The origins of the Hungarian flock guard and herding dog breeds

The dog is the domesticated form of the wolf, however it is still not known where and which subspecies played a role in the process of domestication started maybe 135.000 years ago (Vila et al., 1997) and ended within the Old-World long before written history (Clutton-Brock, 1984; Kovács and Rózsáné Várszegi, 2015).

Lessons from wolves

For decades, scientists have been following a population of wolves on Isle Royale that has served as a model system for the study of the evolution and genetics of small, isolated populations. Isle Royale is a remote island in Lake Superior, USA, and wolves first arrived via an ice bridge from Canada in the 1940's. They found a healthy population of moose and no other predators, and their numbers grew. Over the years, the populations of the wolves and moose cycled in the dynamics of predator and prey.