{"id":168,"date":"2008-06-20T22:41:44","date_gmt":"2008-06-21T06:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=168"},"modified":"2009-09-23T20:31:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T04:31:10","slug":"c-lupus-familiaris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=168","title":{"rendered":"<span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">C. lupus familiaris<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yester-day, I saw a couple of especially small Yorkshire terriers (each at a different place and time).  Often, when I see little dogs, I wonder what their lupine ancestors would have thought and done if they could have known that <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">H. sapiens<\/span> was going to <em>do<\/em> this to their children.<\/p> <p>I understand that the initial process of domestication was likely to have been as much something undertaken by the wolves themselves as by the humans.  Domestication was <em>often<\/em> a matter of plants or animals adapting to human beings without humans first thinking to selectively breed or train the other species.<\/p> <p>(Indeed, in a sense, <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">H. sapiens<\/span> even <em>domesticated<\/em> ourselves without deliberately setting-out to do so, becoming increasingly neotenic.)<\/p> <p>But, at some stage, people got it into their heads to shape <em>deliberately<\/em> some domesticated plants and animals.  And, in the case of wolves, one result has been tiny, fragile creatures, utterly incapable of survival for more than a matter of <em>days<\/em> if left to fend for themselves.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yester-day, I saw a couple of especially small Yorkshire terriers (each at a different place and time). Often, when I see little dogs, I wonder what their lupine ancestors would have thought and done if they could have known that H. sapiens was going to do this to their children. I understand that the initial [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[261,179,263,262,264,178,265,266,267],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-public","tag-canines","tag-companion-animals","tag-dogs","tag-domestication","tag-neoteny","tag-pets","tag-wolves","tag-yorkies","tag-yorkshire-terriers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}