And what were they when they were still in the wild?
In: Biology
Domestication is essentially the process of changing animals so their properties are more desirable to us.
For instance, domesticated sheep grow more wool. Domesticated chickens lay more eggs. Domesticated cows give more milk and grow more muscle (meat) and so on.
This happens because we intentionally or unintentionally select for qualities that we like and allow those animals to reproduce or reproduce more. An excellent stallion is used to sire many offspring while a horse with poor qualities is intentionally castrated so it doesn’t reproduce.
Many of these animals are intentionally domesticated because we intentionally try to breed them to maximise the benefits we get from them.
But animals can also domesticate themselves more or less. The earliest dogs resulted from the wolves that were the friendliest towards us. A wolf that ate our scraps and warned us of danger was useful. A wolf that ate or chickens or threatened our children was killed on sight.
The end result is wolves that became increasingly tolerant and eventually friendly towards humans.
Dogs are a great example in general really. A lot of dog breeds are the result of intentional selective breeding for size, temperament, colouring, coat etc. We choose which dogs we want to breed in order to pass their qualities on to their offspring.
But dogs also have a lot of unintentional adaptations. Dogs are much better at digesting carbohydrates than wolves for example. Wolves are almost entirely carnivorous and their diets consist mostly of meat. But dogs ate a lot of human scraps, right from the start. And humans ate a lot of carbs.
Dogs also evolved the ability to move their eyebrows, wolves can’t do that. This gives dogs much more expressive faces than wolves. Most of us know exactly how effective dogs can give you a sad face when they’re begging for food or attention. More expressive dogs got more positive attention and rewards than inexpressive dogs or wolves.
And most domesticated animals are nearly exactly what they were in the wild. Cow, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, dogs etc. all have wild relatives that are so closely related to them that they can interbreed.
The differences are so small that when domesticated animals go feral, they start to lose their domesticated traits and become more similar to their wild kin within the space of a few generations. After all, a lot of their domesticated traits are just disadvantages in the wild. And they still carry the genes for everything that made them successful as wild animals.
Feral pigs for instance become less fat, more muscular, hairier and grow bigger tusks in just a few generations of going back into the wild.
If you take a whole bunch of purebred dogs with unusual looks and leave them free to breed amongst themselves, a couple of generations later the mutts all start to look more wolf like. They start to lose all of the ridiculous features that humans bred into them.
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