Notes on managing a canine biliary system clearance disorder (intrahepatic cholestatic liver disease).

I was doing a bit of personal research today that might be of interest to a few others, so sharing here.

Kateva, of Kateva.org fame,  is 12 years old. Since she was about 9 she’s had liver enzyme elevation on her routine vet exams. In early 2017 she had intermittent vomiting — which is not unusual among dogs. A month or two later she became jaundiced (yellow sclera) and very ill. She was found to have obstructive jaundice, likely chronic, with a very large gall bladder. Post cholecystectomy she developed pancreatitis. She had 3 paws in the grave when a combination of Emily’s diligent home nursing [6] and oral ursodiol (ursodeoxycholic acid - aka UCDA, Actigall) pulled her back. [1].

As best we can tell, without a liver biopsy (risk, $, uncertain benefit), Kateva has a disorder of hepatic bile clearance. These “intrahepatic cholestatic liver diseases” have been increasingly recognized in humans over the past few decades. The ones we’ve named include primary biliary cholangitis [2], primary sclerosing cholangitis, granulomatous liver disease, a host of rare genetic disorders and more familiar things like hepatitis. When one considers how tricky it is to produce bile and clear it through the liver into the bowels it’s likely there are many currently unrecognized varieties of bile clearance disorders.

Many of the intrahepatic bile excretion disorders respond to ursodiol. I recall use of it to dissolve gallstones in the 1980s (with laporoscopic surgery this became less valuable), it has been used in humans for primary biliary cirrhosis since 1996 [3]. Ursodiol has pretty clear short term benefit but we don’t know how much it changes longterm outcomes. Within a few years of use in humans it was tried in dogs and cats, this 2011 discussion is pretty good.

I liked this description of the mechanism of action …

Ursodiol … is a naturally occurring bile acid that is a minor fraction of the bile acid pool in humans, but a major fraction in bears and other hibernating animals.  Ursodeoxycholic acid is more water soluble (hydrophilic) than cholic or chenodeoxycholic acid and is less inherently toxic to cells.  When given orally, ursodeoxycholic acid becomes a major component of the bile acid pool, the proportion rising from <2% to as much as 65%.  By replacing the hydrophobic or more toxic bile acids with ursodiol, the toxic effects of cholestasis are ameliorated …  Ursodiol was approved for dissolution of gallstones in 1987 and as a therapy of primary biliary cirrhosis in 1996. 

Kateva had a good year but she’s slowing now. I think without the liver diseases she’d be early old age, but either the underlying liver disorder is worsening or she’s moved on to liver failure or a malignancy … or some other disorder. Old dogs, like old people, usually have a few things going on.

At her age both cost and the least-misery principle limit what we’re likely to inflict on her. Obeticholic acid (Ocaliva) is a new and fantastically expensive alternative to Ursodiol — too costly to consider given limited added benefit. Colchicine is used, but it probably doesn’t do much and it’s nasty to take. Investigational drugs are often prohibitively expensive but a veterinary formulation of budenoside (a steroid that disproportionately acts on the liver) and fenofibrate [5] might be affordable.

I wrote this post to help think about what we might do for Kat. I think we could push her ursodiol and, if we can get an affordable veterinary formulation, we might try the budenoside. Or we could spend money on things she might like better, like steak [7].

- fn -

[1] The surgery and ultrasound were costly, but the truly expensive parts were all the things that intersect with human medicine — lab tests, intravenous fluids, medications, and the like. For better or worse we had some resources, so the limit was her misery. We were close to that. The longterm ursediol trial was an informed hail mary pass by my wife and I with veterinarian support.

[2] Thought to be due to “environmental trigger(s) acting on a genetically susceptible individual”.  I’m sure everyone in this field is now wondering if PBC is a CHIP (clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential) disorder. We really don’t know what causes it. Immune system dysfunction seems a contributor but it’s suspicious how ineffective immune suppressants have been. I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a genetic disorder in bile formation though.

[3] With veterinary compounding it’s not cheap, but more affordable than most specialty human medications.

[4] Ref removed, but consulted UpToDate often in this writing.

[5] Curiously fenofibrate drug information lists primary biliary cholangitis as a contraindication!

[6] Emily is an excellent physician, but she also has a knack for nursing.

[7] In the last few years I’ve done end-of-life management for two parents (mine), three gerbils (Kangaroo, Adric, and Pipsqueak), and now a dog. All of the considerations were very similar though budgets varied. The parents were the easiest decisions. The gerbil and dog decisions were much harder.

Desensitization therapy for dogs with fear of thunder, lightning and, of course, firecrackers

This is the season for traumatized dogs. We’ve had two husky mixes, the first (Molly Thunderpaws Squirrelbane) ended up needing oral valium during storms. She wanted under our bed but couldn’t quite fit. Which was why the feet of the bed rested on four hockey pucks.

I often wondered what visitors made of the hockey pucks. It probably livened our reputation.

Kateva Rose Cupcake (young kids did naming by then) isn’t so bad, but as she ages she’s more worried. She’s also having more trouble getting under the bed. So, again, hockey pucks.

So a NYT article caught my attention …

Why Thunder and Fireworks Make Dogs Anxious

… at least 40 percent of dogs experience noise anxiety, which is most pronounced in the summer. Animal shelters report that their busiest day for taking in runaway dogs is July 5…

… the first drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for canine noise aversion (a term encompassing mild discomfort to phobia) came on the market. The drug, Sileo, inhibits norepinephrine, a brain chemical associated with anxiety and fear response…

…  a micro-amount of a medication approved as a sedative for minor veterinary procedures —- a flavorless gel, measured in a syringe, that is squeezed between the dog’s cheek and gum and absorbed within 30 minutes.

Orion, the Finnish company that developed it, tested it on several hundred noise-averse dogs during two years of New Year’s fireworks. Three-quarters of the owners rated the dogs’ response as good to excellent; their pets remained unperturbed. The drug lasts several hours, after which another dose can be administered.

A syringe costs about $30 and holds several weight-dependent doses. Sileo’s main side effect, in 4.5 percent of dogs, is vomiting…

… The optimal solution, vets say, is catching the response early, and desensitizing the dog with calibrated recordings of the offending noise, and positive conditioning…

You know, they could have mentioned the deconditioning part earlier. I found more on that from a reputable source …

Fear of Thunder and Other Loud Noises : The Humane Society of the United States

Begin by exposing your dog to an intensity level of noise that doesn't frighten her and pairing the noise with something pleasant, like a treat or a fun game. Gradually increase the volume as you continue to offer her something pleasant. Through this process, she'll come to associate "good things" with the previously feared sound.

Example:

Make a tape with firecracker noises on it.
Play the tape at such a low volume that your dog doesn't respond fearfully. While the tape is playing, feed her dinner, give her a treat, or play her favorite game.
In your next session, play the tape a little louder while you feed her or play her favorite game.
Continue increasing the volume through many sessions over a period of several weeks or months. If she displays fearful behavior at any time while the tape is playing, STOP. Begin your next session at a lower volume, one that doesn't produce anxiety, and proceed more slowly.
For some fears, it can be difficult to recreate the fear stimulus. For example, thunder is accompanied by lightning, rain, and changes in barometric pressure; your dog’s fearful response may be to the combination of these things and not just the thunder….

Sounds like the desensitization routine could be tricky, but I’ll give it a gentle try.

There are web sites that sell recordings, but a search on iTunes found several $1 recording from “Nature Sounds”. I’ll buy one, probably one with rain and thunder. It’s easy then to play it softly over the kitchen speakers while Kateva eats a treat-enhanced dinner.

The canid domestication of homo sapiens brutalis

Eight years ago, I wondered if European Distemper killed the Native American dog and added a footnote on an old personal hypothesis ...

Humans and dogs have coexisted for a long time, it is extremely likely that we have altered each other's evolution (symbiotes and parasites always alter each other's genome). ... I thought I'd blogged on my wild speculation that it was the domestication of dogs that allowed humans to develop technology and agriculture (geeks and women can domesticate dogs and use a powerful and loyal ally to defend themselves against thuggish alphas) -- but I can't find that ...

 Happily, others have been pursuing this thought ....

We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

...With this new ability, these protodogs were worth knowing. People who had dogs during a hunt would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Even today, tribes in Nicaragua depend on dogs to detect prey. Moose hunters in alpine regions bring home 56 percent more prey when they are accompanied by dogs. In the Congo, hunters believe they would starve without their dogs.

Dogs would also have served as a warning system, barking at hostile strangers from neighboring tribes. They could have defended their humans from predators.

And finally, though this is not a pleasant thought, when times were tough, dogs could have served as an emergency food supply. Thousands of years before refrigeration and with no crops to store, hunter-gatherers had no food reserves until the domestication of dogs. In tough times, dogs that were the least efficient hunters might have been sacrificed to save the group or the best hunting dogs. Once humans realized the usefulness of keeping dogs as an emergency food supply, it was not a huge jump to realize plants could be used in a similar way.

So, far from a benign human adopting a wolf puppy, it is more likely that a population of wolves adopted us. As the advantages of dog ownership became clear, we were as strongly affected by our relationship with them as they have been by their relationship with us....

The primary predators of humans, of course, are other humans. Women's need for protection against men is particularly acute. So which gender would be most interested in, and capable of, the domestication of a strong and loyal ally? What changes would a dog's presence make to a society and a species, and who would lose most when agriculture made dogs less useful?

Do whipworms make dogs eat dirt?

The canine whipworm (Trichuris vulpis) is a common dog parasite.

The juvenile form of the parasite develops in dirt; it's transmitted by eating dirt (geophagy). It may be particularly common in dog parks [1]

Some dogs eat dirt.

Many parasites change the behaviors of their hosts to facilitate their life cycle.

So do whipworm infested dogs find dirt particularly tasty?

The association between geophagy and worm infection has been studied in humans, but a PubMed query on geophagy and trichuris vulpis in dogs produced no hits (PubMed includes veterinary literature).

I'm sure someone is studying this even as I write this post. I'm hoping for an article within the year.

[1] I don't know how hard it is to study this. A visit to the local dog park might be the basis for a great high school science experiment.

American health care costs: dog, man and Rimadyl

The good news is that Kateva's creatinine is back where it should be and her stomach is holding out. The bad news is that, even if all goes well, her feast on a friend's Rimadyl will end up costing over $1,500 for a straightforward 3 day hospital stay.

Please remember this. Rimadyl, an ibuprofen-like drug sold in the US veterinary market, is beef flavored. It's dog candy, just like the yummy children's aspirin that poisoned my childhood peers. We're used to our evil canine cur stealing food, but we misclassified the drugs as ... not food. She had a different classification. (Unfortunately, she's learned to hide food wrappers, so it took us a day to figure out where the Rimadyl went.)

Poisoned medicinal candy precautions are one lesson from Kateva's folly. It's not the only lesson though.

Once upon a time $1,500 would have covered the costs of a similarly routine human hospitalization. Around that time a time a similarly troublesome dog would have received much less care for much less money.

Health care inflation in the US applies to humans, dogs and cats alike.

Which suggests a natural experiment. We know a lot about rising human health care costs in the US. Why not compare those costs to rising costs of companion animal (aka "pet") care? American dogs and men, for example, have similar health care habits and obesity rates. American dogs and men get the same medications for roughly the same costs.

On the other hand, veterinarians are paid substantially less than physicians. Veterinary care has much less regulatory overhead, and is much more efficient. There is minimal marketing, very simple billing, and a largely market based payment system.

Most of all, the care of the aged is very different. A demented incontinent dog gets a brief and painless house call. A demented incontinent human meets a far crueler and more costly fate.

It would be interesting to plot the trajectory of American veterinary and human health care cost inflation. I think the curves would look quite different, largely due to lower end of life costs. I don't know though; there may be surprises. Curiously, I don't think this study has been done.

Dog 2.0

A randomly selected purebred border collie associates sounds with objects, and perhaps sound permutations with objects and actions.

There are mid-sized dog breeds that live as long as 25 years. Given low cost whole genome sequencing, we could create a dog breed a 25 year lifespan and enhanced communication skills.

To develop greater language skills within a short time period would probably take some germline engineering. Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to do the germline engineering.

So does dog 2.0 get to vote in 2060?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: What will be unacceptable in 50 years?
• Gordon's Notes: Dogs

Nordic skiing: how to tow a kid

In a previous life I had one of the earliest english language web pages on skijoring (nordic skiing with your dog). In today's life Kateva prefers running to pulling, and sometimes my kids need a bit of a boost miles from the trailhead.

So now I'm the dog. Call it Skidadding - nordic skiing with your Dad.

I don't need a pulk, I want the kids to stay on their skis. I need a lead and I need a skijoring harness they can wear. That leaves my harness to develop.

I thought of anchoring to my shoulders, but they move too much and that places too much strain on my back. A friend's friend is co-leader of Minnesota's Wilderness Classroom, she suggested adapting a pulk harness.

Ready made pulk harnesses are hard to find in the US, but another Minnesotan, Ed Bouffard, has a web site on building your own ski pulk or mountaineering sled or gear sled. He sells parts for pulks, and provides a free PDF on pulk construction.

Mr. Bouffard advises building a harness using either a Camp Trails replacement backpack belt (alas, I don't think these are sold any more!) or a heavy duty lumbar (fanny) pack with built in shoulder straps. A canvas repair shop can sew on loops made of 3/4" nylon webbing. Carabiners can then be attached just behind the lateral hips loops.

I can then use a nylon loop from the binners to a skijoring lead attached a skijoring harness on a child.

Seems simple enough -- a fun project for the fall. I'll update this post with what I end up doing.

Update 11/8/10: Some products I probably won't buy due to cost, I think I can make something sufficient for my needs.

• Skijor Now belt for Skijoring or "Canicross": $130
• Ultrapaws Skijor hip belt: $70 (I like this one).

Canicross is cross country running with a dog ... "Fast for a human is five minute miles over a marathon distance. That is 12 miles per hour. Dogs on the other hand can run 12 miles per hour all day long. Sled dogs at the world championship often run 20 miles per hour for over twenty miles...? (Only true in cold weather by the way. Humans rule in hot weather.)

Rollerjoring is what you'd imagine.

Honestly, dogs made a smart bargain 30,000 years ago.

Dog are seriously weird animals

Dogs are really, really, weird ...

Dog brains in a spin

... No other animal has enjoyed the level of human affection and companionship like the dog, nor undergone such a systemic and deliberate intervention in its biology through breeding, the authors note. The diversity suggests a unique level of plasticity in the canine genome...

It's as though they're evolutionary speed freaks ...

Survival of the cutest' proves Darwin right

... the skull shapes of domestic dogs varied as much as those of the whole order [carnivora]. It also showed that the extremes of diversity were farther apart in domestic dogs than in the rest of the order. This means, for instance, that a Collie has a skull shape that is more different from that of a Pekingese than the skull shape of the cat is from that of a walrus.

Dr Drake explains: "We usually think of evolution as a slow and gradual process, but the incredible amount of diversity in domestic dogs has originated through selective breeding in just the last few hundred years, and particularly after the modern purebred dog breeds were established in the last 150 years."

By contrast, the order Carnivora dates back at least 60 million years. The massive diversity in the shapes of the dogs' skulls emphatically proves that selection has a powerful role to play in evolution and the level of diversity that separates species and even families can be generated within a single species, in this case in dogs.

Much of the diversity of domestic dog skulls is outside the range of variation in the Carnivora, and thus represents skull shapes that are entirely novel.

Dr Klingenberg adds: "Domestic dogs are boldly going where no self respecting carnivore ever has gone before.

"Domestic dogs don't live in the wild so they don't have to run after things and kill them - their food comes out of a tin and the toughest thing they'll ever have to chew is their owner's slippers. So they can get away with a lot of variation that would affect functions such as breathing and chewing and would therefore lead to their extinction.

"Natural selection has been relaxed and replaced with artificial selection for various shapes that breeders favour."

Domestic dogs are a model species for studying longer term natural selection. Darwin studied them, as well as pigeons and other domesticated species.

Drake and Klingenberg compared the amazing amount of diversity in dogs to the entire order Carnivora. They measured the positions of 50 recognizable points on the skulls of dogs and their 'cousins' from the rest of the orderCarnivora, and analyzed shape variation with newly developed methods.

The team divided the dog breeds into categories according to function, such as hunting, herding, guarding and companion dogs. They found the companion (or pet) dogs were more variable than all the other categories put together...

What other animal lives in a world where natural selection has been relaxed and intra-species variation may be immense?

Now to breed a dog that lives for thirty years ...

Why dog haters should love prosecution of animal cruelty

Unsurprisingly, people who abuse animals are also dangerous to humans ...

The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome - NYTimes.com:

... significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide...

... In his famous series of 1751 engravings, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater. And animal cruelty has long been recognized as a signature pathology of the most serious violent offenders. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer impaled the heads of cats and dogs on sticks; Theodore Bundy, implicated in the murders of some three dozen people, told of watching his grandfather torture animals; David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” poisoned his mother’s parakeet....

I am surprised this hasn't gotten more formal research attention attention in the past. Perhaps scholars assumed it was self-evident? Formal investigations are now confirming long held beliefs. That's good research -- not all long held beliefs are empirically supported.

Not everyone loves dogs and cats. Maybe they have something against brood parasites. Even so, these dog-dislikers have good reason to favor aggressive investigation and prosecution of animal cruelty. My dog is their canary.

Midwest Skijorers Club

Fourteen years ago I authored one of the very first skijoring pages on the WWW.

Heck, it might have been the first in English. We didn't have Google back then, so it's hard to say.

My own wee bit of history.

Which is all by way of introducing another mark of the Twin Cities' greatness - the Midwest Skijorers Club.

Yes, we have our very own local skijoring club. As if our superb bicycle trails weren't evidence enough of our unequalled greatness.

Now if only it would stop $!$!%$ raining ...

Honda knows its customers

What if we paid the CEO of Honda and four of his picks $1 billion to take over GM?

Just wondering. Honda knows its customers very well ...

Honda Element gets dog-friendly ... Consumer Reports Cars Blog

... The Dog Friendly components include a soft-sided cargo area kennel made from strong seat belt material netting, a cushioned pet bed in the cargo area, a 12-volt DC fan, second-row seat covers with a dog pattern, all-season rubber floor mats and a spill resistant water bowl. An extendable ramp will also store beneath the bed, so it can be accessed when the tailgate is open...

Incidentally, this post was not on my regular reading list. It was "suggested" to me by the Great God Google.

Google knows its customers even better than Honda.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Good question

One more reason not to get to bother with football ...

Michael Vick Fails To Inspire Team With 'Great' Dogfighting Story | The Onion

..."The only reason the Chiefs scored in the second half was because I was still thinking about what Mike said during halftime about 'trunking,'" said linebacker Omar Gaither, referring to the practice of putting two pit bulls in a car trunk, closing the door, and allowing them to fight for 15 minutes until one is dead. "Why is this freak on my team? Why are people cheering for him? Seriously, answer my questions. Why?

Breeding even smarter dogs

The studies are probably not terribly rigorous, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that that dogs are smarter than we thought they were -- seems just about every animal is smarter than we thought ...

Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids | LiveScience

... While dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in language, they would trump a 3- or 4-year-old in basic arithmetic, Coren found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.

'The social life of dogs is much more complex, much more like human teenagers at that stage, interested in who is moving up in the pack and who is sleeping with who and that sort of thing,' Coren told LiveScience.

The hypothesis is that dogs are getting smarter fairly quickly, that over the course of a few hundred years we've substantially increased the IQ of certain breeds.

So what would happen if we really tried to breed a dog that was smarter and lived longer? Could we get them up to, say, four year olds? Pretty soon we're in "uplift territory".

At what point do smarter dogs get civil rights? Reminds me of my childhood attempt to develop a non-species specific theory of ethics ...

Parasite mind

The more we learn about the astounding variability of human brains (presumably related to the rapid human evolution of the past 5,000 years) and the “normality” of some persons with fairly gross variations in the genes affecting brain development, the more peculiar commonplace human cooperation seems.

To a geek, of course, this is rather like the same software being able to run rather similarly on very different hardware. It’s not surprising to us that Chrome OS will run on very different ARM and Intel architectures, or that I ran the same software on my G5 iMac (RISC) and my Intel MacBook.

Which leads inevitably to all kinds of weird speculations.

Do dogs, with their whacko plastic genome and 25,000 years of co-evolution with humans now run a stripped down version of our minds on their wetware?

If we think of brains as a substrate for minds (and, of course, memes), then minds start to feel like different things, things that have their own evolution and natural selection. Things that might not completely respect species boundaries … (Science fiction readers can readily fill in that blank).

Minds can’t live independently though. They need something to run on.

Kind of like parasites, though not to be immediately confused with the Zimmerian world of mind-controlling parasites.

I wonder if that’s anything like the parasite mind now sold on Amazon ….

See also: The emergent ecosystem of the corporate amoeba, and prosthetic memory.

Dog food: now it's the fluoride

We don't know the safe levels for dogs. Apparently the fluoride comes from a high bone meal content in pet food ...

