f o x @rrudealphaa - Tumblr Blog

The Dark Feels Diffferent in November - Nina MacLaughlin

marci1900

[ID: a photo of 19 birds in silhouette sitting on 4 telephone wires. Two of these birds are leaning into each other and backlit by the moon so that it looks like there’s a circle of light encapsulating them. /end ID]

feral-t33th

prissnukem

weepingwidar

Rae Klein (American, 1995) - Untitled (n.d.)

antiqueanimals

Slain Prey. Gustave Surand (1860-1937)

via

maria-aegyptiaca

blackbackedjackal

Melanistic Maned Wolf

thequantumranger

A good pupper getting make-up done on the set of Resident Evil

Ripped from Resident Evil Deluxe Edition DVD

shiki21

Hi.

restinthewest

I was recently given these photos of my grandparents’ GSD, Prince. Taken around 1949-1951.

70 years later my grandmother can sharply recall endless stories involving him, and tears up when she says how she misses him. Dogs, man!

golden-reedwolf

F1 grey wolf x poodle crosses bred by Erik Zimen as part of a study on dog domestication.

Footage from BBC Horizon, 1969

hazard-and-friends

#i am intensely curious as to what the temperament on these things was like#wolves are shy and skittish but brainy af#poodles are mad smart and sociable to the point of pushiness#there’s a lot going on inside those heads

For the F1s, it was almost entirely wolf-brains. The puppies were skittish and while they could become hand tame to one person who had seen them every day from the age of 2 weeks, they never really got used to strangers. You can see here in the 3rd and 4th gifs how they move away from the camera, tails tucked.

To a one, the F1s showed fear reactions at 3 weeks and approach-to-novelty at 4 weeks (dog puppies show fear at 3 weeks and approach-to-novelty 4 days later; wolf cubs are the same as the F1s). The author says that “as juveniles and adults, they behaved very much like wolves, reared and maintained under the same conditions, not socialized, but tolerant of human disturbance”.

But then some of these were crossed back to a poodle, and the results are interesting–and all over the map. There were 4 hand reared F2s in this paper: one high fear, highly social; one high fear, low social; one low fear, high social; and one low fear, low social. As they aged, the two that were willing to approach (irrespective of the fear) remained more social, and the two that weren’t remained uninterested in humans. F2s reared by their mother went through the approach-to-novelty period, but ended up fairly unsocialized with humans.

The author (Erik Zimen) notes that the F2s remained much more skittish than poodles and had very strong, wolflike fear responses. The paper I found is on fear and socialization in particular, but it seems like both F1s and F2s are more like wolves than poodles in those regards. (source)