear people saying on tv etc etc how dangerous it is to keep wild animals as pets

and ive heard about alot of times where people who keep things like tigers and aligators etc being attacked and killed by them, because its natural instinct

so how did they get wolfs not-wild lol and get rid of their natural instincts to kill

and does that mean that if people kept keeping tigers etc they eventually could become domesticated pets?

Answer 1

Basically through years of selective breeding.

When people first started to keep wolves, they didn't choose the ferocious aplha males, but the quieter more submissive ones. After doing this for a few generations, the badness was in effect breed out of them, and they became a lot more domesticated.

Answer 2

My guess is that the first domesticated wolves were probably pups taken at a very young age and brought up by early humans. They'd have used the same training techniques as we do now. They'd begin to enjoy the relatively easy life and also begin to rely on humans to help them survive.

Answer 3

did you watch the martin clunes programme about this? i thought it was fascinating. i would like to know this too, but also, he spoke of years of domestication and therefore genetic breeding to get the breeds we get today, but tell me how on earth you go from a wolf, to a sausage dog??? surely impossible

Answer 4

Wolves live in very tightly disciplined communities.  There is a dominant female and everyone else knows their place in the pack.

The weakest dog in the litter is often rejected by the dominant female and left to starve.  Humans took to saving these abandoned puppies.  They latched on to their rescuer as a substitute dominant female.  That's why dogs tend to be loyal to one person and why really violent dogs rarely turn on their owners.

In the wild, wolves kill to eat.  If a dog is not hungry, it will not kill to eat.

Answer 5

evolution, and.. never bite the hand that feeds you. i personally keep wild animals, some are very dangerous. but they do not mess with me cause they know who's boss. the animal kingdom is widely based on domination and submission.

i have a wild owl, by wild i mean i found him when he was already adult injured by the side of the road, i nurdes him back to health and kept him. the only way i managed to get close to him was i struck him out of the air one day after one of his regular escapes from the cage. i can now put my fingers through the rails and pet him and he is completly submisive, if anyone else puts there finger in the cage they will not see it again, he WILL take it from you and he WILL eat it.

i also have some other animals that are instinctive predators, i imagine that at some point in the past humans were using these ''dogs'' for labour of some kind, similar to huskys pulling sleds. i imagine after a long period of time they become more submisive, however dogs and wolves dont worry me. im quite confident that is a wolf atacked me it would be easy for me to defeat, the problem is when they are in packs, there confidence is higher and they are more likely to atack, the same is still true for modern day domestic dogs, if you have enough of them they can and probably will atack you.

Answer 6

The first thing you need to see to understand this, is the movie ice age with that funky squirrel.

Then you should know that the Scottish invented a food that tasted so bad, we through it at the dogs.

Soon, they trusted us, and we started calling the food dog food, instead of modified haggis.

Answer 7

Depends if you agree that all humans are tame and / or domesticated.

I think we as species have developed together.

Answer 8

Dogs were bred for thousands of years to be domesticated. Pretty much, they bred the nicest ones from the litters for years and years. After thousands of years, dogs were no longer wolf-like, and no longer wild. Their wild instincts were honed down. Most dogs, for example, do not need to hunt. So the instinct to hunt and kill that is dominant in wild animals is not seen as strong in dogs because it has not been needed. Granted, you do have hunting dogs, bred for hunting, but these dogs were bred to kill or hunt specific game. Again, many many generations of breeding. Not only that, but dogs that are human aggressive are usually killed and not allowed to breed. Taking aggression out of them even more.

Theoretically, yes, tigers COULD be bred to be domestic, but like dogs and cats and horses, it would take THOUSANDS of years of breeding. That is over 6,000 generations, give or take a generation. Domestication is not something that happens in a litter or two of babies.

Not only that, but scientists believe dogs are related to other members of the canine family as well, not just the wolf. There is a large debate among scientist, and it is believed dogs are NOT wolves (just descended from wolves). They also believe coyotes and foxes played a big role in creating todays dogs.

EDIT: If you believe in evolution, then the breeds today become more realistic. THOUSANDS of years of breeding. THOUSANDS of generations. It seems very possible for one trait to be dominant and come out if it is bred for.

Scientists did a test on some foxes one time, I was watching a program on it. They took a bunch of regular red fox and started breeding them. From the litters, they only bred the nice, calm kits together (fast domestication, in a way). After doing this very selective breeding of only breeding nice ones, weird color patterns started coming out. The farther in they bred them, the more colorations that came out (they were not inbreeding, they were adding new bloodlines in to it). The more domestic the foxes became, the more odd their colors came. Soon they had white foxes with brown spots and black ones and all sorts of colors, just like dog breeds. It seemed like, for some reason, that the domestication affected their actual colorations, and I believe that happened with wolves, and how breeds started. The more domestic the foxes became, the less "wild and natural looking" their colors became.

It was very interesting.

Wild red fox

http://thesilvercoyote.net/images/redfox...

"domestic" fox

http://www.lioncrusher.com/images/redfox...

As I said before, these odd colorations like the one above are not natural. They have never been reported in the wild. It wasn't until scientists tried to "domesticate" the species that colorations like that came in to affect.

If you read through this article, it explains the link between tameness and coat colors. Its very interesting

http://www.ratbehavior.org/CoatColor.htm

EDIT2: you dont have to be so rude!! You ask a ridiculous question like "how do they make WOLVES domesticated. can that be done with tigers, too?" then you turn around and yell at someone for telling you it wasn't done overnight, and then you say you know more about dogs then us. I HIGHLY doubt that, or you would know what it takes to breed in trates and characteristics. You would know "how it was done". By picking the trait that you like and breeding the WOLVES/dogs displaying that trait best. Example, breed the wolf that doesn't want to kill you, and you will hopefully have more wolves that dont want to kill you.

Its not WOLFS, its WOLVES. Gain some intelligence for yourself before bashing on others.

Answer 9

through evolution *bible explodes*

Answer 10

If you've got 10,000 yrs to spare then you probably could domesticate tigers!.

Wolf to domestic dog wasn't done overnight. Probably very young wolf cubs were taken in and used to help in hunting, but humans at that time wouldn't have treated wolves as pets but as useful wild animals which they were - and are.

The natural instinct to kill is still there in dogs - in some breeds more than others because it's been bred for. Why people are so astounded when their Terrier kills a mouse or their Greyhound a cat is beyond me!

All the different sizes, shapes and uses for dogs has been done by selective breeding. If you wanted to breed something bigger than normal, you took the 2 biggest specimens, bred them together, kept the biggest pups and bred them to big dogs, etc. If you wanted to breed a dog whose instinct to kill could be harnessed into herding together, you took the 2 dogs that were easiest to train, mated them then mated the best pups to another good herder.

Despite all the so-called Designer breeds today, it takes many years & a lot of dedication to produce a dog which will go on to produce generations of dogs who will do what they were designed for - not just a matter of taking 2 dissimilar dogs, mating them & hoping for the best!

"im an animal care student

so i probably know more about dogs than you do"

One day, you'll know enough to know just how little you DO know.

Answer 11

I agree with you how do you get different breeds from 2 wolves.  If they were the first "dog" around, how come we have all different breeds. Is it man interfering yet again