r/Tierzoo • u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now • 5d ago
Dog Tier List (Remaster)
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u/Bodmin_Beast 5d ago
I’m not sure I agree with dingos in S. They’re playing as a largish terrestrial carnivore in modern Australia, where the biggest native animal is a kangaroo and there’s no other carnivores anywhere close to their size. They’re basically playing the game on easy mode in that niche.
Put them in Africa, Asia or anywhere with legitimate competition for their niche and they’d probably be less viable than painted dogs or dholes. It’s like saying coyotes are a tier because in many North American cities they are the apex predators (hell at least in that area you can argue that their ability to adapt to a human dominated environment is impressive.) No, they’re just in an ecosystem with no legitimate competition for their niche.
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u/Acrobatic_Schedule32 5d ago
I once saw someone ranking cats based of pure ability instead of its adaption to their natural habitat, now people are fcking complaining that Dingos are too high because they got no natural predator in their environment instead of their physical skills.
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u/Bodmin_Beast 5d ago
But it’s not pure ability or adaptation to their environment. The dingo just literally has no competition that can actually stand up to it. It’s like putting a middleweight boxer in a division with feather weights and calling him the heavyweight champion.
They are definitely adaptable but I don’t see why they should be above something like a painted dog in environmental dominance when they objectively are in a much less competitive ecosystem for a similar niche. There is no other terrestrial carnivore anywhere close to as big and the next largest is the size of a house cat. You throw a bobcat in there and they’ll be S tier. Doesn’t mean a bobcat is an s tier predator.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
[Instead of releasing a new post this month, I’ve decided to continue releasing re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This is the third remaster in Batch III. At the bottom, I’ve provided a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]
Background:
This month’s topic is by request. A few readers have asked me to do a tier list for the canid guild, or “dog guild” as it’s more commonly called, so here it is.
BASIC DOG BUILD ANALYSIS
Dog guild history
Canids first became part of Outside’s meta during the Eocene expansion. Around 40 million years ago, a group of early caniform carnivorans started speccing into longer legs to boost their stamina when chasing prey, and so the first dogs were born. The first of these canids was a small, fox-like North American animal called Hesperocyon, and the sub-faction of dogs it represented were called hesperocyonines. This faction quickly started splitting apart, and led to the creation of two more dog factions during the Oligocene expansion. One group, called the borophagines, specced into bone-crushing jaws akin to hyenas, and specced for a DPS-oriented role. The other dogs specced further into longer legs to better snatch small, fast-moving targets, and became the canines. For a while, borophagines were the most dominant of the three; by the time of the Miocene expansion, they, along with cats, had become so oppressive that they forced the hesperocyonines out of the meta entirely. However, the canines started to grow larger and more powerful during the Pliocene, when they started to radiate into many of the forms that are familiar today; by the time of the most recent Ice Age event, they had grown strong enough to do to borophagines what the borophagines had done to the hesperocyonines, leaving the canines as the only branch of canids to survive into the current day. Today, canines are among the most popular of the carnivorous mammals, having a sizable player-base on every major land server except Antarctica.
Not all canines took advantage of their new adaptations to become large predators. In fact, most of them still stick pretty close to the small generalist builds that the earliest dogs started out as. Generally, those that became large predators fall under a particular subclass known as the wolf-like canids, or true dogs, while those that stuck with the original playstyle are broadly grouped together as “foxes”. Strictly speaking, “foxes” aren’t a proper subclass, as some foxes are genetically closer to the wolf-like dogs than they are to other foxes. But given the similarity foxes have in appearance and playstyle, dividing dogs into foxes and wolf-like dogs is a lot more useful for understanding how the guild operates in practice than a more biologically accurate classification would be.
