[bambax]

> something is deeply different in dog genes, or in how and when those genes become active, and scientists are trying to determine exactly what it is

Darwin famously observed in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species that not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.

Darwin himself attributed it to "muscle misuse", the rationale being that domestic animals are not frequently enough on high alert, but genetic causes are more likely.

The bizarre (and still running) experiment of Dmitry Belyaev who has been raising wild silver foxes for over 60 years to turn them into a domestic species by selecting the friendliest individuals at each generation seems to show that domestic characteristics, including droopy ears, appear "naturally" during this process, hinting at a genetic cause.

Which genes is a tough question, but there are several programs looking for them.

[Animats]

Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.

Neither cats nor horses have drooping ears, except for ones that have serious birth defects or mutations.

[boondaburrah]

AFAIK cats aren't domesticated. It's more that we have a deal with them. They moved in on their own when they realised humans provide shelter if you hunt their pests.

[jhbadger]

They aren't as domesticated as dogs, that's for certain, but you can't just take a bobcat or other small wild cat kitten and expect it to be a good pet that won't try to attack you when it gets older. Even the more exotic breeds of housecat like the Savannah (crossbred with wild servals) have behavior issues. Housecats have been domesticated to the degree that they continue to act kittenish in adulthood.

[derefr]

We've never prized docility in horses the way we do in other "pets"; in most cases, we've either bred them to be easily-spooked speed monsters (race horses; courier horses), or angry muscular bulls (war horses.)

And there has never really been any kind of long-term eugenics project for cats; they mostly domesticated themselves, which had different results. There are no "work cats" that we've selectively bred with other "work cats" to improve their demeanour; there are purebred cats, but they're basically assholes and we basically don't care. (Why this is, I'll never know.)

[Animats]

Docility is much prized in horses. I've owned ex-racehorses, a Percheron war horse, an ex-police horse, and a big quiet warmblood. They're all "docile"; they'll accept training and won't bite or attack without serious provocation.

Horses have been bred to be larger and more docile. The natural size for horses is a large pony.

It's unclear how this started. Przewalski's horse, the last remaining feral horse breed, is not the genetic ancestor of the modern horse, but a diverging line.

(Horses are somewhat different in the Americas than in Europe and Asia. They're not native. Feral horses in the Americas are descended from ones brought over from Europe by early Spanish conquerers. Amusingly, the pedigrees are known; the Spanish expeditions were Government operations and there's surviving paperwork. Most were good Andalusians.)

[derefr]

> They're all "docile"; they'll accept training and won't bite or attack without serious provocation.

I guess I'm using "docility" a bit differently. There are two somewhat different commonly-used meanings, and it'd be helpful if they were different words:

• the animals everyone tends to commonly use the word "domesticated" for, which usually have specifically eusocial behaviours, like coming and laying down beside a human. Dogs are the central example; but numerous animals, from ferrets to hamsters to pigeons, are actually like this.

• the animals that aren't afraid of humans, and will tolerate their presence, and maybe learn skills from them. Horses, cows, sheep, chickens, etc. Farmers and breeders call these species "domesticated" (compared to their wild cousins), but they're not called that by lay-people. "Able to be livestock" might be what the average person would call these. (Oddly, some common "pets", like guinea pigs, are actually more in this category.)

One of the major differences, in my mind, is that the animals everyone calls domesticated, like being around humans enough that—if raised in a human environment—they'll often defend their human "family member" against their own kind. But this is not a behaviour you see with the technically-domesticated species; a wolf, or a fox, or a cow, might defend its territory if it's feeling territorial, but it won't specifically defend you, even if you raised it. It knows humans are a sometimes-helpful thing, but its instincts haven't been hacked enough to consider them "kin."

I'm not actually sure where horses fall on this measure, having not had much personal experience with them. Your input?

---

Also, fitting into neither category, there are a few extremely-intelligent species that, by this measure, we might call "domesticated" without having had much human-mediated human interaction at all. Corvids and chimpanzees both understand human social behaviour well enough to "befriend" individual humans, but this doesn't translate to them having a default-positive association with humans in general.

Also, under this distinction, I'd say that most wild animals that have assumed a "city habitat" like raccoons, skunks, squirrels, increasingly foxes in Britain, etc. are "technically domesticated." They're pretty much as docile if raised as pets as a horse or a cow would be. Definitely less unpredictable than a "pet" monkey. These species are doing the same thing cats did to get where they are; they just haven't spent as many generations evolving under the constraints cats have yet.

