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Believe it or not, two dogs have tied the knot (and not the literal kind). Two dogs have been united in what has been called an animal wedding. The ceremony is marked as being a new extreme in the amount of attention that many people in the United Kingdom give to their pets -- their companion animals, to be politically correct. The bride in this instance as an eight month old dog named Muffin. She arrived to the ceremony -- which was held at Harrod’s, of all places -- in a horse drawn carriage. The groom was a two and a half year old dog named Timmy. The event itself was said to cost $7,000. In fact, another dog couple are slated to be married next week. Last summer, actress Pamela Anderson (now Mrs. Kid Rock) arranged the marriage of her Chihuahua, Luca, to Star who is her pet golden retriever, Anderson's does were "wed" on a beach in Malibu, California. U.K. residents are already spending $560 million a year on gifts for their pets. Beverley Cuddy, the editor in chief of Dogs Today, has noted that the dog weddings takes pet pampering to an unheard of level.
History of animal domestication:
As an example of successes, achieved by cattle breeders for improving the breed of domestic cattle, Darwin in his world famous composition “The origin of species”, for explaining some facts and for proving his conclusions, very often refers to the phenomena represented by domestic animals; even entire chapter 1 of this composition is devoted to the changes to which animals and plants are subjected, owing to their culture. Such changes in the organism of animals and uniformity of their heredity are possible only under the condition of their domestication for achieving similar results, long-term work with many continuous generations and skillful selection of their breeders are required, which is not possible to understand with wild animals. Therefore the domestication itself, maybe, required a lot of work, but how and when it occurred, we do not know. Neither the legends, nor history, speak anything, how and when man has reached this stage of allowing the present domestic animals to live with him. Man of the stone age had with him almost all our main domestic animals. The most ancient of historical annals, the Bible, speaks about cows, sheep, horses, etc., and also about the most ordinary accessories of shepherd and agricultural state of people. In one word, the time, when the man tamed modern domestic animals, still remains unknown to humanity, like the origin of majority of domestic mammals is also not known. It was presumed only, that each of domestic animals should have one or several wild relatives similar to it, and after research of the bones found in the fossils from piled structures, there was a final conclusion which established that these fossils contained the bones of wild animals identical to them. This proves that during the periods about which, nothing is remembered neither in history, nor in legends, there lived our present animals in homes, as well as in wild conditions. But now some of the pets no more exist in wild form. So, e.g., only cow and horse are known as domestic animals. Then among some from domestic animals there are some, whose ancestors are till now not known. So some think our domestic sheep came from moufflon, others think from argali, and there are who think they are from North African domestic wild sheep (ovis tragelophus). Some think dogs came from wolf and some think from jackal, and there are ones who think – from both of them. Wild relatives of dome other animals are extinct now. So ancestors of large part of breeds of large horned cattle are considered wild ox (Bos primigenius) (Reitmeier, and then the others make out all the low breeds of large horned cattle, found on the coast of Baltic and German seas from wild ox: Dutch, Holstein, and equally short-horned English cattle. Our Ukrainian cattle also belong to the same group.
Then, as per Reitmeier, the following must also be listed to initial breeds: Воs brachyceros (short-horned bull) and Воs frontosus (broad-browed bull). From the first form came single-colour brown cattle of Switzerland (Swiss) and adjacent Alps, and from the second - motley, also Swiss, but found in the valleys between torus, and horn less cattle of Scotland and Norway. It lived, as wild bull, not only in prehistoric, but also during recent times. This is proved by the legends of our national poetry, ancient Russian bylinas, further names of different natural holes, in which the name of wild ox is mentioned and, at last, positive information of chronicle and other annals of ancient literature. Judging from this literature, ancient wild ox was well known to our ancestors, it was massive animal, with long horns, bay colour, differing by enormous force and speed, liked to remain in marshy areas in forests, free for food and lonely. As per bylinas, habitat regions of wild ox range from Trans-Dnepr to Volinsk and dense Lithuanian forests, but national language and names of different natural regions in which the name wild ox has serviced, extends these borders to the east to upper Donetsk, and in the north to Ladoga (near the Turova desert), Gryazovts and Galich. From direct sources of information about wild ox, especially its remarkable description, given by famous Gerberstien , who came to Russia in XVIth century. So that wild ox did not mix with bison, Gerberstein in his notes ("Rerum Moscoviticarum commentarii") has drawn the sketches of both the animals.
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