There’s also a wide variability between breeds; the flock guardians like the Maremma, Pyrenees, and others are dogs that are bred for independent action, in the absence of humans. Take a look at the recent incidents where humans were forced to abandon their dogs and flocks to the fires in BC and California, to return to find slightly singed dogs, intact flocks, and burned-out homesteads. The Pyrenees in California somehow managed to add to the goat herd he was overseeing, in the form of six fawn deer…

I think you have to really stretch things to say that the dog has “lost” anything–They’ve found themselves a niche, have worked their way into it with a thoroughness that any evolutionary biologist would have to acknowledge, and they’re in the process of adapting to a human condition that’s well separated from the facts of life as known on the steppes and early agricultural areas where we first partnered up. Were you to compare a wolf to a dog, in terms of ability to adapt and “manage” relations with humans, the dog would likely win out, every time.

All you have to do is watch a group of Border Collies working a large flock or two of sheep, or observe the easy handover between the Collies and the Great Pyrenees flock protectors when the predators show up, and you’ll understand why this is so–And, we’ve pretty much bred it into them. The sum is greater than the whole because if we’d bred them to be more cooperative without the “X”-factor of a human intervening, then packs of dogs turned feral would be more of a threat than we would tolerate.