Thought 1.
Back in 1986, a dude named Robert Wayne published a paper in Evolution about dogs, wolves, and foxes that I've used in a couple of my classes. One funky takeaway from this paper: you can only alter so much about the shape of a dog through selective breeding, even when you've got Chihuahuas and St. Bernards somehow cohabiting the same branch-let of the vast and branch-y species tree. One of the things you can't alter is the snout-to-skull ratio; pugs and Bulldogs don't have short noses; they have wide faces.
Another takeway? "In dogs and other domestic animals, morphologic diversity among adults seems to depend on that expressed during development." Said more simply, we've bred dogs to be more like puppies than like adult wolves or foxes. Dogs have big, dote-on-you eyes. They behave more like young wolves than like "Fang". Annnnd . . . they often have big, floppy ears. (Which are soft, so soft. Adorbs).
And yet, some people crop dog ears (shudder). I grew up with Great Danes lumbering about my home; my dad said he liked to have a dog "that you don't have to bend over to pet". Great Danes naturally have big, floppy ears, but for some reason that I do not understand (and do not want to understand) the powers that be decided that Great Danes should have pointy ears, like the Dane on the left, below.
To get the ears pointy like this, the owners first have to do what you might gently call "surgery", but which really is "mutilation". And then, to get the ears to do the BatMan thing, you have to bandage and bind the ears with a rack for a bunch of months; and let me tell you, puppies do not like having racks on their heads.
One of the Great Danes I grew up with was named Otello (after Verdi, not after Shakespeare; I grew up thinking Shakespeare had stolen his play ideas from opera instead of the other way around, but that's a different thread of conversation). Otello was a black Dane, like the ones above, and his breeders cropped his ears before my parents could convince them not to, which left us to try to deal with the bandage/rack apparatus. The sticks that hold the ears upright dug into Otello's head and created wounds which festered, and we eventually took pity on the beast and stopped using the racks early. This meant that one of his pointy ears stood mostly straight up, and the other one flopped off to one side, and he looked ridiculously lopsided for all his life.
But also, y'know, he'd had his ears chopped off. Which is just many kinds of awful. Because dog ears are wonderful.
Yes? Look at those horns!
When she chases a ball, she is so happy running that her ears flap up and down like they're wings; she's Dumbo flying through the air with her favorite tennis ball in her mouth instead of Dumbo's feather. In fact, I look at her ears to tell when she's had enough exercise: when her running slows down enough that her ears aren't beating the air anymore but instead are kind of jiggling along for the ride, we'll do another good throw or two, but then I can put the leash on her and lead her happily home.
Thought 3.
It is not just that dog ears are soft and so much fun to pet, it's also that they point in so many directions. Here is Prewash, asleep last night, imitating Ferdinand the Bull.
Where I can pet her ears to my heart's content. Because they're so soft. And floppy. ahhh.
My favorite thing about Seamus's big floppy ears is that sometimes he'll go off on his own and play and come trotting back with one or both ears flipped inside out. He looks silly and rakish and pleased as punch all at the same time.
ReplyDeleteInside-out ears make me chuckle, too.
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