Sunday, September 06, 2009

Dog Meat?

Dogs First Tamed in China -- To Be Food?
John Roach for National Geographic News, September 4, 2009
Wolves were domesticated no more than 16,300 years ago in southern China, a new genetic analysis suggests—and it's possible the canines were tamed to be livestock, not pets, the study author speculates...

Click here for the whole article.
Interesting article, but that one bit of speculation doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Cows and goats, for example, take in things we can't eat and turn them into something we can. Dogs, on the other hand, eat meat. It's kind of inefficient to breed something specifically as a food supply when you're going to have to share your own meals with it. Sure, people did and do eat dogs, but it's quite a leap from there to say that this was the primary reason for domesticating them.

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