Dogs Ain’t All the Way Done Yet

There is no “magic moment" when a wolf became a dog. Even today, there is no bright-line morphological difference between Wolves, Dogs, Coyotes, and Golden Jackals. In fact, the differences between wolves, dogs, Coyotes, and Golden Jackals are so slight they can ALL interbreed and produce fertile young.

This is not to say dogs, Coyotes, Golden Jackals, and wolves are not different.

Wolves and coyotes howl and almost never bark, while dogs bark and almost never howl.

Male and female alpha wolves lift their legs to pee, while all other wolf pack members squat to pee. With dogs, almost all males lift their legs, and almost all females squat.

With wolves, estrus occurs only once a year in January or February, while with most non-primitive dogs, estrus occurs twice a year, and can occur at any time.

There are other differences too -- physical differences. Wolves have a pre-caudal gland while dogs do not, and there is also a very small bone difference in the feet of one wolf sub-species.

But can a scientist, anywhere, pick up the skull of an ancient canid and definitely and reliably say this one is a coyote, and this one is a red wolf, and this one is an Arabian wolf, and this one is a dog, and this one is a Golden Jackal, and nothing has ever been crossed?

No.

The assumption is that dogs were created from wolves. It's far more accurate to say dogs ARE being created from wolves. The world of canids is one in which speciation is occurring and has not yet fully occurred.

It is still a process, not an event.

And it is a process in which man is still very much stirring the pot.

In Alaska, Kazakhstan, Spain and Romania, there are still wolf pups being snatched from the wild and raised as dogs. These animals are so unreliable as pets that there are laws in almost every country prohibiting their ownership, but their ownership is so common that there's also a entire lexicon of language where the dogs are described as "Malamutes." In fact, many of the animals bought as wolves are Malamutes! Such is the plastic nature of dogs and wolves.

In Italy, Alaska, Minnesota, Spain, Ethiopia and the Middle East, wolves are occasionally crossing with dogs to create small unstable hybrids with the result being mostly wolf, but with sizable doses of dog coursing through the bloodstream.

Here in the U.S. no one knows what to make of the giant coyotes that have appeared in New York and Maine. They appear to be mostly coyote-wolf hybrids, but there's a little dog in there too.

And, of course, there is the Red Wolf, which has always been nothing more than a stable and self-replicating hybrid of a wolf and a coyote.

So, to circle back to it, “dogs ain’t all the way done” yet.