Seems like in many natural comparison pairs, one domesticated species is way more bred than the other
Dog > Cat
Horse > Donkey
Sheep > Goat
In each case the less-bred seems species “smarter” in a wild sense. The more-bred species may learn more tricks but is dumber overall 🤔
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I feel like this is overall not actually a good heuristic to use, but this is why all those anti-civ & anarcho-primitivist people keep talking about un-domesticating humanity...
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I’m partially shy,pathetic to that idea but not in the fetishistic anprim way. More cyberpunk-wild.
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Yeah, but I mean they haven’t been selectively bred into as many varieties as horses. I think.
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I suspect that’s because we’ve bred the more domesticated species to breed truer, which means more inbreeding.
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Sheep/goat and horse/donkey is particularly interesting given their closer taxonomic relationship (split ~4-4.5 million years ago) vs cats and dogs most recent common ancestor being ~43 million years ago
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This is an exceptionally non-original (and well-understood) insight! eg wolves have brains 30% larger than equivalently sized dogs.
A more interesting line of attack is the hypothesis that domestication = neoteny, and that this is on-going in humans...
edge.org/response-detai
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Is it easier for the less-bred animals to break smart from domestication and return to the wild? First, as feral animals? Then complete atavism?
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Dogs are smarter than cats. We just devalue how smart they are because we can’t believe that they’re stupid enough to be down to do whatever we say.
Cats decline, blankly, and we say “So cool! What are they thinking?” (Answer: “...fish...”)
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