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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How? Those are the ones we kept around and helped reproduce.
Why? Because we liked that trait in dogs. It was beneficial to us, so it became beneficial to them.
Selective breeding and a bit of natural selection though I guess it’s hard to call it that with so much human interference but basically domesticated dogs have much higher rates of survival and people have selectively bred them for millenia
Wolves were like,
“I could eat this mofo but he’s cooking something that smells too good. I’ll wait it out and see what happens.”
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Other posters have covered the early history of dogs, but it’s important to remember that dogs have like 9 puppies a year and food has been scarce for most of human history. The vast majority of dogs who ever lived starved to death. Which ones survived to bear offspring even in difficult times? The ones that were so cute and friendly and endearing that humans were willing to share their own limited food with them. Any dog that wanted to fight or escape from humans would almost certainly starve. The dogs who were friendly, loyal, and affectionate had such a massive survival advantage that those traits, carried on by their descendants, have come to define their species.
Dogs are evolved from wolves.
Wolves have that trait already.
Associating with people then resulted in that trait being selected and growing.
We gave them food, what you describe is what we call domestication, we take an animal and selectively breed the ones with those characteristics
We killed all the ones that were not affectionate, we housed and fed the ones that we felt were affectionate, loyal, and useful for thousands of years.
# The silver fox domestication experiment
[https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x)
There seems to be a [mutation](https://www.livescience.com/59866-rare-human-syndrome-may-explain-why-dogs-are-so-friendly.html) in dogs that is similar to Williams syndrome in humans. Humans with this condition have some physical signs and intellectual limitations, but they are also some of the friendliest and outgoing people on the planet.
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