Fluoride in dog food - Pets' health at risk? | Environmental Working Group:

.... An independent laboratory test of popular dog food brands, commissioned by Environmental Working Group, revealed that the food we buy for our pets contains high levels of fluoride, a contaminant that may put dogs' health at risk.

Eight major national brands marketed for both puppies and adults contained fluoride in amounts between 1.6 and 2.5 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum legal dose in drinking water... All 8 brands contain bone meal and animal byproducts, the likely source of the fluoride contamination.

Scientists have not studied the safety of high doses of fluoride for dogs....

It's hard to know what to make of this, except to reiterate that, in practice, libertarianism sucks.

How to choose a city to live in

Imagine you are an active geek, and that you can live in any city on earth.

Where do you go? For that matter, where might you want to visit?

There are all kinds of metrics you might consider, but there’s a single metric that produces this particular list:

1. Copenhagen, Denmark
2. Portland, Oregon
3. Munich, Germany
4. Montreal, Quebec
5. Perth, Australia
6. Amsterdam, Netherlands
7. Seattle, Washington
8. Paris, France
9. Minneapolis, Minnesota
10. Bogota, Columbia (yes)

What does Minneapolis have in common with Paris?! What joins Copenhagan and, yes, Bogota?!

Think ….

Think ….

This list. These are the world’s top 10 cities for bicycling.

I’ve lived most of my life in Montreal and Minneapolis, and I’ve bicycled Munich. It know it’s hard to credit, but there is something similar about those 3. Paris is an outlier, but then there’s no accounting for Paris.

Ok, so Bogota, which people my age associate with drug wars and extreme violence, is another outlier. Until I summarized this list I’d never have considered visiting Bogota. Now I guess I have to.

If you’re a US citizen you might now be considering Portland, Seattle and (yes!) Minneapolis. I know, it’s a bit mind blowing. Now consider this list …

1. Wisconsin
2. Minnesota
3. Massachusetts

These are the top 3 states for health care quality in a the recent NHQR State Snapshot report (I must confess, by the way, that Wisconsin is a better bicycling state than Minnesota, it’s just that it doesn’t have much in the way of an urban life.)

I live in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (St. Paul, the sleepier sib of Minneapolis), which in addition to being the #3 bike city in the USA is also home to the world’s largest and most attractive legal dog park.

Sometimes, you just get lucky.

Update: chrismealy tells us that his Seattle hometown doesn't belong on the list, and that Portland has cyclists but not infrastructure. He writes recommends a terrific bicycle blog (http://hembrow.blogspot.com/, I just subscribed) so I'll take his word for it.

I know Munich is extreme, and Montreal is only very good, so there's clearly a big drop after #3 on the list. That moves Minneapolis even further up.

Incidentally, this update gives me an excuse to post a picture of the bicycle I bought in 1976. My Raleigh International (see Sheldon Brown's page for an original ad photo) is going for the full refurb treatment at the local racing shop in honor of a coming birthday. This is the pre-refurb shop ...

Evolution of dog and human - mutual selection

I've had a longstanding obsession with the the evolution and plasticity of my favorite parasite, Canis lupus familiaris. Happily our co-evolutionary companion is at last getting well deserved attention.

Today my favorite paleoanthropologist almost asks the right question (emphases mine):

Preverbal infants in canine clothing

For the past couple of thousand years, maybe more, our selection on dogs has been both intentional and unintentional. Before that, as dogs were first becoming commensal with human societies -- more than 20,000 years ago -- the essential changes in dog social behavior were the natural effect of human social systems.

If we were generating all that selection on them, imagine how much we were imposing on each other.

Well, yes John, we believe humans imposed vast amounts of selection on each other, and your readers know that you've shown human evolution is active and rapid.

The question I'm particularly interested in, however, is how did dogs change humans? Isn't it a principle that symbiotes and parasites change their hosts/partners even as they themselves change?

Obama and the dog (corrected)

FMH is right.

Most Disturbing Moment in Obama’s Leno Appearance - Follow Me Here…:

...[I]nevitably, he talked about the long-promised family dog, joking that he might not get one after all. “This is Washington,” he said with a sly smile. “That was a campaign promise."...

You can't fix the economy Mr. President. You probably can't deliver health care reform. You can get the damned dog.

Now.

Update 4/12/09: My apologies to President Obama. Now that the famed dog has been identified, the BBC gives us a bit more quote context:

"This is Washington. That was a campaign promise," Mr Obama said, as the audience roared with laughter. "No, I'm teasing. The dog will be there shortly."

