The Eugenics of Domestication

It's pretty incredible how dogs come in all shapes and sizes, isn't it? I mean, when you say a horse, you've got a pretty good idea of what that looks like across the board. A dolphin looks like a dolphin. A raccoon looks like a raccoon. There's differences between them sure, but like, for the most part animals have a pretty standard appearance based on species. Not dogs though. You can have everything from a Great Dane to a Chihuahua and those are apparently the same species. Even cats, our second pick for most favorite companion animal, is pretty stock standard across the board. But not dogs. And that's cool right? 
 
 
Right? 
 
 
When we say "dogs", it almost feels more like when we say "birds". A large category of a bunch of animals that all have similar traits, but express them incredibly differently. That said, dogs aren't birds. Birds have been branching off evolutionarily for much longer. They've been evolving for about 150 million years. Dogs, on the other hand, have been getting domesticated by humans for around 30,000 years. Still a long time, but about 0.02% of the time that birds have been evolving. Now, I would argue that there are still bigger differences between different birds than there are between different dogs, but I would also say that dogs are closer to birds in that aspect than they are to cats. 
 
 
Of course, human intervention is the reason for this, as things tend to be. Wolves domesticated into dogs over time from those first encounters. We unfortunately don't know anyone that was around tens of thousands of years ago to ask about the whole domestication process, but as dogs are so important to humans, we've spent a lot of time thinking about it. The best guess is that it was a kind of symbiotic relationship that grew deeper over time. Wolves that were more willing to live closer to humans got protection from other threats, as well as could occasionally salvage more food for free. That led to them having an evolutionary advantage over other wolves. Humans benefited from this as well. Wolves could alert them to threats too, and being able to control the wolf population meant that there was less risk of them getting into conflict. Little by little, wolves and humans ended up getting closer and closer, with that relationship getting more and more beneficial along the way. 
 
 
For instance, wolves could help humans find prey, and then the humans could hunt with their tools and communication ability, and then both could share the rewards. The idea of having wolves in your "tribe" could also been seen as a level of status. To tame nature is to show your power over it after all. Speaking of, wolves could also be used to tell you if there were other threats roaming around in the dark. Bears, big cats, or even other tribes of humans whose scents were unfamiliar. All of these things proved to be a great benefit to early humans, and helped us to get to where we are today. 
 
 
And while this wasn't a totally one sided relationship, at the same time there was definitely one group in power, and the other group just happening to reap the rewards of that. It's kinda like if your brother ends up winning the lottery. Sure, you probably get some rewards out of that. A nice vacation, a new car. Maybe your house paid off. But you're also not the one with the money. The one with the control. There's a lot of evidence that humans and wolves did form strong emotional connections. I mean, there are graves where humans and wolves are buried together, showing a deep connection, as far as nearly 15,000 years ago. But, that relationship was also one based off of convenience. 
 
 
You see, wolves were good at a lot of stuff, but what if they could be even more useful? What if we could make them better at helping us hunt? What if we could make their already powerful noses even stronger? What if we could make them smarter? What if we could make them stronger? What if we could make them better? 
 
 
This is an article about eugenics. 
 
 
Eugenics is something that humanity has flirted with for a long time. The Nazis were huge fans of the process. The idea is simple. What if you took a man with 120 IQ, and then a woman with 120 IQ, and they had babies? Statistically, the chances of them having a baby that's also intelligent would be higher than if you had two parents that had 80 IQ. And you could theoretically do this with all sorts of traits. What if you took a dad that had 120 IQ, but then you took a mom that was just incredibly beautiful. Could you create a baby that's stronger and more beautiful than their parents before? And then what if you took that baby and grew them up, and then had them make babies with another person born from the combination of a smart parent and a beautiful parent. Could you make a third generation child that's better than all the ones before? 
 
 
You can expand this out far far past the simple things. What if we intentionally created children that were more resistant to disease? Or lived longer? Or who were more athletic? What about really crazy stuff? What if we constantly bred together humans who were tall, could we eventually make the whole human race 10 feet tall? Or what about running speed? Could we breed the fastest people over and over again in order to make someone just super-humanly fast? What if we could create humans that are smart enough that they could invent things that could make the world better for the human race as a whole? Who could fix our problems and make life amazing for everyone? This is the sweet temptation of eugenics. The idea that we can make humans better by selecting for the best traits and breeding out the worst. Plus a lot of Nazi stuff, because as you can imagine the Nazis loved this kind of thinking. 
 
 
But like, to be clear, we've objectively done eugenics to dogs. That's exactly what's happened over the time that we've been able to control their breeding. We have really big dogs and really small dogs. We've got dogs that are great at smelling, and dogs that are really intelligent, and dogs that are great for protecting the family. Worker dogs that will stay really motivated on a task and then status dogs who look pretty and love to lounge. Through the power of evolution, we've created dogs to do the things that we want them to do. 
 
