Going Raw ???

[haleigh]

THANK YOU DONNA! What people really don't get, is how even a chihuahua is still .02% genetically the same as a wolf.

 

Here's a good example (and african american people please DO NOT get offended, the first thing I thougbht of...and most of it I'm sure may be not true)

 

You are white. You live in a house, complete with a computer, TV, telephone, a few dogs, refrigerators and the works. You have dozens of shirts and pants, and you go to work everyday. On the weekend, you like to settle down and relax with your BCs, and maybe take them to a USBCHA trial, or maybe a USDAA match. See, it's nothing TOO sophisticate. No biggie. This is what happends everyweek, year after year. Until WAIT! You lose your job. You can't get anymore food, assuming your spouse is a lazy butt or stays home working the dogs all day. What do you do now? You can't get rehired, and nobody else wil take you in. Heaven forbid! You can't feed your family, afford food, pay of rent or some other things.

 

Now take the people in that small African village. They live in mud huts (I can't base this on fact, and if it's a not true, apologies, but it's still a great example) complete with thatched beds, no electronics, their few dogs, no fridge. They use little loin clothes, or nothing at all. They go hunting everyday. When done hunting, they skin and gut the animals, and give the dogs the unusable portions. When not hunting, they have tribal meets (I dunno...powows?) and have a good time with the family. They go hunting with the dogs again and give them some food. This is their daily routine. They think nothing about it. They can't lose their job, because they don't have one. They only time the are in food shortage is when the animals are running scarce.

 

These are two different tribes. Two COMPLETELY different lifestlyes, but are we still genetically the same?

 

 

The whole dogs need grains and veggies :It's as simple as this. They CANNOT digest them. They come out the exact same way. They don't have enzymes herbivores and omnivores have to digest them.

[Anda]

What the....?! Haleigh...... I don't even know where to start, so I won't... You are comparing two different species of animals with to different human races?! OMG

[SincereArtisan]

Chimps have been known to eat meat. Panda Bears feed on the occassional carcass outside of their "strict" bamboo diet. Chickens have been known to eat meat, more specifically even their own. Rats can become carnivores, in fact one of the reasons they're used in labs is because of the flexibility of their diet...

 

I don't see how its possible to put such strict labels on what an animal can and cannot eat/digest....especially when individual animals have individual needs. There is documented proof that wolves, coyotes, and other wild canines eat vegetable/grain mater, the undigested matter found in their prey's stomach. Why? because some how, that animal probably knows its good for it. Why dog your dog eat grass? Because it feels ill, maybe to get something off its stomach, who knows??? But, don't you think that if dogs were so incapable of processing green matter, the urge to injest it would have died off somewhere down the evolutionary line???

 

I don't think comparing human races is going to solve anything, either.

[SoloRiver]

Just to be clear: different human "races" would be analagous to different breeds of domestic dogs.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your post but this line is decidedly untrue.

 

Domestic dog breeds are not a good analogy for human variation, at all. They are real, bounded entities in a way that human populations are not. I think that you recognize this because you put "race" into quotes, but I would underscore the fact here that human "race," as conventionally defined, has no meaning biologically and is so totally inadequate (and inaccurate) a way of characterizing human biological diversity that most anthropologists and biologists would argue that there is no such thing as "race."

 

The truth is that human variation is continuous, or what biologists refer to as "clinal" (in the United States, we tend to lose sight of this fact because of sampling error -- our population happens to be made up largely of people from the peripheries of the human range, thus artificially inflating the distinctions we think we see) and that there is no such thing as a closed human population. Domestic dog breeds, by contrast, do represent closed populations (due to the conventions of animal husbandry and the registration of breeding animals) and have also been selected for specific traits that make them quite different from each other. There is far more variation within human populations than there is between them. While there is certainly interesting local variation in human genetic diversity, it is far more striking how much less genetically differentiated local human populations are than populations of our closest living relatives (chimps, gorillas), particularly considering how much more numerous we are and how much greater our geographic range is.

