this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Curly tails and floppy ears are a generql sign of domestication. It's a shame, really. The wild animals look so majestic, while their pet counterparts look very unserious.
Piebald coloration has also been found to be a marker of domestication too, although there isn't much of a good explanation for it yet - https://susancrockford.substack.com/p/thyroid-hormone-and-spotted-coats
I saw somewhere (ok, I probably didn't imagine it) that they believed pigmentation was linked somehow to adrenaline production. But it wasn't proven at the time.
It might even be inevitable. Even humans display "domestication syndrome" in comparison with our closest primate relatives, and bonobos also seem to have changed in analogous ways when they became more sociable.
Williams syndrome is a rare condition in humans that causes them to have particular facial features, a very friendly and extroverted personality, and some intellectual disability. It occurs when a certain chunk of genes are deleted in development.
Dogs have an equivalent region in their DNA, and friendliness in dogs and wolves seems to correspond to which variant they have for one of the relevant genes. So our domestication efforts are kind of like breeding the closest thing we can manage to a disability into them.
https://www.aip.org/inside-science/rare-human-syndrome-may-explain-why-dogs-are-so-friendly
Wild people looked very majestic (+ tails), while their domesticated counterparts look very unserious and unhealthy. ☝🏽🤓
Sorry)
TIL that not pinching off my poo is majestic