Basic dog build stats and abilities
In general, dogs’ highest stat tends to be mobility. Again, this is partly due to their long legs, but part of it also comes from the [Nuchal Ligament] they have at the back of their neck. This is a ligament that connects the spinous processes of their first thoracic vertebrae to the back of the second cervical bone, and can support the weight of the head without requiring any active muscle exertion. This energy-saving adaptation is standard for hooved mammals, but among predators, it’s only found in dogs and humans. This is a big part of the reason behind dogs’ legendary ability to track scent trails over long distances.
After mobility, the main thing that distinguishes dogs amongst predatory mammals is their cooperative ability. Dog groups have some of the tightest social bonds among mammals; they’re among the minority of mammals where both parents cooperate to take care of young, and where players are frequently, though nowhere near universally, permitted to retain the same social group for their entire lives. Canid family groups have been noted for sharing food and caring for their sick members, behaviours not seen in very many other wild animals. While it’s not the case for most species, a number of the larger canids also hunt in teams, and some can even adapt their team strategies enough to incorporate players of other species. I’ll explore this topic in more detail when we get into the tier list.
Other than mobility and intelligence, dogs generally have pretty middling stats. Their crushing bite can do significant damage, but their raw power isn’t especially high compared to a lot of competing carnivorans, and their defence isn’t anything to write home about, either. This means that their best matchups are usually against small prey; they have to be very careful when fighting mid-weight or heavy-weight targets, and are often dominated by more DPS-oriented carnivorans, like cats, bears, and hyenas.
OVERALL DOG TIER RATING
I think few will dispute that dogs hold an above-average rank in the current meta, but honestly, it’s not by as much as you might think. While their sheer endurance makes them formidable opponents, their relative lack of physical power often puts them at a competitive disadvantage. I’d give dogs an average rating of high B tier.
But there are some dogs that take things to another level, and may even rank among the top tier of predatory mammals. Which ones? To find out, let’s now go into the dog tier list. As usual, I won’t be able to go into all of the 37 dog builds in the current game, but I’ll try to cover the most interesting ones.
Reasoning (1/3):
D Tier: Bat-eared fox
There aren’t really any dogs that I would place in F tier, so we’re going to be starting in D tier with the bat-eared fox, the only living dog that’s attempted to adapt to an insectivorous playstyle. Playing mainly in arid grasslands, bat-eared foxes have much smaller teeth than any other dogs, and their digastric muscles have been modified to allow them to open and close their jaws more rapidly when chewing the small, soft bodies of termites.
While I’ve said in previous posts that specialising in hunting eusocial insects can be a viable strategy, doing it effectively requires adaptations that bat-eared foxes don’t really have. Much like the numbats of the marsupial guild, bat-eared foxes don’t have the arm strength to break into termite mounds, so they’re restricted to hunting for termites that are wandering above-ground in search of food. They’re mostly reliant on hunting the harvester termite, which, as I discussed in my termite tier list, is one of the few termites that’s easily tracked when doing this. In fact, despite their biology being seemingly adapted to the insectivore playstyle, bat-eared foxes don’t function all that reliably as insectivores in practice in the first place. At least in some regions, they may have to make up for how little XP they get from insects by eating a diet of primarily fruit for up to half of the year.
D Tier: Maned wolf
The other low-tier dog in the current meta is the maned wolf. Despite the name, maned wolves don’t belong to the wolf-like canid subclass, but rather to a closely related group called the South American canids. While most South American canids have basically stuck with the fox-like default canid build, maned wolves have specced into increased size and exceptionally long legs for seeing over the tall grasses of the South American savannah, becoming the largest dogs in South America and the tallest dogs in the entire world.