[Animats]

There are lots of books about horse behavior. It's been studied pretty throughly. Most horses are willing to socialize with humans. They're not submissive in the way that dogs are, though. Once you understand some horse body language (see "Talking with Horses", by Henry Blake) they're much more willing to socialize. Horses are flight animals, herbivores, and herd animals, and their behavior comes from that. Dogs are pack animals and carnivores. Different mindset.

(My current horse is possessive of me. I recently turned him out in an arena with another horse he likes, and the two played around a bit. Then the other horse came up to visit me. My horse ran over, ears pinned back and teeth bared, to chase the other horse away. But he wasn't "defending" me; the other horse wasn't a threat and my horse knew that. He was just showing the other horse that I was his human.)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> Dogs are pack animals and carnivores.

I was of the understanding dogs, our friends, are omnivores.

From wikipedia:

Unlike obligate carnivores, dogs can adapt to a wide-ranging diet, and are not dependent on meat-specific protein nor a very high level of protein in order to fulfil their basic dietary requirements. Dogs will healthily digest a variety of foods, including vegetables and grains, and can consume a large proportion of these in their diet, however all-meat diets are not recommended for dogs due to their lack of calcium and iron.[14] Comparing dogs and wolves, dogs have adaptations in genes involved in starch digestion that contribute to an increased ability to thrive on a starch-rich diet.[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog

[blacksmythe]

Horses are very much domesticated. It was probably very difficult, requiring many generations of breeding.

By comparison, zebras are very hard to work with.

http://theconversation.com/why-zebra-refused-to-be-saddled-w... "In many ways, zebra appear very like horses (or ponies, given their size). Yet underlying differences in behaviour have meant that while horses and donkeys have been successfully domesticated, the zebra remains predominantly wild... Horses were initially kept as a food animal."

[Animats]

Of course there are "work cats". Most large barns will have a few, for rodent control. You want them big and tough enough to take on a rat. Working cats should be fed about half what they need, so they stick around but have to hunt. Once they've cleared the barn area of rodents, they'll expand their hunting territory to find food.

(The problem is keeping cat fans from feeding the working cats. The cat people got out of control at the Stanford barn years ago, and the cats got fat and lazy. The overweight cats had to be traded out for more useful semi-feral cats.)

[PhasmaFelis]

Those aren't really "working" animals in the sense of having been bred and trained to tasks that are substantially different than wild behavior. They're just following their instincts, which happen to be beneficial to humans in this case.

[KozmoNau7]

>We've never prized docility in horses the way we do in other "pets"; in most cases, we've either bred them to be easily-spooked speed monsters (race horses; courier horses), or angry muscular bulls (war horses.)

Draft horses and other working horses beg to differ.

They're generally calm and docile, and don't spook easily. Especially draft horses working in cities, they're gentle giants, because they have to be when working on traffic and noise. Police horses too.

As for cats, they don't give you the unconditional love that you get from a dog. They need to respect you first.

[Animats]

The police horse thing is about 20% breeding, 80% training. I owned a former San Jose police horse for years. Big AQHA quarter horse. He was fine with traffic and crowds. But the first time he saw cattle, he lost it, snorting and prancing away. I was laughing; quarter horses are supposed to have "cow sense" bred in. This urban workhorse had never seen cattle.

[to3m]

Draft horses (for which there's of course rather less call these days...) are well-built and docile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_horse

[KozmoNau7]

They're adorable, real gentle giants who'll love you instantly if you happen to have a carrot or an apple.

[larkeith]

Scottish Folds?

[Animats]

Mutation, followed by a silly/stupid breeding program.

[larkeith]

"Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears."

It feels disingenuous to exclude breeds based on mutation / selective breeding, as the quote refers to the effects of breeding on domesticated animals, which are by definition going to be mutations of other species.

[kharms]

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/

This episode of radiolab goes into some theories about the process of fox domestication and hypothesizes that something similar might have occurred in humans.

I don't remember it in enough detail to summarize, but it's a fascinating listen.

[learnstats2]

It seems more likely to me that this has a human psychological cause, not a genetic cause.

