Dog Clothes

We have reached that time of the year known as “Dog Days”. The hottest days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere are between July 3 and August 11. Most of us are trying to find ways to stay cool and our best friends are suffering from the heat too. In ancient times the weather during this period was regarded as unhealthy and dogs were thought to have spells of madness.

Shadow has long black hair and when she is outside in the sun, you can really feel the sun absorbing into her black fur. We have found that when she wears a white dog t-shirt it helps reflect the sun off her back and she gets some relief from the heat of the sun.

Have you ever wondered how dogs became man’s best friend? The dog was one of the earliest domesticated animals, living with man for over 15,000 years. There are cave paintings showing dogs hunting along side of humans. Since dogs evolved from wolves, how did this domestication take place? Looking at this cute little guy here wearing his dog T-shirt, it is hard to see that he evolved from a wolf.

It is unlikely that wolf pups were hand raised by humans, because hand reared animals will revert to their natural lifestyle and become predators. More likely, the wolves scavenged from rubbish around the humans. Humans were gradually changing to farming instead of only hunting and humans saw useful qualities in these wolves. Some juvenile wolves that didn’t exhibit predatory traits would have moved into the village with man.

Some probably were used for guarding livestock and others would have been used as retrievers when hunting. The useful wolves would have been bred and the others would have been either killed, eaten or driven away. This selective domestication of certain behaviors was the beginning of breeding and how we got our first dogs.