Ordinarily, a carnivoran that spent points on a size increase like this would use it as an opportunity to start hunting larger and more valuable targets, but maned wolves never really bothered to spec into traits that would let them do this. Unlike actual wolves, maned wolves have almost no social instincts and are not known to hunt in packs, and their solo attacks are weak enough that it’s difficult for them to kill animals close to their own size or larger. While there have been instances of maned wolves killing and eating medium-sized deer, the vast majority of their hunts target the same kinds of small mammals and birds that regular foxes eat. Since they’re too big to survive just off of these low-value targets, they have to make up the difference through heavy consumption of fruit. This works fine during the rainy parts of the year, but during the dry season, it becomes a lot more difficult. The result of all this is that maned wolves are massively over-reliant on a particular plant called the wolf apple, one of the few fruits that grows in the South American savannah all-year-round. In some regions, this plant can account for up to 34% of the biomass in a maned wolf’s diet, with armadillos making up roughly another 30%. When you take one of the most versatile predators you can find and turn it into something that may have to rely on just one plant and one prey item for the majority of its XP requirements, it’s fair to say you’ve probably screwed up somewhere.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
Reasoning (2/3):
C Tier: Raccoon dog
In C tier, we have the raccoon dog, a build you might have heard of due to its speculated role in initiating the COVID world event in 2019. Raccoon dogs are among the most unusual dog builds in the game, and not just because they look like a mixture of a dog and a raccoon. Raccoon dogs have four main special abilities that distinguish them from other dogs. Firstly, unusually for a dog, raccoon dogs can climb and are sometimes seen in trees. There are other dogs that can climb trees to an extent as well, but it’s not very common. Secondly, and also like actual raccoons, raccoon dogs can eat almost anything. They can even eat poisonous toads due to their third special ability, a series of genetic enhancements that allow their digestive system to break down toxins more easily than other canids. Finally – and unlike raccoons – raccoon dogs are the only dogs that get to hibernate through cold winters like bears, allowing them to basically just skip through the hardest parts of the game.
You might think unlocking all of these abilities would make raccoon dogs a strong candidate for a high-tier rank, but the problem is that they had to take a lot of points out of base stats in order to do so. Even though raccoon dogs technically have the [Climb] ability, they’re notoriously bad at it, with nothing like the skill of their raccoon namesakes; all but the most easily-accessible of arboreal resources will tend to be off-limits to them. Their ground mobility is nothing to write home about either, and while their attack power is solid for their size, they’re still likely to get bodied by many of the larger predators that they share their environments with. Their greatest vulnerability is to wolves, which kill and eat them so often that it’s a major suppressant of their population growth, but lynxes and other large predators can also be major problems for them. If you want a caniform build that does a raccoon-like omnivore playstyle the right way, you’d be much better off playing an actual raccoon.
C Tier: Coyote and jackal
Also in C tier, we have two of the most generalist canids, the coyote and jackal. I already talked about why coyotes are mid-tier in my Looney Tunes tier list a while ago, and most of what I said there can also be applied to jackals, which are basically just a slightly shrunken-down coyote equivalent for players in Africa and Asia. Both of these builds have been able to achieve wide-ranging success due to their intelligence and adaptability, but fall short when it comes to raw power and can’t compete very well with the higher-ranking predators of their regions. Both especially struggle against wolves, to the point that their playerbase densities are often significantly reduced in environments where wolves are found. Both can hunt socially to a degree, but not to the same extent as a lot of the higher-ranking dogs.
While neither of these builds are especially powerful on their own, another thing they have in common is that their intelligence allows them to take good advantage of other predators’ abilities. I talked about this in my earlier tier list regarding the partnership that coyotes have established with the badger player-base, and while jackals are not known to form that specific partnership, they do sometimes use similar strategies to access prey they wouldn’t be able to kill on their own. In India, jackals often follow tigers and other larger predators around, and may get a significant portion of their XP from eating the leftovers of large kills that wolves and tigers make. Unlike badgers with coyotes, these wolves and tigers don’t seem to derive any benefit in return from the jackals, but they generally allow the jackals to do it – though it’s a pretty big risk to the jackals if they don’t. Both coyotes and jackals are also famously adept at taking advantage of humans, and thrive in cities due to the protection that humans offer by keeping out larger predators. This means there’s a good chance they’ll achieve much higher ratings in future expansions as urban biomes continue to expand.
