A Boy And Someone Else’s Dog

Hey, Nephew.

“Dog.”

Yeah. Little guy. You and him getting along?

“He’s all right. I’ve been trying to talk the Guy and the Lady into getting me a dog. I promised to clean up after it.”

You don’t even clean up after yourself.

“That’s the joke.”

Ah.

“Where did these things even come from?”

Dogs?

“Yeah.”

We made ’em.

“Is there a factory?”

Not like that. We took wolfs and pussified them.

“I don’t get it.”

About 20,000 years ago, a cold, hungry, probably pregnant she-wolf decided to tolerate human beings for a spot by their fire and a share of their food. Maybe her pack had died or chased her off. She had babies and they were raised by human hands. The friendliest and second-friendliest of the litter were mated. Or could be a stone age tribe and a family of wolfs had a symbiotic hunting relationship. We’ll never know exactly how it happened, but it must have been according to the wolf’s agenda at first.

“Why?”

Try keeping a full-grown wolf where it doesn’t want to be. You’d have to pen it, and these people don’t have the ability to forge metal yet, so they’d need to make the cage from wood, and that would be an enormous expenditure of time and calories and resources for no return. If you put a chicken in a coop, it makes you eggs, and if you keep a cow in a barn, you get milk, but a captive wolf provides no benefit to the tribe and will almost certainly escape and eat several or more people.

“So, dogs chose to evolve?”

Not, like, consciously. In a trans-temporal trans-species kinda way. You could write the evolutionary imperative into the story if you felt like it.

“I so rarely understand what you’re talking about.”

You’re a baby.

“I don’t think that’s it.”

Probably not.

“So how did the big bad wolf become this little dingus?”

We bred for friendliness, and it turns out what that does is lock the animal into a permanent childhood. Dogs resemble wolf pups way more than they do adults, in appearance and behavior. And other stuff started happening, seemingly unrelated stuff. Tails began to vary, and ears got floppy, and coat color went from gray to everything-you-can-think-of.

“Why?”

Genes are like the Saudi royal family: everything’s related, but beyond that is somewhat unknowable.

“Great, so we made dogs. Why?”

Well, they used to have jobs. That little dingus is a terrier, and they were bred to kill rats and similar varmints.

“This little dingus?”

Oh, yeah. Mean little cusses, terriers.

“What do they do nowadays?”

Netflix and chill.

“And that’s all they do?”

What do you do?

“Touché. Uncle?”

Yeah, buddy?

“It’s ‘wolves.’ The proper pluralization of ‘wolf’ is ‘wolves.'”

I don’t say that. I say “wolfs.”