I don’t know how many other folks saw it but there was a “ Nova” special on the local PBS station last night titled “ Dog Decoder”. It was a great program and very informative and educational, especially to serious dog breeders and people who enjoy the history of dogs.
There was so much more information discussed in the show but one part of the show layed out the DNA studies they have done on domestic dogs. The following excerpt just blows my mind; don’t know that I can wrap my mind around it.
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Dogs and wolves are still the same species today. They can easily interbreed. Overall, wolves and dogs are 99.8 percent genetically identical.”99.8% genetically identical? I guess that means the other .02% is what makes the differences in each and every dog today in all their physical differences, characteristics, abilities and traits. Just .02% is mind boggling to me. Just how small is the margin of error between success and failure in a dog? I guess were working on everything contained in the .02% that’s left over. What part of that .02% is drive, hunt, nose and all the other things we breed for? Man, are we dealing with .00000002%? Within that .02% is all of the things that make up the difference in a weenie dog and a bull mastiff or Walker dog and everything that goes with em?? Pretty amazing.
I reckon this next one will meet with some resistance from some naysayers. Among other things it pretty well proves where domestic dogs came from. It also seems to rule out some theories about coyotes and red wolves, at least as the show said “on the thousands upon thousands” of domestic dogs that have been tested.
"To unravel the evolutionary origins of dogs, geneticists compare D.N.A. from dogs with that of their wild relatives. Specifically, they look at mitochondrial D.N.A. sequences which pass, unchanged, down the maternal line. Since mitochondrial D.N.A. changes little over time, it can act as a kind of signature left by an animal's ancestors.”
“ Greger Larson: Those markers, in domestic dogs, show them to be much more closely related to grey wolves than they are to any other species. There's no admixture, so we never see a mitochondrial signature of, say, an African wild dog or jackal or coyote in a domestic dog. And of the thousands upon thousands of mitochondrial D.N.A. that has been extracted from domestic dogs, every single one of them just looks just like a grey wolf.”They will go on in the program to deal with the fact that the breeding selection process is the key and what made and makes the difference in all dogs. That part of the program just reinforces my personal beliefs when it comes to actually producing performance based dog.
If you think about what they say, it demonstrates just how important is it to fully prove each performance dog to absolutely know what genes, characteristics, traits and ability are present in that dog and to what extent. That should be critical to a breeder, other wise the odds go way down. Once proven only then will then know what they have available to pass down to their offspring and/or what that dogs sire and damn actually reproduced. If looks or color or a breed standard or other physical characteristics are what is most important to someone, then proving their abilities may not important to someone. This excerpt if from the show on that subject.
“ In the past few hundred years, we’ve taken dogs infantile features and emphasized them even further through selective breeding.
We’ve created hundreds of breeds to fulfill different toles, but some of them have been bred purely for their looks.”
I sure would recommend any one watch this show if they can or want to. You can go to the web and read the entire script of the show along with other shows on the subject done by Nova and National geographic.. The study done on a Russian fox farm the last 50 years and how it ties into dog breeding is outstanding.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-decoded.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/potpourri-pooches.html
