I would just like to understand why my dog seems to see me as her person and not another animal she must fight or escape from.
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Dogs evolved due to thousands of years of selective breeding.
Genetic testing shows that dogs were domesticated by humans in two separate events at roughly the same time. Around 33,000 BC in East Asia and Western Europe.
There’s no way to know for certain, but it’s very possible that it started with humans raising some orphan wolf pups.
Around 18,000 years ago Dogs began to spread to human populations around the world possibly through trade. Once the Asian dog breeds reached Europe they entirely replaced the Western breeds implying the Asians did a far better job at dog breeding and domestication than the Europeans.
Dogs continued to breed randomly with wild wolves throughout this process occasionally re-injecting wolf DNA to certain breeds.
Dogs were bred to keep personality characteristics of Wolf puppies throughout their entire lives. This makes them far more docile and playful than Wolves.
Humans figured out that the children of wolves had the characteristics of their parents in the same way that human children reflect their own parents.
Ancient peoples likely abandoned or killed puppies from liters that showed negative characteristics so that only the desirable characteristics remained and bred. This may seem harsh by our standards today, but keep in mind these weren’t modern dogs. These were wild animals and the aggressive ones could attack and severely injure or kill humans and children.
Wolves are pack animals and we used this to our advantage by manipulating the dogs behavior for our benefit. They see humans as the leaders of the pack rather than a threat.
Most dog breeds we recognize didn’t even get bred until the Victorian era. During this era urbanization reduced the need for hunting and farm dogs while dog fighting was made illegal in England. This lead to a surplus of pup and dog shows and dog breeding became very common place.
So called ‘lap dogs’ were breed that were much smaller and better suited for living in an urban home.
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