I4CUSATSU

Cat: Arr-rar! (weird chirp noise)

Cat: [weird mechanical-sounding hiss]

Cat, while licking finger, in a very gravelly voice: Ah mlem-a-mlem-a-mlem-mlem-a-mlem-a-mlem… mrowr rowrrr…

Person holding camera: I love you.

Ok, it's finally done. Home is a place, home is a person.

This story is my first major piece after several years of art block, and I'm so glad I could finally get back to drawing.

( @he-needs-enrichment )

You guys are SO RIGHT and you should say it. Like YEAH it's NOT widespread but if it WAS... There are machines but that's different than the sort of interface and experience you get with computers and the internet.

And necromantic instructions are already called programming! (Or at least they are by Gideon, Harrow, and John, which could mean John kept calling it that so it just became a common term or could be a case of them knowing things they shouldn't via permeability, but I digress.)

Gideon in GtN 9 - "The sheer amount of complex programming each skeleton followed would have taken all of the oldest and most gnarled necromancers of the Locked Tomb months and months to put together." / Harrow in HtN 43 - "I made my skull a construct, programmed to apply pressure to specific lobes." / John in NtN John 5:18 - "And then I stopped having to hold the strings—I could say, Go here, or, Go there, and they’d go like I’d programmed them to."

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

Could coyotes be domesticated, sometime down the line? I know there are animals like bears that could never be, but coyotes seem close enough to dogs for it to work in many many many many generations.

Could Coyotes be domesticated again? Yes and No.

Yes: They're REALLY closely related and already frequently interbreed with domestic dogs and are in a similar ecological position to the proto-dogs: comfortable living in and around human settlements, especially garbage dumps. Biologically, it's a VERY short hop (possibly as few as 2 or 3 mutations) to domestication for them.

No: The actual practicality of domesticating coyotes is negligible. Humans domesticated dogs in the first place because partially because we needed help with hunting, but probably mostly because we had fuck-all else to do for fun back then. In the modern age of readily available livestock and needing to monetize EVERYTHING or suffer for it, there isn't really much need or interest in domesticating coyotes. It'd take a large canine farming facility, similar to the fox farms of the early 1900's, multiple generations of careful genetic testing and manipulation, and would be goddamn impossible to zone or get insurance for.

The re-domestication of Cheetahs has a slightly better shot because there is a genuine need for LOTS of them as an ecological keystone species and there's decent odds of finding some rich idiots to back that project so they can have The Coolest Pet Cat.