Where's Pom?

The New Guineau Singing Dog is named for its unique vocalization. It has a distinct and melodious howl which starts shrill and rises to very high frequencies. Like most canine, it is a social animal. Packs of singers used to roam high altitudes in Papau New Guineau and fill its valleys with song.

Time has not been kind to the singer, an animal closely related to the Australian dingo. Its numbers have been in decline since William MacGregor introduced the species to Westerners in the 19th Century.  The last verified sighting occurred in the 1970s. Since then, a singer was photographed in the wild in 1989 but it was impossible to verify it as pure or hybrid. Currently the only known singers exist in captivity.

Because singers are almost unheard of in the wild, it came as quite a surprise when Tom Hewitt snapped a picture of  one on a hike in the mountains. Hewitt is a tour guide for Adventure Alternative Borneo. He led a group that was surprised to find a tawny, thick coated dog watching them from a hillside.

“We watched it for around 15 minutes as it continued to watch us. It seemed as curious as we were, but not particularly scared or nervous,”  Hewitt wrote on his blog. “What stood out was how healthy it looked upon closer examination with binoculars.”

[Scientific American | National Geographic | Wikipedia]

Dogs are humanity’s oldest friend. For tens of thousands of years, they’ve helped us hunt, helped guard the home and helped keep us warm at night. There’s little doubt that tens of thousands of years ago, grey wolves became domesticated dogs. The question is how?

According to one narrative, grey wolves circled neolithic camp fires in search of food. Humans selectively fed and bred the tamest among them. Over time, Canis lupus evolved into Canis lupus familiaris –– the domestic dog.

In the late 1950s, a Soviet scientist sought to test this theory. Dmitry Belyaev attempted to re-enact the selective process through which dogs evolved. He used silver foxes. Belyaev selectively bred 35 generations over 40 years based solely on their friendliness to humans.

Over time, the foxes developed traits that we associate with domestic dogs. They developed floppy ears, curly tails and spotted coats. These traits developed even though they weren’t selected by researchers. Remember, they were just breeding for friendliness.

The path to floppy-eared foxes was long and arduous. Researchers worked tirelessly over forty years to achieve a substantial population of domestic foxes. Belyaev concluded that neolithic man could not have reproduce his experiment under primitive conditions. Instead he reached another conclusion: dogs selected themselves.

The wolves that possessed the traits Belyaev selected in foxes were probably the ones most likely to approach the camp fire. Generations of selective breeding produced packs that were likely to follow humans as they traveled in search of food. As they became domesticated, human selection started to accelerate the process.

The legacies of Belyaev’s experiment are now available in the US as pets. SIBFOX is a Las Vegas distributor of Siberian domestic foxes in America. Where’s Pom? doesn’t know enough about the company to endorse the business but we did want to make our readers aware of it.

It’s generally assume that dogs mature faster than humans. As a result, some humans try to interpret dog years on a linear human scale. According to this convention, a dog ages seven years for each human one.

Pets/WebMD takes a more nuanced approach. It assigns more human years at the beginning of a dog’s life then adds diminishing amounts near the back end. By this method, a one year old puppy is a teenager and a seven year old dog is middle aged. This tells us that Pets/WebMD has never met a seven year old dog.

Others prefer to place dog years on logarithmic scales. (They’re called nerds).

My formula works this way: for each year your dog has been alive, that’s how old he is. Pommie Jones has been with us three years, that means he three. He’s not 21; he’s not 28; and he’s certainly not whatever the nerds at San Jose State think he is. A dog may mature more quickly than a human, but he spins around the earth at the exact same pace.