Monday, September 2, 2013

8:50 AM Well, it's Labor Day. If I were working I'd be happy for the holiday. If I had somebody to go with, I'd like to drive down to the beach. It could be Ginger would like to go. Maybe I'll call her later this morning and ask her. Right now, I am getting ready to eat and drink coffee. I have taken my weekly pill and waited the required half hour.

This business of knowing I have a little money to spend is going to my head. I have just ordered a book from Books-A-Million – The Butler. I am interested in seeing the movie because of the stars who are in it, but I am disappointed that they have fictionalized the name of the butler, and I'm afraid the story won't be accurate either. The author of the book is Wil Haygood. He got his information from an interview he did with the real butler Eugene Allen. It only cost $16.00 with shipping included, and should get here by next Thursday or so. I can't wait to read it!

I just called Ginger and she has to work today. She works for a police and fireman's group, calling people who have failed to pay the pledge they agreed upon. They call on holidays because people are more likely to be at home then, and in general have few if any days off that they don't have to make up during the week to keep their pay, in other words, no paid holidays. I feel sorry for her, but she doesn't seem to mind the lousy working situation. Her boss is tight fisted, but possesses a certain amount of personal charm, and she basically likes him. She feels good to have a job, and enjoys the telephone contact with all the people they call. She is very gregarious. Ginger is really more socially and philosophically conservative than I am, so she always obeys authority figures and doesn't complain about being mistreated. I have learned to look over it rather than feeling superior about it. She is a survivor, which is something I have learned over many years to be also, without feeling so much like I am losing face. Fighting every battle that presents itself is a good way to end up defeated, unpopular, and more unhappy. I would be making more money on social security now if I had been more docile in the workplace. Luckily I was brought up in a poor to lower middle class home, both my parents from the farm, and I know how to save money on food and lots of other things. It's okay. I'm happy to be alive and mostly healthy.

A heavy-set black man named Cedric the Entertainer has taken over from Meredith Veira as host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He is not smooth and charming, but boisterous and loud. I don't like him. I wonder if the questions on the show are going to become more popularized or too easy. I'll watch it today and see. Afterward – he wasn't too bad. He settled down when he got into the questions, and the questions were about like they have been in the past. They haven't totally changed the show. I'm glad, because I enjoy trying to answer the questions.

According to this book about the natural history of dogs, when dogs were developed from wolves, one of the changes that occurred was that the dogs tended toward tawny or “piebald,” in other words spotted. He didn't mention tri-color like some collies. He says that coat color and temperament have tended to be related in a number of domestic animals, though they are different genes. He speculated that the tendency of domesticated dogs to be tawny or piebald may have been because they were also more docile, and humans selected for those colors. He didn't mention the tricolor dogs like some collies and black and tan like some German shepherds, rottweilers and doberman pinschers. I wonder if those colors are more aggressive? They are all used by man to dominate (herd) sheep or as guard dogs.

How early did the friendship between people and dogs begin? Circa 14,000 BP a dog mandible was found in a grave in Germany. But wolf remains have been found in association with Homo Erectus sites, in the range of 400,000 BC in England and 300,000 BC in China. It is not clear whether they were pets or prey, perhaps taken for their hides or even as food, or maybe they simply had formed a habit of hanging around human camps and raiding the human garbage heaps for food. Several other dog remains were found in Israel and Iraq dating from 12,000 BC. The earliest domestication of herd animals and plants also are from the Middle East around 14,000 BC, along with the earliest monotheistic religion, permanent dwellings and civilization in general. Barley, rice and sheep have been found domesticated as early as 11,000 BP. These are archaeologists' date estimates. The geneticists have seen evidence that the change from wolves to dogs may have happened as early as 60,000 to 100,000 years ago, and they concluded from comparing DNA from modern dogs, wolves, coyotes and jackals that only the gray wolf is the origin of dogs. A geneticist named Robert Wayne studied dogs and wolves and found that more changes through time (mutations) had occurred between them than “seemed possible” in just 15,000 years, so geneticists began to place the gradual developing of dog DNA as far back as 135,000 BP, which also coincides with the appearance of Homo sapiens. The oldest known remains of a dog in North America was dated at 9,000 BP. I can see an argument for wolves “taming themselves,” if those wolves that had less physical prowess might find it easier to scavenge from man than hunt, and then perhaps interbred with themselves to become more like dogs, or simply be easier to tame.

A Russian geneticist named Dimitri K. Belyaev did a large experiment on foxes, breeding them only for tameness. He made four categories of foxes, based on how fearful of humans they were and whether or not they showed emotional attachment to their human handlers. Class IE was the most docile, even showing attachment to the humans in the early months of their life. He bred only the tamest. Each generation of pups showed a higher number of IE pups. By the 8th to the 10th generations the coat color changed, producing more pups with white patches and they also developed floppy ears and curly tails continuing into adulthood. As the generations continued, shorter tails and legs began to appear, their skulls became smaller in height and width, and their reproductive season got longer. The activity of the adrenal glands was reduced, and the amount of serotonin was increased, producing calmer and less aggressive animals. It took 45,000 foxes and 40 years of selective breeding for tameness to produce an affectionate and docile pet fox. In other words, humans in the stone age wouldn't have knows how to carry on all that selective breeding, the author said, so the development of dogs even with selective breeding took many generations. Prehistoric man didn't know about genetics, though you wouldn't have to understand genetics if you simply picked the animals with the desired characteristics to breed. Eventually you would get your result, and I imagine Prehistoric man would be patient enough to carry on the process.

The author said that if you tame a wolf, or hopefully two – a male and a female, the pups will be wild and aggressive at first in the first generation of breeding and have to be tamed in the same careful way as their parents. It would require years of selective breeding to produce tame dogs that had an attachment to humans. The key point with the foxes may be that at a certain point in the breeding the adrenal glands became less active and the serotonin increased. One thing that occurs to me is that the wolves themselves must vary from puppy to puppy in the amount of adrenalin and serotonin they produce, so that some wolf pups are gentler than others by nature. I read somewhere, I can't remember where, that a wolf puppy that is removed from the pack and brought up to be gentle, will have a shorter nose than a wild wolf even in the first generation, so there is some environmental effect at work in addition to genetics. And any dog puppy that grows up with a feral pack will be fearful of humans and aggressive like a wolf until it is tamed. I think the extra exercise and the aggressiveness of a hunt, the mostly meat diet, the play fighting and status ranking in a wolf or dog pack is probably enough to produce an aggressive animal. The dogs that are brought up to fight are treated more roughly by their owners, and punished physically. That's the way you shouldn't bring up a dog. You can make any dog a biter, or maybe just very, very timid on the other hand. I've seen dogs that cower when you stand over them.

It's 5:12, so I'll quit reading and writing and eat some supper. Over and out.