The hunting abilities of humans and dogs, the tendency of game animals to herd up or take other actions to avoid predation, etc., if disassembled and reassembled with the same actors playing somewhat different roles, give you a sheep herder, a protecting breed of dogs (like the Great Pyrenees or other mastiff type breeds), a herding dog (like a border collie) and a bunch of sheep, cattle, or goats.

Even human hunting with dogs (not herding domesticated animals) involves a reorganization of tasks and abilities, all present in non-dog-owning human ancestors and wolves (dog ancestors), but where the game are, as far as we know, unchanged. Human hunters documented in the ethnographic record, all around the world, had or have dogs, and those dogs are essential for many hunting types. The Efe Pygmies, with whom I lived in the Congo for a time, use dogs in their group hunting, where they spook animals into view for killing by archers, or drive them into nets that slow the game down long enough to be killed. The Efe actually get a lot of their game by ambush hunting, where a solitary man waits in a tree for a game animal to visit a nearby food source. He shoots the animal from the tree with an arrow. But, even then, the dog plays a role, because the wounded animal runs away. The trick to successful ambush hunting is to do it fairly near camp so you can call for help when an animal is wounded. Someone sends out a dog, and the dog runs the animal to ground. And so forth.

Scientist and science writer Pat Shipman has proposed another important element that addresses a key question in human evolution. Neanderthals, who were pretty much human like we are in most respect, and our own subspecies (or species, of you like) coexisted, but the Neanderthals were probably better adapted to the cooler European and West Asian environment they lived in. But, humans outcompeted them, or at least, replaced them, in this region very quickly once they arrived. Shipman suggests that it was the emerging dog-human association, with humans domesticating wolves, that allowed this to work. Most remarkably, and either very insightfully or totally fancifully (depending on where the data eventually lead), Shipman suggests that is was the unique human ability to communicate with their gaze that allowed this to happen, or at least, facilitated the human-dog relationship to make it really work. We don’t know if Neanderthals had this ability or not, but humans do and are unique among primates. We have whites around our Irises, which allow others to see what we are looking at, looking for, and looking like. We can and do communicate quite effectively, and by the way generally viscerally and honestly, with our glance. This, Shipman proposes, could have been the key bit of glue (or lubricant?) that made the human-dog cooperation happen, or at least, rise to a remarkable level.

The Invaders: How humans and their dogs drove Neanderthals to extinction, by Pat Shipman, outlines this theory. But that is only part of this new book. Shipman also provides a totally up to date and extremely readable, and enjoyable, overview of Neanderthal and contemporary modern human evolution. Shipman incorporates the vast evidence from archaeology, physical anthropology, and genetics to do so, and her book may be the best current source for all of this.

This is a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it. Shipman also wrote “The Animal Connection,” “The Evolution of Racism,” “The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins,” and several other excellent books on human evolution and other topics. Shipman, prior to becoming mainly a science writer, pioneered work in the science of Taphonomy, developing methods for analyzing marks on bones recovered from archaeological and paleontologic sites, such as those marks that may have been left by early hominins using stone tools to butcher animals.

Seriously, go read The Invaders: How humans and their dogs drove Neanderthals to extinction.

UPDATE: I’m adding this here because it is my current post on Ebola. Thomas Eric Duncan, the person who became symptomatic with Ebola in Dallas, had died at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (according to news alerts).

A nurse’s assistant in Spain caring for Spanish nationals returned with Ebola from West Africa contracted the disease, gaining the dubious distinction of being the first person to be infected with Ebola outside of that disease’s normal range in West Africa, Central Africa and western East Africa. There is speculation that she contracted the disease by contacting the outside surfaces of her own protective gear, which is exactly what I’ve speculated to be a likely cause of infection in health care workers. This is not certain, however.

Members of her family and others, including additional health care workers, are in quarantine. There is evidence that the hospital procedures were inadequate to keep a lid on Ebola in this context, and nurse’s unions and others are protesting and demanding change.

Meanwhile, the Spanish government has claimed that there is “scientific evidence” that dogs can transmit Ebola, so Excalibur, the nurse’s family dog, will be euthanized and incinerated. People have gone to the streets to safe the dog.

So, can dogs get, or transmit if they get it, Ebola? Short answer: Yes, and probably not. Here’s my thinking on this, and some information.

