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<br /> from wolves or near-wolves to small, timid, docile pets. To label all dogs as "pets" is <br /> <br /> therefore a human appellation based in wishful thinking and emotion, not reality and <br /> <br /> genetic fact. We should take note that dogs have been domesticated, and all the diverse <br /> <br /> breeds developed, in only the past 7 to 10,000 years -about the same length of time that <br /> humans have developed agriculture or had the bow and arrow. This is a drop in the <br /> <br /> bucked compared to the eons of time that both humans and wolves have been on the <br /> earth, and thus from an evolutionary and genetic standpoint all domestic dogs are still <br /> wolves. They just Lowdifferent, and only some are cute and docile and labelled "pets". <br /> D®GS IN HAVd~AI'I: <br /> The earliest foreign visitors to Hawaii reported that the Hawaiians raised small, terrier- <br /> like dogs in large numbers for food and ceremonial feasts. A few small dogs were lap <br /> dogs. Whether the Hawaiians had a larger, husky-like dog such as their close relatives, <br /> the Maori of New Zealand (Aotearoa), did isconjectural -except that the Hawaiian <br /> priests in 1778 were known to use a "tabu wand" made with a rather fluffy white dog's <br /> tail quite like that of the Maori dogs. When the very powerful high chief Kahekili of <br /> Maui invaded the Big Island in the late 1700's his army brought fighting dogs {the <br /> historian Kamakau says Kahekili personally brought "two man-eating dogs"). There is no <br /> record of any foreign visitor from Cook onward bringing such dogs, nor are they likely to <br /> have been on the well-armed exploring ships of 1778 and later. Most likely these <br /> fearsome dogs came from the shipwrecked foreigners prominent in Haw°aiian oral <br /> tradition who arrived, in at least several instances, in the late 1400's and mid 1500's, <br /> were most likely Spanish, and who might well have had mastiffs on board, based on other <br /> Spanish history and practice in the Americas in the same period. Thus, large and fierce <br /> dogs may have been part of the canine gene pool in Hawaii {at least in East Maui) for as <br /> much as five hundred years. <br /> Whether pre-contact Hawaiians used their dogs to hunt wild pigs has very little record, <br /> perhaps because such a practice of subsistence hunting was so common amongst native <br /> peoples worldwide that the early foreigners to visit Hawaii did not even think to mention <br /> it, or perhaps it was not seen -since most early visitors spent their time near the seashore <br /> rather than in the forests. (The modern claim that the Hawaiians kept their pigs only in <br /> pens is incorrect, just as the concept is incorrect for native societies throughout the world. <br /> Pigs simply love to escape and go off into the wild, as they continue to do to this day <br /> despite highly bred domestication) It would be highly likely that the Hawaiians who lived <br /> in the forest as outcasts, wood cutters, bird catchers and the like would snare wild pigs <br /> and/or hunt them with the aid of their dogs as a source of food. <br /> After 1778, foreign visitors rapidly introduced other dog breeds, bot11 American and <br /> European, and Native American and Oriental dogs were surely introduced as well as part <br /> of the fur, sandalwood, and whaling trades - in which hundreds of Hawaiians took part. <br /> By the mid nineteenth century there were also many hunting dogs in Hawaii. In the <br /> 1850's the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa was reported to abound in both <br /> wild pigs and wild dogs. Nineteenth century photographs in Hawaii show that hound- <br /> like dogs were rather common, including amongst Hawaiians. In addition, thievery was <br /> 2 <br /> <br />