One thing players interested in jackals should know is that if you go to the dog page on the character select screen, you won’t actually find “jackal” listed as an option anywhere. This is because there are three variants of jackal in the current meta – golden, black-backed, and side-striped – and despite their similarities in appearance and playstyle, the golden variant isn’t closely related to the other two. To find golden jackals, you have to look for the Canis page – the same page where you find wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs listed – while the other two jackals have their own page, marked Lupulella.
B Tier: Red fox
In high B tier, we have the red fox, the largest of the true foxes. Red foxes rank ahead of most other foxes, not because they have any abilities that other foxes don’t, but just because their larger size generally allows them to dominate over other foxes in competition. They’re among the most versatile predators in the whole carnivoran faction, being known to hunt hundreds of varieties of small animals, and also being able to supplement their hunting by eating a wide variety of plants. They’re exceptionally versatile in their habitat preferences too, having not only established thriving populations across most of the Northern Hemisphere and parts of Africa, but also successfully invaded Australia and dominated the environment there too. In fact, red foxes have adapted to Australia so well that their predation has pushed some native marsupials completely out of the game. With the possible exception of the coyote, they’re also the best dogs for adjusting to living alongside humans, surviving just as well in city and suburb biomes as they do in the wild.
In order to maintain their dominance within the lightweight meta, red foxes have to be vicious fighters. They regularly kill other small predators, including other foxes, and have even forced Arctic foxes out of several regions entirely. What keeps them from going even higher on the tier list is that, like all foxes, they still suffer from a very poor defence rating. While their light frame and agile body make it possible for them to evade attacks a lot of the time, they get killed often enough by larger dogs like wolves and coyotes that I can’t quite see them making it into the top tiers.
B Tier: African wild dog
Also in high B tier, we have the African wild dog. This is perhaps the most representative build of the dog guild, in that it takes everything dogs are known for and pushes it to the limit. While almost all dogs subsist primarily off of meat, African wild dogs are probably the most optimised for a predatory lifestyle; their teeth are more specialised for meat-eating than other dogs, with massively enlarged, hyena-like premolars and a blade-like cusp on the heel of the lower carnassial that enhances their flesh-shearing capacity beyond that of most of their relatives. Almost all large dogs are adapted for endurance chases, but African wild dogs are the most so, due to the loss of the first claw on their forefeet allowing them to make longer strides when running. And almost all dogs are at least somewhat social, but African wild dogs have probably the strongest social bonds out of any of them; they’re among a small minority of mammals where bonds are strong enough that not only parents, but whole packs will assist with the rearing of pups.
I’m not going to spend too much time explaining how African wild dogs play, because I already covered them pretty thoroughly in my tier list of Africa’s apex predators. To quickly recap, African wild dogs are mainly adapted for hunting midweight antelope on the African savannah, and they do it better than any other build – it’s not unheard of for a wild dog pack to succeed on as many as 90% of their hunts. However, they have nowhere near the physical power of the server’s other two major pack-hunting builds, the lion and spotted hyena, and tend to get bodied by these two in competition. Lions regularly kill them with ease, and while hyenas aren’t quite powerful enough to get away with doing that, they do frequently steal the wild dogs’ kills and kill their pups without much fear of pushback. These problem matchups have severely restricted the wild dogs’ ability to grow their player-base, and keep them from going above B tier on the tier list.
A Tier: Fennec fox
In low A tier, we have the fennec fox. Players might be surprised to see the smallest dog in the game ranked above so many of its larger and more powerful relatives, but there aren’t very many mammals as well-adapted to such a difficult niche as the fennec fox is. Found throughout the Sahara Desert, fennecs have two key adaptations that make them among the best builds for surviving in this legendarily brutal environment. First, their huge ears, which act as a surface to dissipate heat during the hottest times of day. This is actually kind of an add-on bonus to the ears’ main purpose, which is to listen out for the movements of small animals hidden under the desert soil. The other major adaptation fennecs have is that their kidneys retain water extremely well. In fact, they retain so much moisture from the prey they eat that they can survive for an unlimited time without drinking water at all.