1) Pick a random species, or to make it easier, pick a random mammal, and test to see if it can transmit a disease known in humans. It is unlikely to be the case because diseases are to some degree adapted to exist in certain hosts, and host vary, well, by species. So it seems unlikely.

2) On the other hand, Ebola seems to be able to infect a very wide range of mammals. Ebola resides in multiple species of fruit bats (though maybe not uniformly or equally well). A range of mammals seen to be suitable intermediates between fruit bats and humans. The mammals known to be able to harbor Ebola are diverse. It isn’t like only primates can be infected. So, it seems quite possible.

3) On the third hand, I’ve never heard of dogs being addressed as an issue in the current crisis in West Africa or during prior outbreaks. One would think that if dogs were a concern this would have been mentioned by someone some time.

4) On the fourth hand, dogs in Central Africa are less likely to be house dogs, hanging around with the family on the couch, and more likely to be working dogs that spend all their time outdoors. A Spanish family pet may have hung around on the sick bed with an ill individual. I don’t know about dogs in West African cities. By the way, you have to go look to see what the story with dogs there is, and it may within that context. I’ve noticed that westerners tend to have a rather monolithic view of how humans “elsewhere” (especially the “third world”) relate to their dogs, based on a concept we hold of them, not based on actual knowledge. How dogs fit in with humans from place to place and time to time varies.

5) I’ve read a good amount of the peer reviewed literature on Ebola and I can not recall anything about dogs.

5) But … A quick check of Google Scholar did come up with one study. From the abstract:

During the 2001–2002 outbreak in Gabon, we observed that several dogs were highly exposed to Ebola virus by eating infected dead animals. To examine whether these animals became infected with Ebola virus, we sampled 439 dogs and screened them by Ebola virus–specific immunoglobulin (Ig) G assay, antigen detection, and viral polymerase chain reaction amplification. Seven (8.9%) of 79 samples from the 2 main towns, 15 (15.2%) of 14 the 99 samples from Mekambo, and 40 (25.2%) of 159 samples from villages in the Ebola virus–epidemic area had detectable Ebola virus–IgG, compared to only 2 (2%) of 102 samples from France. Among dogs from villages with both infected animal carcasses and human cases, seroprevalence was 31.8%. A significant positive direct association existed between seroprevalence and the distances to the Ebola virus–epidemic area. This study suggests that dogs can be infected by Ebola virus and that the putative infection is asymptomatic.

I’ve not looked further at the literature. This study suggests, unsurprisingly (see point 2 above) that dogs can harbor the virus. However, they don’t seem to be symptomatic. Therefore, spread from a dog seems unlikely. I would think the dog could be kenneled for a few weeks, rather than being put down.

Yet, there is such a field guide, Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides), and the truth is, this is ONE OF THE COOLEST BOOKS I’VE EVER SEEN! All the carnivores (almost) in one book. Interestingly, it turns out to be possible. There are fewer than three hundred species of terrestrial carnivore in the whole world, and that is fittable in a single book.

That itself is an interesting fact, in proper context. Indeed, when I went through this book, spending a bit of time on each and every page, a number of interesting thoughts about carnivores came to mind….

Regarding taxonomy, diversity, and disparity (the former = number of species, the latter = how different they are), carnivores are fairly unique, but in a way that applies as well to primates. Looking only at the regular terrestrial carnivores first, they are all very similar in certain respects yet there is a fair amount of variation among them, including a huge range of body size from the smallest carnivore that could easily hang out in an open soda can to the largest being the northern Bears (either polar or brown, depending on how you measure a species “size”). There are almost 30 orders of Mammalia, and Carnivora is about the fifth most speciose. Yet, Carnivora has fewer than 300 species. Compared to some other animal Classes (Mammalia is a Class). the mammals, for all the interest we have in them, are fairly low density in respect to species (there are something like 10,000 Birds!), high in disparity (the “hooved animals” includes whales and bats fly like birds!) and are rather cryptic with respect to how visible they are on the landscape (compared, again, to birds, which are always rather in your face).

