Dog Domestication And Diet

New research (reported here, for example) has highlighted genetic differences between wolves and domestic dogs that “may suggest that the development of agriculture catalysed the domestication of dogs”. The most interesting difference is the significant duplication in dogs of genes that enable starch digestion which gives them a great advantage over wolves in living on starch-rich rather than protein-rich diets. A change that to some extent paralleled our own genetic adaption to agriculture.

The researchers conclude that “a change of ecological niche could have been the driving force behind the domestication process, and that scavenging in waste dumps near the increasingly common human settlements during the dawn of the agricultural revolution may have constituted this new niche”.

This seemingly adds weight to the idea that humans did not deliberately create dogs from wolves as is commonly believed but that it was a natural process in response to changes in an available niche, which in turn, implies that unowned dogs scavenging food around the edge of human communities are doing exactly what they evolved to do.  

However, it seems to me that it is equally possible that these genetic changes occurred after the dog had already travelled well down the road to domestication. The changes in available food would be a driver for these genetic changes even if the animals were already fully domesticated. To be fair, the researchers are more tentative in their conclusions than the popular media have been!

With the improvement of DNA research techniques and a general lowering of their cost further similar studies will probably provide more evidence on the question of dog domestication before too long. But frustratingly for me, these studies always select dog breeds as the comparison with wolves rather than the free-living non-breeds such as the dingoes and pariahs of Asia, which are probably the closest living relatives to the earliest dogs. 

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)