 

I'm only responding to this at length because I think this is really, really important to say, not because I think AK was implying anything nefarious (the opposite is implied since "race" was in quotes) or because I want to pick a fight. In case bona fides matter here, I hold a PhD in physical anthropology and a PhD in evolutionary biology, which adds up to "big geek about human evolution and biological diversity" so this is kind of an important topic to me.

 

The American Anthropological Association's statement on "race" is here:

 

http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

 

And a REALLY cool online exhibit exploring the concept of "race" from both biological and social perspectives (highly recommended):

 

http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html

[AK dog doc]

No, I agree completely - there IS no such thing as "race", and you're exactly right, that's why I put the term in quotes (and I think I might have said "used to" as well to try to further emphasise the distance from the truth that the term "race" represents). Actually, I wasn't trying to use dog breeds as an analogy for human variation. I was trying to use human variation as an analogy for dog breeds (although a fictitious analogy, since there is no existing entity of "race" amongst humans, unless one is referring to the term "human race", which would of course include us all. Which makes it sort of a silly term, no matter how often you hear it.) The whole wolf/dog thing seems to be such a stumbling block that I was trying to come up with a mental picture that might make sense to someone who may not have had the opportunity to suffer though - er, benefit from, I mean - as much education as some of those here. Perhaps a faulty analogy; but trying to explain that despite a very marked genetic conservation between wolves and dogs, the two are not the same, seemed like too big a leap for some people. I was trying to shorten that gap by using something that at least some people might have some experience with - for instance, the idea that, say, the sickle cell genes are generally found in peoples who evolved in malaria-ridden areas, or that the genes conferring resistance to the plague are commonest amongst those who descend from northern Europeans, where the plague did some of its best work in terms of selecting for plague resitance. Or that Native Americans, for instance, are more susceptible to smallpox than Europeans, or those of African descent more reistant to Dengue fever. Etc. In my expereince, even people who have not done a lot of genetics in college are at least to some degree acquainted with some of those examples, since they show up in other disciplines (such as history). They're certainly not enough to differentiate one group as a different race from another, but my intent there was to point out that within a species you may have marked variations, as within the species of domestic dogs there are marked variations (including what we refer to as breeds). That does NOT make them different species. They're the SAME species, even though there are distinct differences consequent to their differeing genetic heritages. But dogs and wolves are not the same species, despite their similarities.

 

To use a different approach... the analogy Haleigh used is faulty, because if you were to take an infant from white middle america and give it to an aborigainl tribe in Africa to rear and vice versa, those children would be able to do whatever they were taught by their culture to do. The differences in lifestyle are cultural and learned and have no genetic basis. We don't inherit our lifestyle or our culture through our genes, any more than we inherit language through our genes. If we did, all caucasians would speak one language, and all aborginals another, etc. The analogy is about learned behavior, not genetics, so I'm confused about how it even ended up as an example in a discussion about genetics. It makes no sense to me as an example here. But let's say, using the analogy of taking an infant from each tribe and swapping them at birth, that you took a wolf cub and gave it to a dog to rear and took a puppy and gave it to a wolf to rear. Hate to break it to you, but when the wolf reaches a certain age, it's going to become MOST obvious that THIS IS NOT A DOG, and vice versa. The dog will do poorly in the wolf pack, and will very likely die young or be driven out of the pack. The wolf will start acting like a wolf and will be destroyed at the owner's request because it IS NOT A DOG. They're just not.

 

I think SA's point about the urge to eat vegetable matter is a good one. Coyotes, for instance, are extremely adaptable as a species. There is no way they would be so successful if they persistently poisoned themselves by eating plant material; they'd have died out a long time ago, rather than persisting and even thriving today. And yet, here they are, eating all kinds-a-fun stuff like berries and grasses and seeds and cacti and whole raw mice and bunnies and snakes and so on. If it made them ill, they'd avoid it, or they'd die out. Maybe cactus makes coyote A sick, and makes coyote B feel fantastic. So fine, Coyote A does better without cactus, and coyote B can have all it wants... just like dog A may need to eat raw and dog B may need to eat kibble.