Carnivores, relative to some of the more common mammal Classes, are both ubiquitous and thinly distributed. As you track mammals across the landscape, you might find that certain mammals are highly concentrated here and there, almost absent in other places. The total biomass of bovids in northern climes varies dramatically as you go from herds of bison to forests with thinly distributed deer to tundra or mountain slopes where the highly specialized forms occur in small groups with big gaps between. But everywhere you go, you will be within the territory of a carnivore. In fact, as a rule, you’ll be within the territory of between two and four carnivores, as they tend to divide themselves up by size class, with the classes sometimes competing with each other. In one place there may be otters or minks (small) and coyotes (medium) and either a cougar or a wolf pack (large), or there may be lots of coyotes (large) and otherwise mainly stoats and the like (small). In much of Africa, there will be one large cat (lion) one small cat (golden, wild-house, or sand?) one hyena and two or more mongoose-getet-civet-like creatures that are different from each other in size covering the exact spot you are standing. You’re standing there looking at some bird, and off in the bush there are five carnivores looking at you. In the ancient middle east, there would be lion, leopard, a smaller cat, and an even smaller cat. And so on.

Don’t think about that too much … it is just a rule of thumb. The point is, most space is occupied by carnivores, yet at the same time they are way spread out because of their territorial habits which arose for a number of reasons including the fact that they eat other animals and thus are limited. And, this means that as they disperse during their own carnivoresque personal development cycle, they tend to disperse over very long distances, maybe not during all generations but certainly some. Therefore, some carnivore species have huge ranges, or if they have diversified a bit, some carnivore groups of species have huge ranges. And, for many types of carnivores, there are both tropical and template’s and in between forms. This is not typical of the other orders of mammals.

This is why we get interesting patterns such as the fact that the New World cougar and the Cheetah are close relatives, having differentiated in North America. The Cougar did not spread from North America probably (this is just an educated guess) because medium+ size cats were already everywhere, but the Cheetah was rather a novelty … a doggish cat that could run as fast as the fastest antelope or pronghorn … so it did spread. Subsequent events left the Cheetah only in Africa but it was once more widely dispersed (as a type of cat, not necessarily the same species).

The lion was probably the one mammal among all mammals, other than humans, that has the largest range of all mammals ever, having been spread across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa not too long ago. And so on and so forth.

The result of these patterns of adaptation, dispersal, and ecology is what you see in Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides). When you look at the carnivores organized more or less by taxonomy and then pay attention to the geography, your mind will be blown and you will demand an explanation! How the hell did we get the same basic animal living in the woods of North America (wolverine) and the nearby prairies (badgers) as we have across Europe and Asia and Africa (the honey badger) with about dozen or so other versions all over the place? And you will see other patterns as well; As you thumb through the pages, you will repeatedly see size grading among the carnivores, but most of the size grading is localized. It isn’t like Asia has large otter-mink-stoat critters and Africa small ones .. everywhere gets a range from small to large. Also, as you thumb through the pages, every here and there you’ll see “Crab Eating X” where “X” is some kind of animal (dog, badger, cat, whatever). Either carnivores like them their crabs or carnivore namers are regularly surprised enough to see crab eating that they tend to name anything they see eating a crab after that behavior, even if some of them actually rarely do. (Had I named coyotes after my first extended wild encounters with them, they would be the “crab eating dog”!)

Hunter’s book does not cover the fish. Yes, folks, just as the “hooved animals” gave rise to several fish (whales) and other groups have given rise to fish (hippos, etc.) the carnivores has a fish branch as well (walrus, seals, sea lions). I think it would be cool if Carnivores of the World (Princeton Field Guides) included these critters as well. Including them would make important points about evolution. I respect the fact that this book is written by an expert on land carnivores, so having seals and such in there with the terrestrial forms may be inappropriate. But in a future edition of the book, I would love to see five pages dedicated to the Fish nee Carnivores, not all species but just a nod to the families of seals, walrus, and sea lions.

The other thing that is missing from this book that I would very much like to see and that I must insist (as if I could) be included in the next edition is range maps. I have ideas as to how to make them fit. It is important. (But see below)

Luke Hunter is an Australian who has done research in South Africa and elsewhere. He heads the Panthera Corporation and formerly headed Great Cats and the Wildlife CosnervationSociety.

The Panthera Foundation web site has lots of information about carnivores, and in particular, you can download the range maps that are missing from the book, here!

Hat tip: Todd.

