| Rather like their human masters, a growing number of pets in the United Kingdom are becoming obese. As a result, these animals are facing chronic illnesses, such as heart conditions, diabetes and arthritis, according to research. A survey conducted of U.K. vets and pet owners demonstrated that one in three pets was considered overweight and 38 percent of pet owners said their pets put on weight over the Christmas holiday. Only a few pet owners actually plan to put their companion animals on a diet.
History of pets and domestication:
There is little known about how and when domestication started. There is practically no data available either in legends, or in historical chronicles. It is believed, that Stone Age man already had almost all the main pets. Ancient historical chronicles, such as the Bible, speak about cows, sheep, horses and other animals, as if they are very ordinary belongings of shepherds and agricultural people. In short, the time when man tamed the modern pets, still remains unknown, like the origin of the majority of domestic mammals is also not known.
It is however assumed, that each domestic animal had wild forefathers. Some researches of bones, found in the remains of pile dwellings, prove this. During the analysis of an excavation, it was possible to distinguish the bones of pets from the bones of wild animals. Therefore, it may be assumed, that in the ancient ages about which nothing is mentioned either in history or in legends, the same animals could have been wild as well as domesticated. These days, there are some species of domestic animals, which cannot be found in the wild at all. So, for example, the cow and horse are exclusively domestic animals.
It is still in dispute who was the ancestor of some of the domestic animals. So some believe that the Russian domestic sheep came from the moufflon, others think from argali, and there are ones who think it came from the North African wild sheep (Ovis tragelophus). There are people who consider the wolf to be the ancestor of the dog, some think the jackal, and others - both species (sometimes the prairie wolf is also added to them). As per modern views, dogs entirely came from wolves.
Wild representatives of many pets are extinct now. So, the ancestor of most breeds of large horned livestock is the wild ox (Bos primigenius) (Reitmeier and his followers think, all the breeds of large horned livestock, found along the Baltic coast and North Sea: Dutch, Holstein cattle, and equally the short-horned cattle of England are the descendants of wild ox. Ukrainian cattle are said to belong to the same group.
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