Today I was home for a while waiting for the window guy to bring our replacement glass and the dogs were safely in the basement. Coco emitted her usual annoying cacophony of shrieks and yips and whines.
But then, rising above the din came a most unholy sound. A very long and almost musical, unmistakably wolven howl that brought a chill to my spine and curdled my blood. For a brief moment I thought a wild animal may have broken into our basement.
Dogs diverged from the Gray Wolf over the last 100,000 years or so and have been domesticated for about the last 15,000 years. For a long time it was thought that dogs were a separate species from the wolf, but DNA testing has confirmed what many half-wolf, half-Malamute owners suspected: they are the same species. In 1993 the dog was removed from it's longstanding species taxonomy Canis familiarus and reclassified properly as a sub-species of the Gray Wolf, Canis lupus.
It was with these thoughts in the back of my mind that I realized this ancestral throwback, this hair-raising howl was coming from Jake. Somewhere buried deep in Jake's canine brain is etched the programming to howl, untouched by the last 100,000 years of divergence and breeding.
I guess you can't take the wolf out of the dog.
2 comments:
My dog Chloe howls all the time. She's part Lab/Pitbull and we say "Chloe, you're singing my favorite song."
Dave, you made my day with the use of the word "wolven." It's a very, very good word.
Thank you.
Oh, and tell Jake to take a chill pill.
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