Duck watching this time of year is very hard. In the beginning of the season the males are in full bloom. Females found near males are almost always of the same species. (Unless the male is a mallard. They do not discriminate.) So you can use the male and female view of the species to narrow it down and it is never hard to identify the ducks. A little bit later in the year there are ducklings with females, and you don’t see the males very often. For some species, the males have gone into the woods. For others, they may have actually started to migrate early. In any event, the females are easy to spot because they are more or less tethered to miniature flocks of miniature ducks, and as they are fully mature females, they look just like they are supposed to in the bird book.

Over time, the number of ducklings goes down, thankfully, or we would be living on a planet with ducks piled all the way to the moon. One might wonder where all those ducklings go. Well, they go here.

By the end of the season, the very small number of ducklings that remain have become “mature” in that they are not any longer dependent on their mothers (or crèche keepers) and are off on their own looking rather adult. But the problem is, they are looking rather adult what? Yesterday we saw a duck alone on a pond in a remote woodland west of Itasca and had a hard time identifying it. The duck was floating around with it’s bill in it’s chest sleeping. After several minutes, he finally woke up enough to stretch his head and we could instantly see that he was a wood duck. Not recognizing a male wood duck may sound rather absurd, and you might wonder why I’m even admitting that. It’s a little like looking up at the night sky when the fully lit-up Goodyear Blimp is going by and not being sure which were the stars and which was the blimp.

But a male wood duck born this year and not yet fully mature almost looks like a female teal or something. Especially when it is curled up on the pond sleeping at some distance.

It happened today again, at a small pond off the main road at the Tamarack Nature Preserve. We think it was a female gadwall (though it looked a lot like a whistling duck), but it did not quite hit all the points. Then we realized …. oh, right. Immature female gadwall duck. That works.

A very large number of nighthawks seem to live among the Tamaracks. We saw no fewer than three flocks, all active mid afternoon.

And back in the dense old growth forest that our cabin is in, but just on the other side of the narrow Lake we are on (Itasca) we came across wolf scat. As I poked at it, revealing a nice piece of enclosed bone, I suddenly realized that it was quite fresh. Fresh enough that I checked over my shoulder.

There were no visible wolves. Just ducks. But then, the wolves are always invisible.

The likelihood that your yard slopes one way or the other … statistically … depends in large part on what region you live in. (Here I’ll be speaking mainly of the US, but the principle applies broadly.) If you live in New England, your yard is more likely to slope up. If you live in the Midwest/Plains, your yard is more likely to slope down

This is because in New England, we humans build our settlements around rocks. Because there are rocks. (If you don’t believe me, note that all the famous rock farms are in New England.) You get a big aircraft carrier size rock, you build your streets around its base, the houses face the streets, and the yards travel up the rock in the back.

In the glaciated Upper Midwest, we build our settlements around swamps and ponds, again, because there are a lot of them. They don’t call Minnesota the “Land of Lakes” for its rocks! In fact, rocks are so hard to find around here that when people do find them, they put them out in their front yards like sculptures.

So, you build your road on the high ground, put the houses along the road, and by definition (high vs. low) the yards slope down to the swamp. Which, of course, you fill in with dirt, but it’s still low ground.

This is why dogs in New England are less hyper than dogs in the midwest. When all the yards slope down, even tall fences do not cover the view from the back windows to all the neighbor’s yards, and thus, all the neighbor’s squirrels and all the neighbor’s dogs. But in New England, what with the rocks and all, the view from a person’s yard may consist mainly of the person’s yard and not so much the neighbor’s yards. So, in the Midwest, a dog may have an acre or more of wooded parkland squirrel habitat to look at, while in New England, maybe one squirrel, maybe none. (And, removing the squirrels in New England has a better chance of working long term as well.)

Obviously, this will vary a lot. What I’ve just said applies more to suburbs than to urbs (though not entirely). In South Minneapolis, for instance, the swamps are all parks. Really. Go look at any park in South Minneapolis and you’ll see that it’s a major low spot. If it is big enough, there will be a lake down there, if not, just a filled in swamp. The local geology dictates that the yards are mostly flat (and that, therefore, the airport is nearby!) and that the main thing you see in your yard is your garage and the alley. So, South Minneapolis yards are more like New England yards than one might expect. And, in New England, if your yard backs on a stream, obviously, you have a low area, but you don’t get the above described view, because the stream will be accompanied by an edaphic woodland riverine forest. People who live in those houses have very nervous dogs, because … of the raccoons.