 

But dogs are still not wolves.

[Black Watch Debatable]

"Lastly, dogs have recently been reclassified as Canis lupus familiaris by the Smithsonian Institute"

 

Someone really needs to let Dr. L. David Mech know about this --- the Scientific Classification of Wolves page of the International Wolf Center needs to be updated, stat.

 

Unfortunately, there is no Royal Academy of Taxonomists to serve as final arbiter. Mech and his colleagues are good enough for me, though.

 

On the diet of deer-eating wolves in Minnesota:

 

Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) are consumed by wolves year-round, and although the number of individuals consumed may be second only to deer, the biomass contributed to the diet is rather insignificant (< 1%) (Fritts and Mech 1981, Fuller 1989). Beaver (Castor canadensis) have been found in the diet of wolves in spring and summer (Byman, unpublished thesis, Frenzel 1974, Fritts and Mech 1981, Fuller 1989); data indicate that its importance may be greater in northeastern than northwestern Minnesota. An increased consumption of beaver accompanied a decline in white-tailed deer populations in southern Ontario (Voigt et al. 1976, Theberge et al. 1978). Other mammals documented in the diet of wolves include bog lemming (Synaptomys sp.), fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), jumping mouse (Zapus hudsonius), meadow vole (Microtus pennsylvanicus), white-footed mouse (Peromyscus sp.), and woodchuck (Marmota monax) (Young and Goldman 1944, Fritts and Mech 1981). Additional miscellaneous foods have included black bear, striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), wolf, unidentified Canis, various bird species, duck and duck egg shells, and insects. Wolves have also consumed fruits such as blueberries (Vaccinium sp.) and strawberries (Fragaria sp.) during summer and early fall (Van Ballenberghe et al. 1975, Fritts and Mech 1981).

 

This is moot, though. There are finches in the Galápagos that are more closely related to each other than dogs are to wolves, and some of those finches eat only fruit and some eat only insects. Milkshake-drinkers and I belong to the same species, but keep those dairy products away from me:

 

Up to 80 percent of African Americans, 80 to 100 percent of American Indians, and 90 to 100 percent of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant. The condition is least common among people of northern European descent.

 

Obviously there is no diet that is ideal for every individual. In some cases we may be hurting, rather than helping our dogs with our premium this and human-grade that. A poster on Sheepdog-L commented recently:

When I first started with these dogs in 1969 alot of hill farmers and Shepherds only ran their dogs on flaked maize, ( like corn flakes ) with a drop of milk over the top of it. These dogs ran all day long on the hills 7 days a week in all extreme weathers for up to 10 years of age easily with no health problems. Maybe an odd dead lamb split open at lambing time.

This diet may have been far from today's ideal, but for hundreds of years the working sheepdogs that managed to thrive on it were the dogs that were bred. What is the relationship between conditions like Osteochondritis dissecans and modern diets that cause border collie pups to grow bigger and faster than they would have done on a bowl of oatmeal? The working border collie spent centuries adapting to a very different diet from the ones we're bestowing on him now. Our obsession with superior nutrition has been a mixed blessing, perhaps.

[haleigh]

I know we were comparing two different SPECIES, but I just wanted to point out the even within the same SPECIES we have varying brhaviors and traits, than we shouldn't put so much store on location, breed, and genetical difference on how certain species of wolves, coyotes and the domestic dog is different.

 

So sorry, I shouldn't have posted that, or at least I should've made it more CLEAR.

[AK dog doc]

than we shouldn't put so much store on location, breed, and genetical difference on how certain species of wolves, coyotes and the domestic dog is different.

 

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point here. Are you saying that the differences between wolves and coyotes and dogs are neglibible? Or that they should not be chalked up to genetics? Or...? I'm confused.