Selective dog and cat breeding is leading to wild outcomes
Cats that look like dogs? Dogs that look like cats? It’s happening, and largely because we humans are causing it!
For centuries now, people have been breeding animals to emphasize certain features. We like cute dogs, for instance, so we breed for features that accentuate or punctuate that cuteness. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many different dog breeds, all of which, at some point, descended from wild dogs, like wolves.
It’s also why some dog breeds have come so far from their ancestors, and now have distorted features. For instance, if you were to look at a bulldog and compare it to a wolf, it’d be hard to believe that the two were related. And yet, they are.
New research, too, shows that the morphologies have become so extreme over the years that there are now dog breeds that are more anatomically similar to cats than they are to their own distant ancestors. Wild!
“Three-dimensional shape analysis of domestic cat and dog skulls demonstrated convergence at multiple levels. Most broadly, cats and dogs have both diversified greatly: equaling or exceeding the morphological disparity among all modern-day species of their respective families,” reads a recent study.
“Moreover, as a result of artificial selection, some breeds of these two phenotypically distinct species, evolutionarily separated for 50 My, have converged to such an extreme extent that they are more similar to each other than they are to many members of their own species or their ancestors, a phenomenon never previously observed in domesticated species.”
To put it more succinctly, one of the researchers, senior author Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Scientific American that “Wolves and wild cats are quite distinct in skull shape, but by applying [selective breeding] pressure for babylike faces, we’ve caused short-faced dogs and cats to become very similar to each other…We’ve substantially erased 50 million years of evolution.”
Also, many of the breeds that have resulted from selective breeding over the years wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild—or, at least not for very long. Accordingly, the researchers say that studies like this one could help us better understand how specific anatomical changes in some animals lead to specific problems or abnormalities related to their health—and, hopefully, figure out some remedies.
Here’s hoping!
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