I suggest that - if humans associate e.g. droopy ears with being more friendly, this creates a positive feedback loop whereby those animals with droopy ears receive more positive interactions, show less fear and are modestly more likely to be selected by Belyaev's research for breeding, all other things being equal. Human bias has become a "selection pressure".

This has no implication within genetics, neither genetics of the foxes nor genetics of the humans: it could simply be (increasingly) customary in society including Belyaev's. So, I strongly doubt any genetic cause.

[travmatt]

IIRC there’s an ongoing breeding program a Russian researcher is conducting with foxes - explicitly breeding the friendliest individuals.

In addition to the ears drooping, others morphological differences manifested - the friendliest animals had distinct coat patterns, curlier tails, and then later generations additionally showed shortened legs, tail, snout, upper jaw, and widened skull.

[arkades]

They're also dealing with a genetic bottleneck. As they repeatedly select for a given trait, they can inadvertently select for traits that are correlated /in their original sample population/, which may not be correlated universally.

That is, with a small enough sample, if it just so happened the nicest cubs had (some traits) in common, you can easily end up exaggerating those traits in later generations.

The Russian study is heavily inbred. They only ever had a maximum of 2000 foxes - now bred for a few dozen generations.

[tzs]

Similar traits show up when other species are domesticated.

It's been theorized that this has to do with the neural crest, which is an embryonic structure that the adrenal medulla develops out of. The adrenal medulla produces hormones involved in stress and fear, and so an animal with a less active adrenal medulla would probably be more amenable to domestication.

Several other things also develop out of the embryonic crest, so it could be that which ties together domestication and those various other traits that seem to go with it across many species.

[mannykannot]

That is an interesting reversal of the causality, though if selection is involved, there would be a genetic change in either case, so sorting out the cause could be difficult.

Do people see droopy ears as more friendly? I guess it indicates that the animal is not particularly alert, and so unlikely to be on the verge of aggression.

[learnstats2]

Perhaps people today think droopy ears are more friendly just because (for example) the first domesticated animals happened by chance to have droopy ears.

[sethammons]

My first thought was, for sure, the foxes you mentioned. But on the note of no domestic animals avoid some examples of drooping ears, while I'm sure you could find supporting cases, that does not seem to be the norm for horses nor cats. And opposite that, elephants seem to have drooping ears. While the claim might be valid, it feels weak.

[goofingaround]

One factor that affects the horse is that humans use ear position to assess a horse's mental state. Most trainers teach riders to pay attention to whether a horse's ears are forward, pinned back, etc. Humans therefore may actively select horses with upright ears.

[k__]

Also, they aren't predators

[tzs]

> The bizarre (and still running) experiment of Dmitry Belyaev who has been raising wild silver foxes [...]

What do you find bizarre about it?

[smnrchrds]

How do horses fit into this?

[glibgil]

They edit: ~~aren't~~ are barely domesticated. They are useful already in their wild form. They can be "broken" to recognize a dominate rider as their herd leader, but they have to always be tied or corralled. People are trained on how to approach horses, not vice-versa. Never approach a horse from behind.

[callmeaz]

Domesticating seems like a fuzzy concept here, in the way it's being discussed. For, as dog owners, we too (well, the more.. principled ones) are trained in how to approach a pup -- or a 'misbehaving' adult dog -- and how to train/discipline the dog in turn.

As someone who has owned a pregnant mare, and observed (and been involved where appropriate) in the birthing, raising, and, with time, subsequent breaking of the foal, I think horses may be born in a more 'wild' form--- but only in the loose, as-it-were sense of the word.

This all said, domestication should probably be discussed in a way that's wholly specific to a species since, with the horse-dog comparison, it goes without saying that their cognitive development, experience, functional relation to humans, and genetics (unlike the wolf/dog in this regard, a premise of the article) differ in such profound ways.

[ryanx435]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

They are domesticated.

[glibgil]

Yes, but I mean to a far lesser degree than a dog. You get utility very quickly with a horse for very little trait selection. For example, you can get this far (no traits selected, completely wild, not feral) with a never-domesticated Przewalski's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovUGagVGiZ4

[Smaug123]

Have you heard of Williams Syndrome? http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/11/somewhat-against-psychi...

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

This is discussed at some length in the article, which draws parallels to domestic dog behavior and Williams syndrome.