dog breed closest to wolf

i love dogs as much as the next guy. i talkto dogs. in preparing this book i spoke with dogs at length. maybe i spoke more to dogsthan with them. but they’re all dogs, that’s the thing. i know we all love our kennel clubshow we all go there. we obsess about whether our dog is a pug, jack russell terrier mixwith corgi overtones and an oaky finish. an approachable little dog, whatever. they’reall dogs, okay. and so the idea of a purebred is just a human construct. there’s no suchthing – in a sense there’s no such thing as a purebred dog. and that’s – i don’thave a problem with that. that’s the way it is. by the way you talk to any veterinarianand they’ll tell you that a mutt is a much healthier dog generally because they havethis mix of genes, they’re not inbred, they

haven’t made the same gene repeat too manytimes. and so it’s funny, it’s charming to me but there’s a great lesson to be learned.dogs are a descendent either from wolves or from one ancestor before wolves. but whatyou and i think of as a modern wolf may or may not be the direct – what led to a moderndog. people talk about this as i’m writing thebook. in the next five years it will probably be resolved. somebody will come up with adefinitive answer to that. but anyway, apparently these experiments were done with foxes whichare just the coolest thing where the foxes that were friendlier, that they were morecomfortable around people, they were allowed to approach, they were allowed to use humanfood. after just three generations they had

floppy scritchable ears and they were muchmore like dogs. and it just shows you that dogs are almost certainly a result of a humanwolf ancestor interaction. as we became friends with them they became friends with us andwe have a dependency that’s charming. it’s enriched both the dog lives and the humanlives. it’s really quite an insight and it’s a result of evolution. the other lessonto be learned from dogs for me is since they’re all dogs it’s just – if you have a dachshundand a great dane and they interact, can we say interact on big think? if they interactall you get is a dog. you don’t get any new thing, new species, you just get a dog.in the same way if a papua new guinean hooks up with a swedish person all you get is ahuman. there’s no new thing you’re going

to get. you just get a human. japanese womanjumping the african guy, all you get is a human. they’re all humans. so this is alesson to be learned. there really is, for humankind there’s really no such thing asrace. there’s different tribes but not different races. we’re all one species.