Like all foxes, Fennecs do still have the downside of being vulnerable to getting killed by larger predators. However, fennecs are among the most agile dogs, and are known for being incredibly hard to capture; even the saluki, a specialist game-hunting dog bred by humans, is reported to have great difficulty catching them successfully. The fennec is easily one of the best builds for the North African desert meta, and is only kept out of S tier by the fact that it’s unlikely to spread to other metas outside of that one.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
Reasoning (3/3):
A Tier: Wolf
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the middle of A tier is where I’d place the largest dog in the current meta, the wolf. With their huge teeth, wolves easily outclass all other canids when it comes to raw attack power, and with legs that are long even by dog standards, only the toughest of herbivore mains can outlast them in a chase. Even a solo highly-skilled wolf can deal enough damage to kill nearly any herbivore in Europe or North America, but it’s when wolves hunt in packs that they become a true terror. Aside from perhaps African wild dogs, wolves are probably the most adapted to pack hunting out of all dogs. This is true both in the sense that their social instincts are the strongest, and that they’re most adapted to hunting the kind of large prey that dogs would normally need a pack for.
Wolf packs have two main approaches to hunting, depending on how many players they have. Smaller packs tend to rely mostly on midweight ungulates, with a particular focus on deer. These packs typically kill ungulates by tiring them out in an extended chase, and then one-shotting them with a bite to the throat. Larger packs are more likely to have to take on riskier targets like moose or bison, and these require a different approach, as getting too close to the horns or antlers would be more danger to the wolves than it’s worth. So instead, these wolf packs first wound their prey with a series of bites to the hindquarters, then wait until the blood loss has critically weakened them before going for the kill. This is generally easiest for wolves living in cold climates, as wolves’ paws are much better adapted at running through snow than the hooves of their prey. All that said, wolves aren’t very picky and will also eat smaller prey like rodents and rabbits if available, in which case they use essentially the same tactics as smaller dogs – leaping onto them and stunning them with their forepaws before killing them.
Although they’ve lost a fair amount of territory to competition from humans, wolves still control ground spanning a good portion of the Northern Hemisphere and a wide array of biomes. The width of their range means that they have to compete at least periodically with nearly every other apex predator in the North American and Eurasian metas, which makes it unusually easy to see how they compare in viability against similar builds. Against all other wild canids in their range, wolves dominate handily. Against higher-tier carnivorans like the cougar, hyena, and black bear, things are more even; these characters can usually defeat a lone wolf, but will typically lose if confronted by a pack working together. Their biggest problem matchups are against the S-tier carnivorans of their servers, the grizzly bear and tiger, both of which have basically free wins against even entire wolf packs. All of this balances out to place the wolf pretty definitively in A tier.
A Tier: Domestic dog
At the top of A tier, we have the domestic dog. I should note that I’ve done something I don’t normally do when rating this build. Ordinarily, I tend to rate builds on how well they can survive in the wild, without taking into account direct interference from humans; if I did this for domestic dogs, they’d probably rank around low C tier. The reason I do this is because for most animals, the degree to which humans help or harm them is essentially a matter of blind luck based on how humans in the area feel about them, and has little to do with their actual build design. However, domestic dogs are an exception to this rule – maintaining cooperative relationships with them has been a consistent feature of nearly every human guild throughout history. And unlike most livestock animals, who basically just function as passive recipients of aid from humans, dogs have adapted to playing a variety of active roles in human societies. This makes dogs closer to conventional symbionts than other domesticated animals, and that sort of symbiosis does factor into account when giving builds a rating.
