Baboons Keep Dogs?

Extract from ‘Animals Like Us’ (National Geographic).

I had an argument in your mind for the movie above, but I found out that Hal Herzog wrote it over a year ago.   Nothing like being behind the times…

If you do not have the time to see or see both of the aforementioned, here’s the gist:  Hamadryas baboons in Saudi Arabia, according to a (now quite old) movie, kidnap dogs as dogs and ‘boost them as pets’and treating them as relatives and receiving their defense in return.   Hal is (logically) a little skeptical; even though we view, in the movie, a male baboon ‘kidnapping’ a pup, and a Few adult dogs connecting with baboons, we do not actually see the interim stage (i.e. that the ‘increasing as pets’ component…)  The counter-argument is that  the male baboons might be ‘playing’ with the dogs (within their own rather rough way) and that the baboon-dog connection is more mutualistic than triumphed in the content; the puppies may not be ‘owned’ from the baboons as merely cohabiting with them.    

The clip is in the documentary called ‘Animals Like Us’.   Why the obsession of attempting to determine how ‘like us’ other creatures are?   As an example, the interesting thing about this is the   actual connection that exists between the baboons along with the puppies, whatever that may be.   Sure, it is extremely interesting if like the human-pet connection (which, it should be said, is hardly set in stone for a concept), but it is equally interesting if that is not the situation, not least since this could, in fact, be a exceptional association unlike anything detected elsewhere.

What seems to have gone unnoticed, in the tacky mirk of determining exactly what does and does not constitute pet-keeping, is the intriguing parallel between this association and the afore-blogged study regarding the possible evolution of the domestic dog as a scavenger of their human waste ditch.   Could it be that the baboons within this association provide an alternate, present model by which to research coevolution?   Could it be that waste-dumps, where scavenging is plentiful, give a good ground for cooperative (or, barely aggressive) interspecies associations?

As Hal notes, this definitely needs more study.   I believe study should take place never to show how ‘like us’ those ‘unlike us’ species could be, but simply to understand them for what they are.

source http://www.thedogcouch.com/baboons-keep-dogs/