Votorx said:
Do they mate for life in their natural habitat or an artificial? I had said in my previous post that they stay together for a period of time (pertaining to raising their young) but what happens after their young are old enough to leave their nest?
I can't speak for all of the species, but there are plenty who have been studied for generations and who ornithologists tell us do mate for life. I think the Canada goose is one of them.
Parrots have not been captive-bred for very long. Except for the really small ones like budgies and cockatiels, there was no psittaculture to speak of as recently as 200 years ago. The larger parrot species take about five years to reach sexual maturity, so there simply haven't been enough generations bred in captivity to have accidentally selected for a behavior no one was even trying for. In my opinion no one has bred a significant change of any sort in their behavior. A wild-caught chick stolen from the nest and hand-fed grows up to be pretty much the same as a captive-bred chick whose parents allow the humans to take over the incredibly tiring work of round-the-clock feeding and just drop in on their babies once in a while to see how well the humans are doing.
Yes of course there are species where the mates stay together to raise the chicks and then separate. I just found a baby bird (sorry, I'm temporarily on the East Coast and I don't know the names of many of the common species out here) that fell down into the window box of my basement apartment and couldn't get enough lift to fly back out. I crawled down to rescue him, but I almost dropped him because these two adults came out of nowhere, just battering my head and screaming at me. They thought I was a predator. This bird was fully fledged and no longer sleeps in his parents' nest and can probably do a halfway job of feeding himself, but his parents are still together and still keeping an eye on him. Admirable behavior.
Domestic [dog]... would she be fit for being leader of a pack having little to no experiance in the wild? Being larger or even meaner doesn't always qualify...
Dogs are a completely different story. We've been captive-breeding them for at least eight thousand years, and unlike parrots they reach sexual maturity in one year so that's a lot of dog generations.
As I've said, the most obvious differences between the domestic and wild dog/wolf populations (one single species) are in areas that put the dog at a tremendous disadvantage if it ever has to live as a predator -- not just a garbage dump scavenger but a true hunter. Their teeth are not shaped right for ripping flesh, so it would be difficult to eat the game they bring down before the hyenas and jackals muscle in and take over. And their brains have decreased in size due to the lower-protein diet of an omnivore, so they wouldn't be as clever at outwitting their prey as a wolf is.
Add to that the peculiar traits that have been bred into the Lhasa Apso and you've got a dog designed only for living in partnership with humans. They're practically blind, even for dogs, which as a species have terrible eyesight. Even if you comb the hair out of their eyes they can barely see anything. Their sense of smell is nothing to rave about. They're guard dogs, so their keenest sense is hearing. They can hear a human jogging down the highway half a mile away -- and dutifully warn us that the Mongolian Hordes are on their way. Since their most recent place of residence was Tibetan monasteries in the Himalayas, they are incredibly sure-footed like mountain goats. They can chase each other up and down a snowy, rocky cliff face, looking like a bunch of skateboarders on a ramp. Not a particularly useful ability for a hunter unless they were turned loose in the Himalayas.
Would a female Lhasa Apso, or any female dog, be a good pack leader? Hard to say. There are plenty of animals in which that is the case. Most ungulates, from domestic cattle to bisons and elephants, have a lead cow that the herd follows from one feeding ground to another. The males only try to pull rank in the breeding season and then (in many species) they spend most of their energy trying to kill their rivals so they can have all the girls, rather than watching out for lions.
Something that we breeders don't always talk about, Lhasas are killers. We've lost a couple of birds to ours. I'm sure they'd be enthusiastic about hunting down small game.
But dogs in general have far too many disadvantages already bred into them, there's no way they would fare well in a true wild milieu. As opposed to simply running loose on the fringes of civilization like coyotes, raccoons, and bears, using their knowledge of human habits and their lack of fear of humans to out-scavenge the wolves and cougars.