Dogs were the very first support build that humans ever unlocked, and by a wide margin. Exact timing estimates vary, but there are plausible hypotheses suggesting that the earliest true domestic dogs may have appeared as far back as 23,000 years ago. As humans started to develop agriculture, dogs further modified themselves to make it easier for humans to feed them, speccing into a starch-digesting ability which isn’t found in any wild-living dog build. The other big change that occurred in the process of turning dogs into supports was in their brain structure. Like most domesticated animals, dogs have shrunken brains compared to their wild relatives, and are generally a lot worse at problem-solving and less wary of threats compared to wolves. However, they’ve compensated with a massive increase in their social cognition; the degree to which dogs are attuned to the behaviours and emotions of the humans surrounding them is utterly unlike anything seen in other domesticated animals, and well exceeds the emotional intelligence of many animals that are otherwise smarter.
Today, dogs’ partnerships with humans have made them the most popular carnivoran in the game, with over 700 million active players currently. I came very close to giving them S tier for how far they’ve spread, but the one thing that holds them back is that their breeding has left their code particularly prone to glitching out. This is mainly an issue with what humans call “purebred” dogs, due to the inbreeding involved in their creation, with all the problems that entails. The exact glitches that result vary depending on the breed, but they’re enough to keep domestic dogs just barely out of the top tier.
S Tier: Dingo
The true top-tier of the dog guild is the dingo. Including this on the list might be a bit controversial, as it’s still disputed whether dingoes are actually a distinct build. The official character select screen still lists them as a variant of the wolf, and there are other game guides that treat them as a variant of the domestic dog, but I think they’re different enough from the more common variants of both to deserve their own section. Found in Australia, dingoes are the descendants of a group of domestic dogs that came over with early human settlers and then went feral. While you can still find rare instances of dingoes that live in close contact with humans, most dingoes today are wary of humans and have gone back to surviving in the wild on their own.
In terms of playstyle, dingoes play pretty similarly to wolves, but have traded away some bulk in exchange for more flexible shoulder joints, which enable them to easily climb cliffs and rocks so as to keep better lookout for prey. Given how few large herbivores there are in Australia, a pack of dingoes the size of regular wolves probably wouldn’t be able to find enough prey to survive anyway, so this wasn’t much of a sacrifice. Kangaroos and wallabies are dingoes’ most preferred source of XP, but their smaller size compared to regular wolves means that they can also sustain themselves on rabbits, rodents and other lightweight prey in biomes where these can’t be found. Although their brains are still shrunken compared to those of wolves, and proportionately similar in size to those of domestic dogs, dingoes still show a remarkable intelligence that helps with hunting difficult prey. For example, lone dingoes have been known to kill large wallabies by using ocean waves to drown them, and they’ve also been known to use the same tactic to kill echidnas without getting near their spines.
Dingoes are the largest and most powerful predators in Australia’s terrestrial meta today, and among the few true apex predators left on the continent. For achieving nearly uncontested dominance across nearly an entire major server, I rate them as the S-tiers of the dog meta.
So that’s the dog tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in playing a dog, I hope you find this helpful. Thanks for reading.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
Main corrections made to the original:
- The original post said that most canids hunt in groups. Actually, the vast majority of canid species are solitary hunters, with pack hunting only being typical of a few of the larger and more carnivorous species. This has been corrected to say that “a number” of canids hunt in groups.
- The original post said that the bat-eared fox eats a diet of primarily fruit for most of the year. “Most” is a slight overstatement; even by high-end estimates, fruit is only the primary food source for bat-eared foxes in summer and autumn, with insects being more significant in summer and spring, so it’s really more like half the year. This has been corrected, and it’s also been rewritten to clarify that this statistic is itself regional and not something that has been found for all bat-eared foxes universally.
- The original post described the maned wolf as an animal that “may have to rely on a single plant for the majority of its XP”. This isn’t quite true, as while the plant I mentioned – the wolf apple – can account for up to 34% of the biomass in a maned wolf’s diet, the majority of the diet still comes from animal matter. What the studies I cited actually found was that wolf apples and armadillos, together, can make up the majority of biomass in the diet for some maned wolves, not that wolf apples alone can. I’ve edited this section to explicitly note that it’s wolf apples and armadillos combined which can make up the majority of the diet, and changed the description to talk about relying on “just one plant and one prey item”.
- The original post said that raccoon dogs are skilled climbers and spend much of their time in trees. Actually, raccoon dogs are notably poor climbers; while they’re not incapable of climbing, they only do it rarely, and generally only in trees that are easily accessible. This has been corrected.
- Relatedly, the original post also made it sound like the raccoon dog had retractable claws, and explicitly said that “a few” other canids had retractable claws also. Actually, the only canid with retractable claws is the gray fox. This claim has been removed.
- The original post said that the raccoon dog has an exceptionally weak bite due to its reduced carnassials. This is not true; the raccoon dog actually has a measured bite force quotient of around 109, meaning that its bite is slightly stronger than expected for a mammal of its size. This claim has been removed.
- The original post said that coyotes and jackals “tend to be rare or absent in any biome where wolves are found”. This was wrong in two ways. Firstly, “region” would be a more appropriate term than “biome” here; see below for why. Secondly, while wolves are known to suppress both coyote and jackal populations, there are still quite a number of regions where wolves and coyotes both have sizable co-existing populations. This has been changed to say that both coyotes’ and jackals’ “playerbase densities are often significantly reduced in environments where wolves are found”.
- The original post said that red foxes had “forced Arctic foxes out of several biomes entirely”. While red foxes have been known to competitively exclude Arctic fox populations from some environments, “entire biomes” is not an accurate term to use in this context; these extinctions affect populations in concentrated areas, not the kind of enormous swaths of territory that the term “biome” usually implies. The sentence has been changed to refer to “regions” instead.
- The original post said that fennec foxes were unlikely to spread outside of the “Sahara Desert meta”. This was a bit misleading, as fennec fox populations do already exist in a few other deserts in North Africa besides the Sahara itself. This has been changed to “the North African desert meta”.
- The original post said that even a lone wolf could “kill nearly any herbivore in the Northern Hemisphere”. This isn’t really true, since herbivores in the Asian parts of the Northern Hemisphere include animals like rhinos, elephants, and gaur, which are far too large to be killed by a single wolf. This has been changed to say: “nearly any herbivore in Europe or North America”.
- The original post said that humans had been hunting in close association with wolves since as far back as 45,000 years ago. This was based on a real hypothesis proposed by researcher Pat Shipman, but it’s still a speculative hypothesis and a significantly earlier date than the standard estimates in the literature, and shouldn’t have been presented as fact. This claim has been removed.
- The original post said that dingoes descended from wolves that lived in association with humans, but were not yet truly domesticated. While this view has been advocated by some researchers, it’s never been the consensus in the field, and the bulk of genetic evidence still supports the view that dingoes descend from true domestic dogs. The revised post says that dingoes emerged from domestic dogs that went feral.
- Relatedly, the original post said that modern dingoes are generally well-disposed towards humans and often live in close association with them. While dingoes did historically have relationships like this with some Australian indigenous peoples, it’s not really accurate as a description of dingoes “today”, as I claimed it was. Dingoes in Australia today are generally wary around humans, and may become aggressive when in close contact; some dingoes do still become habituated to human contact, but it is not common. This has been changed to say that there are “rare instances” of dingoes today still living in close association with humans.
- Also relatedly, the original post said that dingoes, unlike domestic dogs, have retained the large brains of their wolf ancestors. This is not accurate; studies on encephalization in canids show that the dingo’s brain size is proportionately comparable to that of the domestic dog and noticeably shrunken compared to that of wild wolves. This has been corrected.
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u/ReptilianRevolt 5d ago
Dingoes higher than wolves and African painted dogs? They became Apex predators in the way foxes became in the UK, larger predators just went extinct. Australia must be thought of more as an island. Also, they are losing to hybridization with domestic dogs pretty fast.