David Ian Howe
speaker
136 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
David Ian Howe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
We are very much human in the sense that we are now. Like 50,000 years ago, you could take somebody and put them through school and they could do the SAT just fine. They could read Shakespeare, like the people that were painting all the caves in France and stuff. So we were human by then. And when we were interacting with dogs, I don't think there's been enough time to fully co-evolve.
But there are some like biological adaptations that like dogs have picked up or we've bred into them that they have definitely co-evolved with humans, to say the least. And there are certain things like dogs sleeping near you does calm you down, helps you sleep better. Just petting a dog can lower your heart rate kind of stuff. So that counts.
Some people will comment, like when I post a video of me petting my dog, that like, he's uncomfortable. You should stop or like read X, Y, and Z sign. But that's just my dog. But other times he'll like paw at me to keep doing it. So I guess that's the case. And then my beagle and my lab, especially my lab, just like, if you weren't petting her, it was like distraught. So, yeah.
I've never seen too many wolves up close or wolves 20,000 years ago, but apparently wolves don't bark. They will when they're playing and stuff like that, but they don't bark in the sense that dogs do as their form of communication. And that was certainly bred in dogs as a warning bark probably first or to indicate there's an animal when you're hunting, but also... Just as a communicate.
Because I know cats meow more around humans. So it's probably the same thing. If they don't meow so much in the wild, they just do it to get our attention.
Yeah. And it's also cool because cats are the same thing. They're in the order carnivora. They're a social predator the same way. And they just... Like, we all interact so, like, similarly in that sense.
I can say... Like anecdotally with my dog, he won't let me know when he's in pain and shepherds are notorious for being whiny. And then I know for a fact, dogs in the past have like skeletal trauma, either from being kicked or, you know, kicked out of camp or it's hard to tell if it was a fight with another dog or they got gored by a, you know, a boar or something.
Hard to tell, but yeah, dogs had a hard life for a long time, which yeah, significant bummer.
Yeah. Dogs, so when the Europeans got here to the Americas, they brought dogs with them as well, but the indigenous had dogs. But with the overwhelming amount of population of the Europeans that came here when the colonial era started, those dogs interbred with indigenous American dogs all up and down South and North America to the point where the genetic lines of pre-contact dogs are gone.
But to my best understanding, a Chihuahua is a Mesoamerican breed, but it's been bred so many times with European dogs and then back to like a Chihuahua kind of thing that it has European DNA more than indigenous DNA. It just looks like a Chihuahua. The Xolo too, the same, the hairless dog in Mexico, same kind of thing. And then there's the American Dingo, which is the Carolina Swamp Dog, has some
DNA still. And then the Greenland dog is one of the only remaining indigenous American breeds that's left.
Fetch, to me, is a social bonding mechanism between humans and dogs. It bonds you. It's like dogs love play that strengthens the bond. But fetching, I believe, is a direct quirk that comes from hunting. Whereas like a dog, like if you treat an animal, like you treat a raccoon or you treat something, dogs run up to the tree and bark and like scare it until it's stuck in that spot.
And then the hunter can get it. Or if a human shot a bird with a shotgun or a bow back in the day and it fell, like dogs love to go get that and bring it back. And I think that's all fetch is. And it's just a redirection of that because dogs are essentially around to hunt and fetch is like a good outlet for that. And they just love it. But yeah, social bonding mechanism.
She won't. My lab wouldn't either.
Yeah.
Like, no joke, I would throw the ball and it would just like bounce off her head and she would just sit there staring at me. But my shepherd, he loves fetch, like to the point where it's annoying. So I found that interesting.
i would say that's definitely hardwired because dogs are bred specifically to do certain things like a greyhound or a whippet wants to run like really bad and it has to run or it's going to go mentally kind of crazy in the house terriers are bred for ratting like they want to find little things and rat and labs are bred to swim if i remember correctly or retrieve and then Yeah.
Dogs just want to do that stuff. And like my shepherd too, like he can't turn it off. I went to a lake house with my friends for a bachelor party. And the first thing he did was just go sniff every inch of the perimeter and constantly patrol. Like he was like having a blast and I didn't tell him to do that. He just does it. Yeah.
Yeah. And this one's always a sticky answer, but I'll just be honest. I think I love pit bulls. Like they've always been sweet with me and stuff. The only dogs I've been bit by have been pit bulls, but that just happens to be because I sample size of two that have bit me. But I can't say as an anthropologist, like,
Breeding dogs for specific tasks like ratting or racing or things like that, that they are bred for these things, but socializing them to not do that is going to pull that out of them from that last question. I can try to socialize my dog as best I can not to patrol the house, but he's still going to do it. So one thing I always heard was it's not the breed, it's the breeder.
Showing 61–80 of 136 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →