Most pet dogs carry a little wolf inside them; tiny snippets of wolf DNA that slipped into dog genomes after domestication. A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that almost two-thirds of dog breeds have a small amount of wolf genes, which may have provided them with unique advantages to survive in diverse human environments.
“Our findings definitely show how low levels of gene flow between dogs and wolves have contributed to what dogs are today, regardless of where the dogs are from,” the lead author of the study, Audrey Lin, told New Atlas via email.
Previous studies have shown that modern dogs evolved through the interaction between the now extinct gray wolves and humans during the Late Pleistocene. Since this ancestral split, the genetic flow between the two is rare, even though wolves and dogs can interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Well as you can clearly see - those wolf genes are really to the fore in little Theodore 😜. The "hunter killer instinct" does come out when Theo sees pigeons or squirrels - not that he's ever gotten close to one LOL!
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