we killed all the alien dogs
Jul. 16th, 2007 03:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisalikMy favorite recently-extinct animal is the thylacine, and tonight I learned there are videos of them. (At that link.)
I'm sitting here watching them move, in digitized grainy hundred-year-old footage, and my brain kept trying to read them like I read dogs. But they're not. The signals aren't wrong, they're absent. Their ears and tails - the two most obvious posture-dialects of a dog - were devoid of meaning, from what I could see. They jutted out stiffly from the animals' bodies. In the videos, I can see doglike behavior - play bow, striking at things with forepaws, shaking meat to detach it from bones, bouncing with the forelegs, kangarooing onto the hinders, a yawn and a look away - but I don't know what it means. Not the way I would with a dog. Thylacines move differently, like people in CGI flicks where gravity appears to be slightly off. They looked at each other in a way dogs wouldn't. They weren't dogs, and they weren't wolves, and they weren't properly canine at all. But damned close. I don't know if they moved similarly because they're built similarly, or if any of that behavior had inherent meaning. I never will know, because nobody studied behavior, they just shot them dead to preserve their precious chickens.
Thylacines parallel wolves almost exactly: they hunted herbivorous prey, they were social pack animals, their bodies are structured for all the same needs of agility and speed and strength. Now I'm imagining prehistory differently, where thylacines had been domesticated. Where they'd been kept in houses, the pups separated from the mothers and raised with humans, bred and interbred, the genetic 'sports' prized for uniqueness. Would they have different shaped tails? Would the ears lop or perk? Would the coats be particolored, black, white, red, all in stripes? Would they breed up and down in size like dogs have? Would they discreetly look away from their owners, opening wide jaws to run a tongue over a nose, to signal that they were content?
If aliens had dogs, they'd be descended from thylacines. And with the uncanny-valley likeness thylacines have to wolves and dogs --- in what ways would their owners disturbingly not resemble us?
I'm sitting here watching them move, in digitized grainy hundred-year-old footage, and my brain kept trying to read them like I read dogs. But they're not. The signals aren't wrong, they're absent. Their ears and tails - the two most obvious posture-dialects of a dog - were devoid of meaning, from what I could see. They jutted out stiffly from the animals' bodies. In the videos, I can see doglike behavior - play bow, striking at things with forepaws, shaking meat to detach it from bones, bouncing with the forelegs, kangarooing onto the hinders, a yawn and a look away - but I don't know what it means. Not the way I would with a dog. Thylacines move differently, like people in CGI flicks where gravity appears to be slightly off. They looked at each other in a way dogs wouldn't. They weren't dogs, and they weren't wolves, and they weren't properly canine at all. But damned close. I don't know if they moved similarly because they're built similarly, or if any of that behavior had inherent meaning. I never will know, because nobody studied behavior, they just shot them dead to preserve their precious chickens.
Thylacines parallel wolves almost exactly: they hunted herbivorous prey, they were social pack animals, their bodies are structured for all the same needs of agility and speed and strength. Now I'm imagining prehistory differently, where thylacines had been domesticated. Where they'd been kept in houses, the pups separated from the mothers and raised with humans, bred and interbred, the genetic 'sports' prized for uniqueness. Would they have different shaped tails? Would the ears lop or perk? Would the coats be particolored, black, white, red, all in stripes? Would they breed up and down in size like dogs have? Would they discreetly look away from their owners, opening wide jaws to run a tongue over a nose, to signal that they were content?
If aliens had dogs, they'd be descended from thylacines. And with the uncanny-valley likeness thylacines have to wolves and dogs --- in what ways would their owners disturbingly not resemble us?
