Episode 232: Almost Domesticated
b'Sign up for our mailing list! Buy our merch!\\n\\nThanks to "dog freak Ruby," we\'re going to learn about some animals that aren\'t exactly domesticated but aren\'t really wild either.\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nMemories of \\xc1ngela Loij\\n\\nMongolian horse and its person:\\n\\n\\n\\nMongolian horses:\\n\\n\\n\\nOH MY GOSH HEART HEART HEART (photo from this website):\\n\\n\\n\\nDingos!\\n\\n\\n\\nAn artist\'s rendition of the Fuejian dog (left) and a picture of the cuelpo (right):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe cuelpo, happy fox-like canid:\\n\\n\\n\\nA very fancy rat:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nBefore we get started, and before I forget again to tell you about this, I\\u2019m planning a bonus Q&A episode for August. If you have any questions about the podcast, podcasting in general, me, or anything else, feel free to email me at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com, or otherwise contact me through social media!\\n\\nA few episodes ago I mentioned in passing that the Australian dingo is a type of feral dog. It\\u2019s a more complicated situation than it sounds, so while I didn\\u2019t want to confuse the issue at the time, I kept thinking about it. Then I remembered that a listener emailed me a while back wanting to know more about how dogs were domesticated. We covered the topic pretty thoroughly back in episode 106, but I realized that there\\u2019s an aspect of domestication we didn\\u2019t cover in that episode. So thanks to \\u201cdog freak Ruby,\\u201d here\\u2019s an episode about a few animals that are only semi-domesticated.\\n\\nDomestication, after all, isn\\u2019t a switch you can flip. It\\u2019s a process, and depending on the animal species and the circumstances, it can take a really long time. It\\u2019s not the same thing as taming an animal, either. An individual animal might become tame with the right treatment, but that doesn\\u2019t mean any individual of that species would react the same way. Domesticated animals show genetic changes that their wild counterparts don\\u2019t, changes that make them more likely to treat humans as friends instead of potential predators.\\n\\nGenerally, a fully domesticated animal requires some level of care from a human to survive, even if it\\u2019s just feral cats living near humans so they can find and kill rodents and avoid most predators. Feral domesticated cats don\\u2019t live the same way as their wild ancestors do. But sometimes it\\u2019s not as cut and dried as it sounds. While mustangs and other feral horse populations are considered domesticated animals, they live like wild animals and don\\u2019t need humans to survive. They mostly just need humans to leave them alone so they can thrive on their own. But if you capture a mustang that\\u2019s lived its whole life in the wild, with the right treatment it will eventually become tame, because its ancestors were bred for thousands of years to trust and depend on humans.\\n\\nThat brings us to our first semi-domesticated animal, the Mongolian horse. Yes, I\\u2019m still really into Mongolia and the Hu, and I\\u2019m excited to say I have tickets to see the Hu twice in concert this fall, if everything goes well. I\\u2019ve been listening to a program called the Voice of Mongolia in English, which is primarily a shortwave radio program but it\\u2019s also released as a podcast, and it talks about various aspects of Mongolian culture. Recently they had an episode about horses, so some of my information comes directly from that show.\\n\\nMongolia is a country in central Asia that\\u2019s mostly open steppes, which is a type of grassland. The soil isn\\u2019t right for most crops, but it\\u2019s great for horses. The people of Mongolia are traditionally nomadic, moving around from place to place to find grazing for their horses and other livestock, and about half of the current population still lives this way.\\n\\nThe Mongolian horse is a small, tough breed that probably hasn\\u2019t changed much in the last thousand years, possibly longer. It\\u2019s one of the oldest breeds of horse in the world and the ancestor of many other horse breeds.'