Here is an answer to a similar question that basically sums up what I want to say ~ "Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers and respected and admired the wolf as a successful fellow hunter. There are various theories as to how domestication first began - for example, did people seek out wolf cubs to tame, or did wolves begin to scavenge from humans' leftovers, bringing themselves into contact with people? What it amounts to is that wolf cubs were taken into human tribes and raised among people, whom they then saw as their pack. The original purpose of this was to aid the humans in hunting. Over thousands of years, these wolves were selectively bred for particular physical and/or personality traits, depending on what job they were intended to do - for example, some were bred for hunting, some for tracking, some for herding, some for guarding, etc. If you wanted, say, a dog with particularly strong jaws, you would only allow the male and female with the strongest jaws to mate, so that the puppies would inherit this characteristic. Over the generations, if you continued to breed the strongest-jawed males and females together, the offspring would develop stronger and stronger jaws. Eventually, this selective breeding resulted in all the hundreds of different dog breeds we have today." ~ (Credits to Leolupus)
The wolf was cleared out of the picture. Throughout those thousands of years, dogs no longer had wolf blood running through their veins. The only reason its a subspecies is because a dog is not a wolf and a wolf is not a dog.. its as simple as that.
But in some way, you are right - dogs ARE domesticated wolves. After all, we did domesticate wolves, right? But the way you worded the question is a no. And as you got into detail, that was definitely a no. "domestic wolves" is not an acceptable name. In a way, you could think of it like that but we didn't directly domesticate them.. Sorry if its confusing.. hope I helped.
Stop thinking of taxonomy as monolithic. Most mammalogists do not consider dogs and wolves to be the same species. The ones who do have been brainwashed by geneticists and are not real mammalogists.
Not exactly. Over the past 14,000 to 30,000 years, dogs have been artificially selected, changing their genetic make-up.
No. A house cat is not a domestic tiger.
No.
If dogs are classified under Canis lupus (Gray wolf) as Canis lupus familiaris, doesn't that technically make them domestic wolves? If scientific taxonomy considers wolves and dogs to be the same species, then why does colloquial language still refer to them as separate? Would "domestic wolf" technically be an acceptable name for the dog? Is it because the use of "dog" is so extant, it's kept the same as before for convenience?