This relationship between landscape and lifestyle is fairly trivial, but there are a thousand (well, OK, dozens) of ways in which regional geology and physical geography shape your life, and they can add up. These aspects of the land add to cultural feature of a region to form a palpable gestalt.

Look around you. How is your cultural landscape shaped by bedrock, sediments, drainage patterns, and patterns of natural vegetation?

To a dog, it is better to sleep
To a dog, don’t tickle the heap.³

Notes
¹Bone munching
²Do not take food off the table. Periodically.
³A veiled reference to “tickling the dragon’s tail” during early A-bomb research. Dogs prefer if you tickle their stomach instead.

Why this poem?

Dawg:

OK, so the Dawg obvoiusly wins. Let’s give the katz one more chance:

Anyway, you all know what a corgi looks like (see the video linked above if you don’t) and the major feature of these dogs is their short legs.

Now, around the corner from Irv’s house was a restaurant called Nicks. Or Charlies. Depends on when you may have gone there (the name changed, but nothing else about the place did). If you’ve ever seen the movie The Paper Chase, then you’ve seen this restaurant. It’s the place the law students go and hang out. If you’ve read this post you’ve experienced this hamburger joint vicariously. But all you really need to know about Nicks for this story are two things:

1) In the evening, it is increasingly full of increasingly drunk Harvard Law students, Anthropology and Science graduate students, and older undergrads; and

2) The front door of Nicks is hard to open and when it does open there is an explosive exchange of air between the inside and outside so a lot of strange things can happen. This occurs because of the big fire inside the restaurant where they cook all the hamburgers (… and lamb chop platters).

So every evening Irv would walk Dillon around the neighborhood where he would defecate in designated spots behind bushes and in various nooks. (Dillon, not Irv. Defecating.) Very commonly, Irv would take a swing around to Mass Avenue, and part of his walk would bring him south from Linnaean Street, and thus, past Nicks.

So one evening, a bit late, Irv and Dillon were heading south on Linnaean Street, and just about to cross in front of Nicks. Suddenly, the door of the restaurant burst open. A vast amount of air was instantly sucked into the restaurant to replace the O2 that had been burned out of the atmosphere. The responding recoil shock wave caught the young man who was about to stagger out of the restaurant off guard, and as he stepped out onto the side walk, he lost his balance and fell to his knees, his baseball cap flying in one direction and his eyeglasses in the other direction.

Irv instantly stopped in is tracks and reigned in the corgi, who stood waiting and at the ready, as well trained dogs do.

The young man started to get his wits about him, and still on all fours looked around and found himself face to face with Dillon.

Dillon stared at the student. The student stared at Dillon.

And after a moment of contemplation, the stunned young man vociferated a startled lament:

“Lassie!” he yelled. “What have they done to your legs!?!?!?”

In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.

We showed that each population is characterized by distinct genetic diversity that can be correlated with breed history. When the breed studied has a reduced intra-breed diversity, the combination of dogs from international locations does not increase the rate of false positives and potentially increases the power of association studies. However, over-sampling cases from one geographic location is more likely to lead to false positive results in breeds with significant genetic diversity. … [thus] … These data provide new guidelines for [statistical] studies using purebred dogs that take into account population structure.

One question that comes to mind immediately for me is the difference between breeds that are, essentially, offshoots of some basic stock vs. breeds that are amalgams of multiple breeds. One could say that to some extent both are true of all breeds, but I think that would be wrong. For instance, the mountain dogs such as the Bernese and the Pyrenees are probably bred from Tibetan mastiffs more or less directly, thus involving a reduction in genetic variation within the breed. In contract, the Newfoundland is also bred from a mastiff stock but possibly with another very distantly related breed added in for special effect (thus offsetting the variation). The doberman is one of the most complex breeds of recent times, with several different breeds used to achieve a true breeding highly specialized form. Breeds that derive mainly from divergence should have different patterns (genetically) than breeds derived from combinatorial breeding.

Quignon, P., Herbin, L., Cadieu, E., Kirkness, E.F., H�©dan, B., Mosher, D.S., Galibert, F., Andr�©, C., Ostrander, E.A., Hitte, C., Awadalla, P. (2007). Canine Population Structure: Assessment and Impact of Intra-Breed Stratification on SNP-Based Association Studies. PLoS ONE, 2(12), e1324. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001324