Societies of Wolves and Free-ranging Dogs 1st Edition

Excellent book.

This book was… well it was useful. But it has big flaws in my eyes and should never be read by a beginner. First you very often need to read the notes since often he dismisses one thing (like the concept of territoriality for dogs) because in his eyes there is no evidence (basically because he knows of no case where they aggressively defend their territory [well I do])) but in other cases he downright accepts it simply because someone stated it and although in the notes he says himself that there is no evidence (like in the statement that free-ranging dogs basically reproduce via recruitment from owned dogs albeit saying in the notes that Boitani provided no evidence for that.Also due to the notes I could check some sources where the statement seemed weird and so I could check what the given sources actually stated.Sometimes I wondered how much he researched since I personally know research material saying something different and what his conclusions are based on since they seemed to be the opposite of what the stated sources said.To give examples:He states that all canids can admix and cites Villa et al 1999a "Origin, genetic diversity, and genome structure of the domestic dog" and its references as a source. It is true that the source stated "all species of the genus Canis are known to hybridize" and stated as a source "Mammalian hybrids, a check-list with bibliography" by Gray in 1954. Well, my local library had that book and so I checked. And turns out that the author only listed the following cases of interbreeding within the genus Canis (I am using his words, personally I do not agree with his nomenclature):Canis aureus X Canis familiarisCanis familiars X Canis familiaris dingoCanis familiaris X Canis latransCanis familiaris X Canis lupusCanis familiaris X Canis lupus nubilusCanis familiaris X Canis lupus occidentalisCanis familiaris X Canis mexicanusCanis familiaris dingo X Canis lupusCanis latrans X Canis lupusCanis lupus X Canis lupus occidentalisCanis lupus X Canid lupus pallipesCanis lupus occidentalis X Canis lupus lupusSo while this taxonomy is a notch outdated, even using Gray's taxonomy he only listed combinations of five species, meaning even by that time at least two were missing.Also he notes Wayne and Ostreander (1999) as a source for his statement of alternative origins for the domestic dog. But in the paper the authors did not state a theory of their own but merely stated that Darwin and Lorenz suggested the jackal to be an additional ancestor of domestic dogs, they actually stated clearly that such a viewpoint is uncommon and that most of the data supports a sole origin from gray wolves. So of his sources only Matznick actually stated a dog origin from a separate species.Sometimes I do wondered while reading this book how much thought and research he actually spent. He stated on page 23 that "genetic evidence (mtDNA) from dog lineages through time shows matings of female dogs and male wolves to be rare, the reverse pairing rarer still." But how can evidence from mtDNA even detect a mating off female dog with a male wolf? In dogs at least. MtDNA is maternally inherited among canines (which he states himself) and so every offspring of a female dog has dog specific mtDNA. He listed Pang et al. 2009 as a source and so I checked. The paper in question is called "mtDNA Data Indicate a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, Less Than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves" and I can't quite understand how he came to this conclusion because the article states: "The mtDNA data presented here strongly indicate that the domestic dog has a single origin from southern East Asia, but further genetic studies are necessary to corroborate this. Independent markers, inherited also through the male lineages, should be investigated to see whether the phylogeographical patterns, for example, the worldwide sharing of haplotypes and largest diversity in southern East Asia, are consistent across markers. They may also show if the extent of crossbreeding between female dog and male wolf has been as rare as that between male dog and female wolf (only three or four cases through time, as indicated by the region specific clades D, E, and F; see Supplementary Material online for details)." They simply don't say what he said.And when he later mentions that evidence of mixture with wolves have only been found in the "ancient breeds" (he calls them archaic) like Salukis, Chows and the like he never mentions that von Holdt (2010), the source he mentioned himself, also stated in their paper that "The limitation of evidence for admixture to only a few breeds is striking given that backcrossing between dogs and wolves is known to occur and dogs and wolves coexist widely. Given that modern breeds are the products of controlled breeding practices of the Victorian era (circa 1830–1900), the lack of detectable admixture with wolves is consistent with the strict breeding regimes recently implemented by humans." So what he states kind of paints a different picture from what the original authors of the study seemed to have stated.Another example of weird reasoning is when he cites results of another examination of mtDNA and that none of 350 wolves from 26 regions across the globe had a common domestic dog mtDNA genotype. But again the wild living offspring of dog x wolf matings would be between a female wolf and a male dog, so mtDNA would be useless. Also traces had already been found, the most recent was published in "Bucking the Trend in Wolf-Dog Hybridization - First Evidence from Europe of Hybridization between Female Dogs and Male Wolves."Also on several occasions his data seems to be very incomplete. Not only did he state that male dogs never rear offspring despite the fact that he mentioned wolf-dogs resulting from such a cross and rearing (in "A Symposium on the dingo" there was also a case mentioned of a male Labrador feeding his dingo-offspring) and later says himself that they sometimes do, but also that dogs are never monogamous, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Also several cases of free-ranging dogs do form packs so I wonder what is criticism of them being unsuitable as mates is based on. Early in the book I started to wonder whether anybody had checked that book for consistency prior to publication.

Stepehne Potte poursuit, notamment avec les moyens modernes de la génétique, le travail d'étude de l'éthologie canine magistralment entrepris par Erik Zimen dans le cadre de l'observation expérimentale, et donne un livre indispensable, qui fera date, même si il n'atteint pas le plaisir de lecture que donnait Zimen au travers des récits d'observation et de partage de vie avec les loups, les chiens et les hybrides des deux. Comme lui, il s'intéresse aux chiens non sélectionnés, aux parias, aux chiens des rues, et aussi, de façon novatrice, au dingo.