Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Behavior
Foraging
Direct human feeding of household dogs has replaced foraging behavior.
Foraging efforts are discouraged by the separation of waste from dogs.
People buy special food formulations, processed from grains and domestic
animal products. These agricultural crops are produced for human consump-
tion and should not be thought of as waste or by-products.
Therefore, household dogs are ecologically competitive with humans for
food and the land to produce it. Agricultural land is the prime cause of wild-
life displacement (e.g.,
Warner et al., 1996
), and thus the added cropland
necessary to grow dog food is in competition with those species. An animal
that depends on another species to expend energy for its feed and does not
return that energy in some form is biologically defined as an obligate
parasite.
Pound for pound, dogs are metabolically about twice as expensive as
humans. Humans require 41 kcal/day/kg of lean body mass (
Schoeller et al.,
1986
), while a small dog requires 80.2 kcal/day/kg of lean body mass
(
Speakman et al., 2003
). Rough calculations compare calorie consumption of
the estimated 72,000,000 household dogs in the U.S. to that of the human
residents of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, combined.
Feed is not a limiting factor for these dogs and has no effect on energet-
ics of size and shape. The lack of behavioral limitations on size and shape
(as there is in our other dog categories) and the minimal need for behavioral
output often result in obesity and other nutritional diseases.
Reproduction
The human intention is to control all reproductive activity of household
dogs, which
Bradshaw and Nott (1995)
claim is “likely to have a major
effect on any inherited aspects of social behavior”. There are three major
ways in which household dogs are bred, each with different behavioral con-
sequences: (1) dog owners arrange matings, (2) specialized breeders maintain
and publicly display breeding stock, and (3) breeding farms purchase and/or
raise pups to be distributed to pet stores. Lack of knowledge or precaution
sometimes allows dogs to “choose” for themselves. Neutering animals
(reproductive culling) is common. However,
New et al. (2000)
found that
56% of households which responded in the affirmative to having had one or
more litters, also reported that litters were not planned. This suggests that a
large proportion of American people do not have, or do not maintain, repro-
ductive control over their household dogs.
Household dogs can become free-living. They can interbreed (hybridize)
with wild canids (
Boitani et al., 1995
) or endemic village dogs (
Brisbin
et al., 1994
), contaminating gene pools to the point of extinction of these
adapted wild types.
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