 
This isn't limited to dogs either. We've done this to most of the animals that we exist around. We've selectively bred cows to get as bulky as possible and make the most milk. Chickens to produce the most eggs. Sheep to grow the most wool. Horses to be the most capable of bearing weight and running fast. Selective breeding has been the tool we've used to enslave nature for as long as we've been interfacing with it. However, all those other animals I used as examples each have one single purpose. Cows exist to give us food, so we made them really good at that. Horses exist to carry our weight and work our fields, so we've made them really good at that. Dogs however are expected to do a lot of things, which is why there's so many kinds of them. 
 
 
It's hard for me to put into words just how fucked up that is. Like, I think it's one of the most conceptually evil things you could ever possibly imagine. Killing someone is evil. Killing someone and their whole family is really evil. But selectively breeding a whole species until their only function is to live and die specifically for the job that you've given them is just... I don't know. When I really stop and think about it, it feels like I'm staring into an abyss. We've forever changed the animals in our lives to serve our benefit, and it's not like there's really a great way to go back. Chickens today are barely even animals. Especially ones that exist on farms. But somewhere, tens of thousands of years ago, they were a real animal that just lived and existed and we forever changed the course of that whole species. We didn't just cause them to go extinct. That would be bad enough. We've modified them. Corrupted the idea of what their species even is.
 
 
Really, in some ways, dogs are lucky. On the global scope that we're talking about at least anyway. Wolves still exist. They aren't doing great right now, but they are still out there. And for the most part, a lot of dog breeds are doing okay as well. I mean, don't get me wrong, flat muzzled dogs still face brachycephaly on a pretty much breed wide level, meaning that they have trouble breathing. Kinda like if you just squished your nose in flat against your face. And short legged dogs are basically bred for 
chondrodystrophic conditions. The same kind of dwarfism that humans face, except we've selected for it because we seem to find it cute I guess. Giant breeds on the other hand tend to frequently run into joint and heart issues. And literally all of this doesn't even mention the basic stuff like overall health issues, shorter life spans, and higher risks of cancer. 
 
 
As a general rule, the more "pure bred" a dog is, the higher chance there is that they're going to experience real and serious health issues. But it's also not that simple. Because at this point, dogs are so separate from each other that sometimes even they aren't compatible anymore, and breeding dogs that have too separate traits can lead to big health issues as well.
 
 
The thing is, this problem is toothpaste out of the tube. There's not really a way to fix it. That poodle is never going to re-become a wolf no matter how hard you try. And really, the only way to try would be to engage in more selective breeding, and try to eugenics your way out of the eugenics you've done. Which feels like its own problem. The other thing that we can do is to try and not make it any worse. Some studies show that mixed breed dogs have overall better quality of life, and also tend to live longer. So maybe we should be trying to support that.
 
 
I bring this up because as zoosexuals, we have a bit of a unique relationship to animals, as far as humans go. We want to be the best representatives of a movement that serves to empower animals and show that they're so much better than people assume they are. And yet, I rarely see people talk about this. It's just something that gets looked over. Especially when it comes to all the animals out there that are still being born, whether that be bred to become pets, or to become food. This isn't something that I ever see people think about.
 
 
It's really hard to make a call to action when looking at the scope of this problem. I like to end my articles with some kind of supportive message, but I mean, this is post-event reporting here. The car crash has already happened, and I just feel like it doesn't get talked about enough. Definitely avoid falling into the hype around pure breds, and if you have a partner and you want to make some puppies, maybe try to avoid doing so with another dog of the same breed. But also, everything at this point is a drop in the bucket. 
 
 
I get really sad when I look at some dogs. When I think about the ways that we as humans have influenced their ancestors generations on generations to get to where they are today, I just feel so much second hand guilt. I hope that in the future we can slowly let loose the clamp that we've placed around the species we control. But until then, please just remember to be kind to animals. We've done so much to them, and yet still we ask more. Treat animals well, go vegetarian or vegan if you can, and think from time to time about how we got here. It's too late to fix things now, but at least we can learn from the past. 
 
 
And the crazy part about all of this is, this is all looking at it from the human perspective. What about the dogs themselves? They have no way of conceptualizing all of this. Hell, even for me it gets to be a lot. They have no feelings on the fact that without us, they could have been a totally different animal with a totally different body. They don't get mad that we've changed their species forever to fit our whims. They just exist. And, when we're lucky, they even love us. When I look at my partner, I know he loves me. And I love him too. But it hurts sometimes to think about how maybe that love is just another trait that we've bred for. I like to think that if we met 20,000ish years ago maybe we could have been the human and the wolf that first started interacting together. I could have helped him, he could have helped me, and it would have been amazing. 
 
 
But that's not where we are. We're sitting in my house as I write this, in a town built by and for humans, where I'm his owner and he's my pet. And he's the result of a thousand generations of dogs before him made to fit this exact purpose. And while I know if I asked him, he'd forgive me, it doesn't stop me from wanting to spend the rest of my life apologizing. 
 
 
I'm gonna go hug my partner. Thanks for reading. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (January 2026) 
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