by Gregory McNamee



Woolly mammoth replica in a museum exhibit in Victoria, B.C., Canada–Jonathan Blair/Corbis

even feature structures framed by mammoth bones. Certain technological and social advances allowed the people who lived in those settlements to bring down those elephantine creatures: a communication network, sharply knapped projectile points, well-balanced spear shafts. But, writes archaeologist Pat Shipman in the journal Quaternary International, an advance of a different kind also comes into play: Those sites also afford evidence of the early domestication of wolves on the way to becoming dogs. The horizon of domestication, so to speak, begins to appear about 32,000 years ago, pushing domestication well back into the archaeological record.

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Alas, long after the age of the mammoths has passed, humans continue to chase down pachyderms. It is to the everlasting detriment of modern humankind that the hunt continues, and to our eternal shame that this bit of news should emerge: The largest elephant in the world, a denizen of a Kenyan national park, has been killed by poachers. Writes Paula Kahumbu in the Africa Wild blog published by the Guardian, Satao was slaughtered last March, killed by poachers. Notes Kahumbu, with wholly justifiable anger, the Kenyan government insists that only 1 percent of the country’s elephants are poached each year, while knowing observers place the figure at 10 times that figure at the very least. “Elephants are an important national asset that make a significant contribution to Kenya’s GDP through tourism,” she insists. “It is therefore in the national interest that the correct figures are shared with the public.” And in the national and world interest, too, that elephants are better protected.

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How does one even begin to approach that problem, however? Through mathematics. Through science. A recent paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology offers a methodology: If you crunch enough data about past behavior on the part of poachers, you can predict their future behavior. The premise works in every other aspect of life, after all, and indeed it’s been demonstrated that this predictive modeling can fruitfully guide game wardens and park rangers to trouble spots. The resultant algorithm is now being applied in Uganda—specifically to the problem of elephant hunting.

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Back to dogs, in closing. Rabies, the World Animal Health Organization notes, is on the rise, and of course it often targets dogs, bats, and other creatures that are exposed to the virus. These animals pass the virus on, through bites, to other creatures—and to humans, about 55,000 of whom die each year of rabies infection. As the BBC reports, it’s one of those ounce-of-prevention things, but the organization further observes that it would cost about a tenth of the cost of caring for infected humans to vaccinate every dog in the world.

Meanwhile, just as the future is unevenly distributed around the world, the American South is beset by many problems that result, directly and indirectly, in the abandonment, abuse, and ill care of animals. Where the region’s surplus of dogs was often sent to shelters to be killed, in the post-Katrina humanitarian network, it is ever easier to move them to other parts of the country for adoption. Writing in The New York Times, novelist J. Courtney Sullivan describes the situation through the viewpoint of her experience with an adopted Southern dog. Her lede will be meaningful to anyone who loves our canine familiars: “If I could be reincarnated as anyone, I’d pick my dog, Landon.”