[FRIAM] enough sleep?

[Steven A Smith]

I'll see your Shepherd-mix and Heeler and raise you a purebred Akita and
a Doberman mix.   Our Akita is as aloof and singularly loyal as they are
reputed to be while our Dobie is as high-energy and Skitchy as THEY can
be reputed to be.   But what seems to dominate our little family (2
adult humans, one old Akita, one middle-aged Dobie, a very old cat) is
the pairwise (and somewise 3-ary and 4-ary) relations.  Each dog
responds differently to each human and they have their own relationship,
and each dog a different relationship with the cat.  

Regarding your Heeler, I have to admit I've never really known a
(healthy) dog that didn't wake quickly and easily most of the time. But
my sampling is tiny!  Our Akita (particularly in old age, but also by
nature) is very slow to react physically but seems to be quick to come
to awareness...  he seems to need to contemplate *everything* including
known food treats, and isn't prone to rise or move unless there is
something known to be good in the deal, and despite affecting
disinterest in most everything seems to be paying (covert) attention all
of the time.

And of course, I don't know what all to think about human-canine
similarity given that we seem to have co-evolved WITH them.   Their
shorter generations suggest THEY can evolve faster than WE, but there
does seem to be evidence that WE are what/who WE are because we had
dog-companions among us, even if only as scrounging camp-followers for
many millennia?

Looking around for a popular science style article to reference, I found
this NatGeo one:

    https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130302-dog-domestic-evolution-science-wolf-wolves-human/

I am mildly disappointed that they reference only Wolves among Canines
who might have "domesticated us"...   it seems more like some of the
more omnivorous, less-apex predators like foxes or coyotes or dingos
might have been our first, or most likely companions, cleaning up our
waste and providing some level of "intruder alert" in exchange for the
good-scavenge we likely left behind, long before we let them sleep in
our tents or tend our babies, retrieve our ducks, tree our lions, or
pull our travois.

I was also disappointed at the
human-caused-extinction-of-large-carnivores-and-other-megafauna
references without backup...  I am inclined to want to believe our
current anthropogenic climate change is only the most recent (and
extravagant) of Homo Sapiens' tipping of the balance of dynamic systems
such as the earth's climate or the top end of the ecological food-chain,
but I also think there has been a lot of evidence questioning those
theories.


- Steve



On 4/9/19 4:01 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Steve writes:
>
>     "I also live with two dogs (and a cat) who nap *all the time* and while
>     they occasionally present as "groggy" when woken abruptly, they mostly
>     slide in and out of sleep according to need, efficiently and well as
>     best I can tell."
>
> I've got a big shepherd mix dog who is never really out as far as I can tell.
> Also I've got a high-energy heeler who can wake up in seconds and be across the house in seconds flat.
> The same dog does sleep at night and can actually need to be woken, like a person.
> She can be groggy and uncoordinated for five minutes or more.   It's hilarious.  
>
> Marcus
>
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