That last bit was important. It turns the statement from nasty humor into just funny.

I wonder if FMH fell into the same trap I did -- an out of context quote.

Three whacks to me.

Super science 2009: The Economist at the AAAS meeting

The Economist today highlights a few of the recent super science (AAAS) meeting.

Cooking is humanity's "killer app" (emphases mine) underscores that we are not natural, we are a creation of our own technology. Perhaps cooking is the oldest profession ...

...without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals...

...even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved...

...Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is....

What goes into a dog breed emphasizes how plastic our forms are, and how fungible ...

Dr Ostrander has already used dogs to track down the genes behind certain cancers that the species shares with people, and to work out the dog family tree. At the AAAS she described her search for the genes controlling three of the most important features of a breed: its size, its hair and the length of its legs...

... The size of water dogs, she found, is governed mainly by variations in a gene called insulin-like growth-factor 1—and that is probably true of other breeds as well...

...Short legs, a phenomenon known as chondrodysplasia, are characteristic of many dog breeds, perhaps most famously dachshunds and corgis. In people the condition is known vulgarly as dwarfism. Dr Ostrander’s work showed that in dogs it is caused by the reactivation of a “dead” version of a gene involved in the regulation of growth. Chromosomes are littered with such non-functional genes; they are the result of mutations favoured by natural selection at some point in the past. Here the gene in question has been reactivated by the arrival within it of what is known as a LINE-1 element. This is a piece of DNA that can jump about from place to place within a genome, sometimes causing havoc as it does so....

...Dr Ostrander found that 80% of the variation between breeds in coat form and furniture was explained by differences in just three genes. Different combinations of these result in different mixtures of coat and furniture...

Now that you're thinking about how a few gene variations can cause amazing changes to shape and size, you're prepared to contemplate another genome ... that of our brother Neandertal ...

Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, chose Darwin’s 200th anniversary to announce what would, until recently, have been thought an impossible discovery in evolutionary biology—a draft of the genome of Neanderthal man.

Dr Paabo made his announcement to the AAAS meeting via a video link from Germany, and followed it up by a lecture in person on the 15th. The Neanderthal Genome Project, as it is known, is the culmination of a career devoted to the examination of ancient DNA by a man whose work provided inspiration for Michael Crichton’s novel and film “Jurassic Park”...

...one-fold coverage gives you about 60% of the genome, and that is what Dr Paabo’s first draft has achieved...

...the Neanderthal line and that of modern humanity parted company only shortly before the oldest known Neanderthal fossils were alive...

...The team has also looked at a few genes of particular interest. The most famous of these is FOXP2, damage to which prevents speech in modern humans. Neanderthals turn out to have the same version of FOXP2 as Homo sapiens (and thus a different one from chimpanzees). Researchers are divided about how significant FOXP2 really is, because it is involved in the mechanics of speech production, not the mental abilities that lie at the root of language. But some regard this discovery as evidence that Neanderthals could speak.

Much more information should emerge as Dr Paabo increases his one-fold coverage to 20-fold, the point at which almost every base pair is represented. At that moment, science will have in its grasp the genetic details of what is probably modern humanity’s closest relative...

Min-pin and Newfie look less alike than Neandertal and us. They cooked, of course, but perhaps not as well as we did ...

Melamine sickened infants: 53,000 and counting

This weekend's NYT Magazine reports 53,000 infants have been poisoned by fraudulent milk products.

The number, of course, will rise.

Not surprisingly the story was suppressed by the Chinese federal government lest the bad news tarnish the Olympic glow.

In the old days we'd feel a bit of pride about our superior government, but those days are gone. The Bush administration does the same sort of thing. Back to The Jungle reviews a book written after the pet food poisoning last year. The Bush-devastated FDA earns plenty of scorn.

I suspect, because it's only human, that many Chinese citizens thought Americans were making an unseemly fuss about dog food problems. I know several American right wingnuts expressed similar feelings early in the story.

53,000 children. This could have been avoided.

It will happen here if we don't get the GOP out of power.

In the meantime, I think we'll reduce the powdered milk that goes into my son's "peanut butter snack".

Update 9/30/08: Great NYT Editorial on the 1858 New York "swill milk" fraud by Bee Wilson, author of “Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee." Same framework, same horrors. I don't even want to bother thinking about how libertarians answer these things.