Instinct vs trust and the domesticated animal.

Not sure if this is gonna be about the 2A or not yet cause this is just free thought writing for the moment. If it gels into anything worth reading, you should know about halfway through.

The domesticated dog and the pack mentality.

Although this story actually took place before Helen Thomas entered her career as a journalist, some anthropologists have managed to piece together what transpired between early humans and wolves, the Great GrandFather of all dogs.

Went something like this…

Thog was a typical hunter and gatherer who lived in a community who had just found fire. I say found because I think it much more likely that early humans traveled through a forest ravaged by wildfire and found the first BBQ and started working on their sauces. Some embers we’re collected, kept fed and held in high regard. Imagine, something which allows you to see in the dark and wards off predators and provides heat………………….but you couldn’t even touch it. Must have seemed magical to the kaveman.

The skill to make fire came much later because necessity is truly the Mother of all inventions.

Thog and his friends enjoyed a cooked feast for the first time and developed a taste for burnt on the outside yet still pink on the inside. Finally, something to go with these god-damned potatoes.

Smoke rising in the distance was now a sure sign of easy food. Rally the troops and head forth. We we’re certainly hunters, no doubt. But if you don’t have to chase down your food, well that’s a “rule of Duh.” Our ancestors were not the knuckle-dragging stereotypes so often ascribed to modern day owners of boomsticks. They had our brains, our reasoning, our basic logic, just not our technology. If I had a time machine and could travel back 500,000 years with a couple of bic lighters, a cell phone camera and my recipe for BBQ sauce………………..I would be considered a GOD.

Wolves dug through our “garbage” back then just like a modern domestic is happy with licking the plates clean after a meal.

While our ancestors most likely dug out the marrow from the large bones, we tossed the bones themselves into a pile.

Rule of Duh #57.…..dogs like bones.

We were followed. We were watched from a distance. We were providing an environment for coexistence.

Here’s the tricky part.

Back then, a pack of humans and a pack of wolves were on some decent even footing. We had fire and spears. They had fangs, claws and brute numbers. We were both natural food to each other, but again………why would a wolf risk injury if they could eat for free?

Well…if we’re both eating, me the soft flesh of a slow animal, and you my garbage, and you don’t really like getting to close to the camp fire…………then we have a stand-off, day after day after day. Thog goes looking for more BBQ and the wolves watch me return and toss more bones.

At some point, our ancestors must have realized that the sense of hearing of wolves could benefit the community he was trying to feed. We ate meat, they ate bones and noone ate each other.

Wolves alerted us to others approaching. We tossed dog food and had a protective sphere of fire. Soon after that, we invented carpet for them to poop on. Oh, and I need to mention that I like guns.