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0 pointslinuskendall2y ago0 comments

That’s not true for the most part in South Asia. Here we have dog populations that are basically native and have lived alongside humans for a long time. So these dog population are not stray pet dogs.

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devoutsalsa2y ago

A couple months ago, I was hiking in Nepal. The two of us had lunch at a restaurant on the trail where there was a puppy. One of us pet the puppy, the other fed it.

After lunch, as we continued the hike, the puppy started following us. For 2 hours! At first I thought we'd essentially stolen someone's dog. The Nepali guy I was hiking with explained that the puppy is basically a trail dog.

It soon became obvious that there were many dogs following people, hoping to get food. Eventually the puppy started following someone else who had more food.

datadrivenangel2y ago

We had stray dogs follow us up to Everest base camp! In the snow and cold, they really wanted to get fed.

samus2y ago

Then they are the offspring of dogs that escaped or were abandoned long ago. Probably they also took over the population of any related species they can interbreed with.

saalweachter2y ago

That's an interesting historical and semantic question.

So there may not be any such thing as a "wild pigeon". Pigeons were domesticated so long and widely that all modern pigeons in the wild may be the feral descendants of ancient domesticated pigeons. But we still view modern pigeons as just a thing that exists out in the world.

If street dogs have been a self-sustaining population for long enough does that change their classification? What if the population of street dogs is older than many of the cities they inhabit? What if the population is thousands, ten thousand years old?

samus2y ago

IMHO, the crucial point is whether they are populations that were wild all along (never domesticated) or whether they wholly originate from domestic dogs. But that's hard to say since domesticated dogs might have taken over the first group. Similar to how modern humans are hypothesized to have supplanted Neanderthals and other pockets of ancient human populations.

umanwizard2y ago

I’m not sure the exact answer, but one major difference between stray dogs and truly wild animals is that dogs typically can’t survive in the wild, they need to live near human settlements. This sets them apart from wolves (the nearest wild relatives of dogs).

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devoutsalsa2y ago

A couple months ago, I was hiking in Nepal. The two of us had lunch at a restaurant on the trail where there was a puppy. One of us pet the puppy, the other fed it.

It soon became obvious that there were many dogs following people, hoping to get food. Eventually the puppy started following someone else who had more food.

datadrivenangel2y ago

We had stray dogs follow us up to Everest base camp! In the snow and cold, they really wanted to get fed.

samus2y ago

Then they are the offspring of dogs that escaped or were abandoned long ago. Probably they also took over the population of any related species they can interbreed with.

saalweachter2y ago

That's an interesting historical and semantic question.

samus2y ago

umanwizard2y ago

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