For the most part, I trust evolution. I like that if you think about some attribute, some characteristic or behavior of an animal, it makes sense. You can see how it lends to their survival. But I can’t, for the life of me, figure out the benefit of a dog’s floppy ears. What good is flop?
You get into a fight, they’re the first to get torn. They don’t stand up well to bushes. They clearly don’t add any enhancement to a dog’s hearing. I asked a vet once, does the flop keep out bacteria or something? She said no, that floppy eared dogs actually get more ear infections.
Here’s the best I’ve come up with. With regards to survival out on their own, floppy ears provide no benefit. But they are kinda cute. They lend the dog a kind of idiocy that makes me pity and endear to it. They make me want to rub the dogs head and give it a biscuit. Maybe let it stay the night. That’s survival right there. So flop is probably a mechanism to get dumb people like me to adore them.
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Truer word was never spoken.
About dogs being built to look cute? yeah, my evolutionary prediction is that they will only get squatter and bigger eyed.
Yah. Many popular breeds require C-section births now, cause their heads are too beeeeeeeg! Bummer for Mama dogz, but I still squeal with delight when I see a French Bulldog walking toward me on the street…
The front-running hypothesis on floppy ears is that is is a case of pleiotropy, the genetic connection of two or more seemingly “unrelated” traits.
Some canid breeding experiments suggest that floppy ears correlate with tameness — a dog with alleles for tameness will also get floppy ears as a “byproduct”. (One reason it’s not too “out of the blue” for this to be the case is that young wolves have floppy ears. Dogs bred for tameness are perhaps, to some extent, bred to “stay young” — to be playful adults, etc.)
So ear floppiness is not necessarily selected for in and of itself. In fact, though unlikely, it’s not completely impossible that we evolved, genetically or culturally, to find floppy ears appealing, hence increasing our fitness by increasing our “compatibility” with dogs. (That’s certainly how it seems to be with baby-cuteness — babies don’t look the way they do “because” it’s cute, rather we find the way babies “already are” to be cute.)
Darwin dealt some with pleiotropy in Origin of Species. As you might imagine, it can cause a couple headaches for biologists trying to figure out precisely which traits of an organism were selected for, and which ones, if any, just came along for the ride.
lol. using their cuteness to take control!
Well, I don’t know why no one else came up with this theory, but, for one thing, floppy ears can keep dirt and cold wind out of the inner ear. It may serve as a protective shield for dogs that reside in areas that require it, if you’re looking at it through an evolutionary scope that is..
What about cats then? Thy are all point and literally have a box of sand to contend with.
how did i find this page… anyway your post assumes that dogs evolved on their own. no, they did not. humans developed dogs out of a pre-existing creature (namely the wolf). dog "evolution" is actually a series of manipulations by humans to create animals that work as either tools or companions to us. we have a pretty huge responsibility, therefore, to do right by them. if we take in a dog, we're taking an animal that's basically been created specifically for our companionship, so we have a huge responsibility to look after them correctly, and teach them properly – at the very least.
We'll probably never know why ancient humans wanted floppy ears on their dogs, but maybe it was a side-effect. Or for cuteness. Or maybe even for keeping mud out in marshy conditions. Who knows.
I\’m not sure how you found this page but likely I, or someone, am tracking the hell out of you and could answer that.