Taming the Beast

"Pigeons and squirrels they have been with us for centuries and yet they don't readily eat out of our hands. You would think that the ones that did, the ones who had fewer of the genes that make them afraid of people, would get more food and have more offspring than their aloof neighbors, and those offspring would be even less afraid of humans and get even more food and so on and so on until they were all tame.." - Uncle Ken

That's kind of what happened with dogs and all other domestic species, kind of, but not exactly.  Somebody asked me once, "If humans came from apes, why are there still apes?"  The answer, of course, is that only some of the prehistoric ape species evolved into humans while others evolved into the ape species that we have today.  There are still wild dog species out there, but we call them wolves or coyotes, although there is an African wild dog species that is called a "hunting dog", not to be confused with the domestic dogs that are used to assist human hunters.  All the dog and cat species, both wild and domestic, can interbreed, so they're not that far apart, they're kind of the same only different.

Pigeons have been domesticated for centuries, but quickly go feral if they have the chance.   I don't know if you can call the pigeons and that live in the cities "wild" exactly, but they're not exactly tame either.  There are no pigeons in the swamps of Beaglesonia, but they do hang around nearby farms, so it seems that pigeons have become dependent on humans to some degree

  I've never heard of squirrels being kept as pets, yet they certainly have no problem living around humans, well, some of them that is.  The squirrels you see in Chicago are gray squirrels, you can tell because their underbellies are white.  Fox squirrels are usually found in rural woodlands.  They are larger than the grays and their underparts are usually rusty brown.  There is also a black squirrel, but it is just a color variation of the fox squirrel.  Then there's the red squirrels, which are smaller than the grays and have rusty red backs and white underparts.  The reds frequent swamps and conifer forests. Although their ranges overlap with the fox squirrels, the two breeds do not get along at all.  The reds are pretty wild, but they will move into your attic if you let them.  I don't think the three squirrel breeds interbreed, but I don't know if it's because they can't or because they just don't want to.

How 'bout them Democrats!  I think they have more presidential candidates than even the Republicans did last time, and I think that was a record.  Of course most people had never heard of most of those Republican candidates, except for Trump.  Everybody knew who Trump was, which might be why he won.  I read somewhere the other day that a lot of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary voted for Trump in the general election.  Assuming it's true, why would anybody do that?  Was this part of the "stick it to the man" syndrome?  So now who will get to stick it to the man who stuck it to the man?