Kind of amazing...

I was channel surfing in the great electronic sewer that is Sunday evening and came on this PBS documentary about dogs. Now, I know all these very different appearing breeds all came from the wolves that were smart enough to ingratiate themselves to men in exchange for leftovers. This program actually went as far as stating that dogs assisted us in becoming civilized, by so enhancing our hunting skills. Gosh, in school, they taught us it was the end of the Ice Age and hence the emergence of stable climate zones for growing our own food. Well, perhaps the canine species gave us our leg up. And dogs are so attuned to our species, they will learn things that even chimps will not, just because they want so to please us. In one experiment, foxes were bred through three generations for tameness. And another amazing thing happened; they became multi-colored and got different attributes, like curly tails, too. And, since we share a lot of ailments, dogs and humans, scientists were able to map a genome in the DNA of boxers that caused a particular heart ailment, which could then be used to find that same genome in human (and much more complex) DNA Now, that's thinking. All this just proved to me once more that dogs are special creatures. Owning one makes a person much less likely to have a heart attack, for instance. And their special appeal to humans may be that they are like children, always. I mean, look at Pickle. She will never grow out of her baby face. Hopefully, some pretty awful Pickle habits will be outgrown, though. But if not, she can always turn that wide-eyed Pickle smile on, and melt my ever so protected heart.