• teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
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    14 days ago

    Ha ha, “looks like he’s going to call HR for inappropriate contact”

    For the record, there has never been a documented attack of a healthy wolf on a person in North America. Obviously if they get rabies or distemper or something all bets are off.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 days ago

      Another element that could be at play here:

      He thought it was a dog.

      Dogs, because we domesticated them, have muscles around their eyes, that allow them to make eye/eyebrow expressions.

      Wolves do not have these. Because they’re the ones we did not domesticate for millenia.

      So, if he was expecting dog expressions… wolves literally cannot make the same facial expressions.

      They essentially always look like they have RBF, in comparison to a dog.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          12 days ago

          Huh! You’re right, I did not know that.

          Huskies are… much closer to being actual wolves though, genetically speaking.

          Seems like this applies to malamutes and samoyeds as well…?

          • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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            12 days ago

            I wonder do dingoes have them. I haven’t been able to find any information on that yet

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              12 days ago

              My, ahem, blind guess would be probably not, as they’ve… not been widely and thoroughly domesticated for 20,000+ years?

              • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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                12 days ago

                Oh the genetic confirmation for dingoes to have arrived in Australia is about 8000 years ago these days. So it’s about when did the extra muscles evolve and in which genetic lines? Dingoes and the new guinea singing dog are traced to have come from the wolves domesticated in Asia, so I guess they wouldn’t have them unless they evolved independently or the genes spread before they got separated in Guinea and Australia? But then do japanese breeds also not have them since they’re from the same lines probably? I don’t know, there’s just too little information online. Or if there’s more, I can’t find it

                • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  11 days ago

                  No idea what the more precise timeline is, for when and where dogs started having eyebrow muscles.

                  Maybe if we did something comparable to the Human Genome Project, but for dogs, we could figure it out, lol?

      • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 days ago

        It’s thought the species we domesticated was distinct from wolves of today. That species went extinct in the wild.

        • Talentless Sculptor@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          Teyrnon is wrong because they claimed that there are no documented attacks of a healthy wolf attacking a person in northern America. In fact, there have been three lethal and 24 non-lethal documented attacks by healthy wolfs since 2000 in north America.

          • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 days ago

            Yes, “no xyz” is usually an overstatement. Your counterargument seems to suggest wolf attacks are common, however, which they are not.

          • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 days ago

            One of the fatalities is this

            Wyman was a wildlife biologist who worked as a caretaker in the Wolf Centre section of the Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve. She was killed by five captive wolves on the third day of her employment.

            There’s a bunch of captivity based attacks that were not fatalities.

            Most of the attacks were solitary joggers, hikers, dog walkers etc that would have been triggering a chase instinct. One of the incidents was ambush on two people:

            Noah was awake and talking to his girlfriend when a lone wolf attacked from behind, biting his head. He kicked, screamed, punched, and grabbed, and it ran off. He was taken to the hospital, requiring 17 staples to close a large head wound and to get precautionary injections. Authorities killed the wolf the next day and sent the body for rabies and DNA testing. The wolf tested negative for rabies but was diagnosed with deformities and brain damage.

            It’s not completely out of the question that a wolf was investigating a nice smell, and after getting the prize left. Definitely fits the pattern of the animals slowly acclimatizing to human activity. That wolf wasn’t dangerous then, but it would become dangerous.