Why Are There No Big Dogs?



Here's a question that never occurred to me before- why are there big cats, but no big dogs? At one time, there was a very big canid ancestor, but it wasn't Clifford the Big Red Dog, and that one's extinct anyway. While there are wild canine species left that differ from our human-bred domestic dogs, the biggest of them top out at about 175 pounds. Meanwhile, adult male tigers can easily weigh 600 pounds!

This video explains that the difference is in an animal's hunting strategy. Dogs are pack animals, and almost all cats are solitary ambush predators (the lion being an outlier). The size of the cat has to do with its preferred prey, which varies widely from house cats chasing mice to tigers taking down water buffalo. A dog's size matters less when they have an army of relatives hunting with them. The difference in hunting strategies also explains quite a few other differences between cat and dog anatomy, from their teeth to their shoulder articulation.


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The logic doesn't add up on this. A gorilla eats vegetables all day, so the gorilla doesn't "need" to be 450lbs. Many smaller animals eat the same diet as gorillas, and yet they never "evolve" to be as large as a gorilla. One could argue that a gorilla "evolved" to be big because of Predators, but no one can ever prove this. We weren't around when gorillas went through every stage of evolution, and we weren't around to know which predators caused this alleged evolution of size. Rhinos and Whales, like the gorilla, could easily be much smaller and have "the same hunting/eating strategies", and it would still work. This is the problem with the theory of evolution: They "start with an effect and work backwards". But the more you think about the logistics and details of said evolution, it doesn't make any sense. Oh and before anyone gets the wrong idea: this is not an argument for Intelligent Design. It's actually an argument for Determinism. Everything in the universe came together, and through raw determinism, created a gorilla, among all other creatures. That, in my opinion is a much more plausible explanation than "God create the Gorilla cuz Gorillas n stuff" or "The gorilla evolved over millions of years like a Pokemon to be what it is today, but theres absolutely no evidence at all, just shut up and trust the science cuz we said so" I duno, just my thoughts.
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