You can change animal behavior massively in far less than one generation as Elsa the lioness demonstrated. And as such a domesticated dog that is born in the wild will be massively different temperament wise than it's domestic cousins. Most of todays dog breeds are under 100 years old, and there are simpletons creating hairless breeds every day by crossing a hairless variety with a hairy one, so one day we may well have hairless collies and hairless Irish Setters. perhaps even hairless Huskies............. Is this a good thing? http://www.gopetsamerica.com/dog_bre...irless-dog.jpg That said a hairless wolf would not survive the winter as without dumb humans giving C-sections to bulldogs they go extinct in one generation.

Dogs are wolves who don't act like wolves or look like wolves. Ok then...

Dogs are NOT wolves. They share a common ancestor and many traits, but there have been so many studies that show how different the domestic dog is from the wolf that it's almost ridiculous to even pretend they are the same animal.

Here's something to think about. Dogs and wolves share about 98.8% of their DNA. Some people seem to think that means they're basically the same. Do you know what other species share 98.8% of their DNA? Humans and chimps.

Precisely. This is why it is ridiculous to keep harping back to the wolf when talking about dog behaviour.

No it isn't ... that is like saying it is ridiculous to keep harping back to hunter gatherers or (going further back) to neanderthals when talking about human behaviour. I don't know about you Chris, but I am very much a hunter gatherer in nature both mentally and physically and have many neanderthal traits - we all have, whether we are aware of it or not, or whether we like it or not. Scratch the surface, as they say, and the cave man lies therein.

Our pet dogs are very different from their wolf ancestors, but scratch the surface and therein lies the wolf ...

So, scratch the surface and therein lies the Ape?

I don't know, I'm not an expert on evolution, but if you want to go back hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, then I guess yes - I would think that we still have some "ape" genes, in fact I know we do. We share something like 98% DNA with chimps? That 2% difference is absolutely ginormous of course - there will be people on here far better qualified and far more expert than myself to comment. But an interesting comment nonetheless Chris!

I think the point is that while it may be interesting to study apes, we wouldn't study them to understand human behaviour. We'd study humans.

Similarly, we really should be studying dogs to understand dog behaviour not wolves - interesting though wolves are

Actually if you do not know where you came from, then you do not know who you are. If a war orphans thousands or millions of dogs, those that survive and breed, will be behaving just like what they are, wolves. When a female wolf in heat meets one of these orphaned dogs, what will the puppies be. They will be on the road back to where they came from. The reason that dogs and wolves can breed in the first place, is because they are exactly the same species. A dog and a fox can breed, but the pups will be a sterile dead end, because they are not the same species.

We know we came from apes. It's interesting to know that we came from apes, but we don't study their behaviour to understand ours.

Similarly, we know dogs came from wolves. It's interesting to know that dogs evolved from wolves, but we shouldn't be studying too closely wolf behaviour if we want to understand why dogs behave the way they do.

Your war analogy is interesting if a little 'out there'

Nothing out there about the analogy at all, and there is no evidence that humans came from apes. There is evidence that humans and apes are related true. If humans came from apes as dogs came from wolves, then humans and apes would be able to breed, they can't.

Richard Dawkins demonstrates how stupid he is. If a designer God designed a machine that can change from a fish to a giraffe and then into a butterfly, this is the greatest design of all time in the known universe. But Dawkins can't see that, nor can he see that when we take life forms to Mars, that we are actually bringing life to a Barron planet, so God is proven, and as the bible says, we are made in his image and have his power. Can wolves change into cats, or apes?