Bible Humper

Wow, two thumbs up on lpetrich's article there, very interesting stuff. I see a very good piece of fiction just asking to be written in the fact that dogs were domesticated twice. It seems strange that for all the uses we have for dogs, especially in more primitive settings, that their use fell out of practice for a time.

I was envisioning a barbarian society who made full use of them being thought devils or some such thing by their neighbors, because the only way to control a carnivorous wild animal has to be becoming a vassal of a very foul deity indeed.

I can see the protagonist suffering greatly for his canine friend, for every dog lover among the tribes, there are a thousand kooks who want to inflict some ritualistic nastiness upon them for their invisible sky-juju.

The theory that dogs are wolves who domesticated themselves probably refutes all claims of plausibility for my idea, but I'm in an imaginative frame of mind right now so bite me.

lpetrich

The theory is that they got started by living off of our leftovers, like those parts of slaughtered animals that we decide not to eat. Those most successful in this would be those that are both unafraid of us and unthreatening to us. Which would start them on the road to domestication.