BowsacSummer on Nostr: Domestic dogs could become feral if they have a drastic environmental shift. If ...

Domestic dogs could become feral if they have a drastic environmental shift. If you've read about the Russian fox domestication project, they selected the most social pups of each generation for breeding. They accidentally introduced pedomorphosis and neoteny— keeping juvenile traits into adulthood, aka extra cuteness— in the process because some of the genes were tied together. This has happened in under 100 years. If there had been any type of cataclysmic event that harmed humans or dogs or ravaged the environment making food more scarce, the dogs that naturally were more skittish could've survived and had their own runaway sexual selection away from humans. It only took 40-60 generations to make domestic foxes, and they'd likely morph back to an undomesticated subspecies of their original in the same amount of time or less.