Dogs are dogs because the wolf's genome is highly plastic. People domesticated a lot of animals over the millennia. While we made horses smaller (I know they got a lot bigger over the eons, but I think they did that without our help) and sheep fleecier, etc., we didn't change the basic animals in a vast array of ways. Except for dogs. They're tiny, they're huge, they're fast, they're helpmeets, they're a gazillion things, in a lot of ways dissimilar from wolves.
But what if we were gone? What if some awful virus wiped us out but left every other species alone? Would there be nobody left but rats and bugs, as so many suggest? What about all these awesome dogs? Obviously, things would be unpleasant for a time, maybe a long time, but with so many sizes and forms, it seems to me that at least some dogs would survive. And with all those sizes and forms, they would be well-placed to start filling in niches in the ecosystem of some of the wildlife we've been wiping out these past centuries.
Could dogs evolve to higher intelligence? Do they even need to? What would Dog Planet be like? (Notice that I don't ask what Cat Planet would be like; that's just my house.)
No comments:
Post a Comment