Wolves!

digitalscream

Sambostar said:

Yeah the dog's all should have been  put down, but that is the point, the owner saved them from that fate.

I am severely colour blind,  quick reactions, pretty laidback but have a keen sense of eyesight, hearing and ambient senses and I have red hair, which they can't see, so being camouflaged,  I probably have an advantage with wolves then.  I do see them as direct competition though.

Actually, that's another complete myth - it's a case of visual perception. Dogs have a completely different aural and visual perception of the world; it's not that they can't see stuff, it's that they perceive fewer colours. They can see red things perfectly well, they just see them as a dark grey.

Sambostar said:

You reckon you could wrestle one of them wolves to the ground if you had to go head to head in a celebrity wolf fight?

No, there's no way that I'd survive long in a one-on-one with an aggressive wolf; the thing is, though, the wolf wouldn't even try unless it was rabid or starving. If there's any element of risk - and humans look quite big to wolves, given that we stand on our hind legs all the time - the wolf will simply look elsewhere (or, if very desperate, wait until a moment of weakness). The fact that wolves have more weapons (they have claws and teeth, and they're way stronger than we are) wouldn't enter into it.

On the other hand...they do tend to go in packs, so if threatened they'll fight as a pack; however, so would humans and there were far more of us than there were of them. Again, a tick in the "humans are safe" box.

Finally, there's the fact that the only reason they were walking around amongst us was that they'd already determined that we weren't a threat. They know that they get fed all the time and there's no need for competition, so again...humans are safe.

Sambostar said:

That feeling you had with a wild animal by the way, it is good isn't it.  I've had that a couple of times in Oz, when, cut off, in a remote area, against a big nasty wild animal, I almost got eaten alive.  Your senses do go into overdrive and it's a quite distinct feeling to getting a kick in on the streets.

I derfinitely wouldn't want to go against a grisly bear without a decent gun, like people do, blindly trusting their guides.  Even an African safari scares the bejesus out of me.

In fact, I won't even go to Longleat.

I've never had that feeling before, even amongst large packs of dogs. It was a real eye-opener (and, as noted, I definitely didn't go into this with any sense of complacence).

chillidoggy

Sambostar said:

 It's just that the level of anthropomorphism on here, just because something is fluffy and has forward facing eyes and is an integral part of our folklore, kind makes me wonder. 

My missus is kind of fluffy, with forward-facing eyes, and she scares the crap out of me.

holnrew

I don't think anthropomorphism is that half the time. Animals can actually have personality traits, feel emotions and have intelligence that we sometimes arrogantly assume are exclusively human. The more these things are studied, the more functions of the brain we are found to share with them.