Day 3708: Dogs and Dad.

 

   

"Enemy shelling": junk mail collage, digital.

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How dogs changed the course of civilization

“Fur babies.” Dogs on planes. Dogs in purses. Dogs in restaurants. Dogs, dogs, dogs. Man’s best friend is now in every part of our daily – and nightly – lives. It’s a relationship that goes back 20,000 years.

Yes, 20,000 years. Dogs were the first thing that man ever domesticated, the first way that we adapted our environment to us – and that fact changed, well, everything.

What we know for sure is that all modern dogs are descended from the gray wolf. And that, most likely, packs of these wolves followed early humans – a nomadic people – around, hoping to dine on the scraps and refuse they produced. Eventually, as the theory goes, a few dogs got close enough to humans to grow somewhat tame. And humans realized the utility of having an animal around – for safety, hunting and the like. But as the wolf became the dog, the relationship went from a utilitarian one to a much more intimate one.

In an excavation of a 12,000-year old village in ancient Israel, for example, a woman was found buried with a puppy – a sign that even that long ago, dogs meant more to humans than just what they could do for us.

Fast forward to the late 1800s, when something else happened that changed our relationship with dogs: flea and tick shampoo was developed. Prior to that innovation, dogs were purely outside animals – they were considered too dirty to be allowed to spend any time inside. No longer.

“Once this animal sort of crosses the threshold from being outside inside, he starts to be a member of the family because now your dog is sleeping on your couch. He’s sleeping with your kids. He’s sleeping with you. You see him every morning when you get up. He is literally part of the household. This is a really fundamental transformation where you go from dog as pet or even companion to becoming a member of the family.”

And once dogs got into our houses, they changed us as much as we changed them.

“[The dog] sits right on that border: one leg in the animal world, one leg in the human world, the world of culture,” Dr. Margo DeMello, an anthrozoologist at Carroll College, said: “In some ways, the dog has lost a lot of its animal-ness and gained some humanness, but that is also transferred to us. Our lives are richer, and our lives are different because of this relationship and because of this intimacy that we have.”

Some of you have mentioned that you like Dad stories. My Dad loved cars. This was his car when he married my mom.

I think he probably had to get a family car when I came along, this is when I was one.

We made trips to and from California in this car. I remember it had pull down window shades.  

 

Dad was a former Greyhound bus driver, and eventually a studio driver and teamster for the movie studios. Cars were always a regular part of our conversation. He could tell you which cars drove well, and which were "log-y" or "drove like a tank", and so on. Dad's been gone 26 years but cars are such a reminder.

 

 

 

A 3+minute video, red panda, here.

 

Just because ...

 

 

Blue-naped Chlorophonia

 

 

Smiles for Thursday ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

                             Thanks for coming by today.