Thule Domesticates - Dogs
The first, and the most critical domesticate for the OTL Inuit were dogs. Canines were the critical Inuit draft animal, allowing the Inuit to move rapidly, together with a significant amount of material culture, through their environment, over vast distances. The use of dogs as a draft animal may have been a key technological/social advantage of the Inuit over their competitors.
Dogs typically have a lifespan between 10 and 12 years. They mature rapidly, reaching sexual maturity between six monthths and a year, and full physical maturity within two years. Working sled dogs are trained from 6 months to 1 year of age, and have a working life span of 8 to 9 years. Peak performance is from 3 to 6 years of age. Canines reproduce rapidly, females are usually fertile twice a year, take roughly 60 days from conception to delivery, with litters of up to six. These are the key statistics of any domestic animal, by the way. How quickly it matures, what the working life span is, how readily it reproduces, gestation time, offspring numbers.
Sled dogs average between 23 to 43 kilograms for males, and 18 to 23 for females. During the summer, they may be used as pack animals, carrying a load on their backs in a harness. Pack dogs averaging 35 to 50 kg are able to carry 16 kg for days on end over rugged landscape easily. Loads of up to 23 kgs can be carried for a day or two. Overall, the average viable pack load for a dog ranges from about 20 to 40% of their weight on an average speed of 6 kmh.
In comparison, horses run much heavier. 350 to 635 kgs. Their pack load ability ranges from 40 to 95 kgs. In broad terms, horses carry pack loads of 10 to 15% of their weight, with an average speed of 5.6 km.
During winter, dogs, usually in teams of nine, will pull sleds. Sled loads are dependent on the size of the animals, but ranges between 23 and 45 kg per animal at a pace of 5 to 8 kilometers per hour. Sled loads can go up to 115 kg per animal, but that’s heavy and viable only over short distances, the dogs will require frequent periods of rest. Teams normally cover a distance of 16 to 40 km per day, a well maintained team can do 90 to 95 kilometers a day.
Now, let’s compare this to horses. It’s a bit more apples and oranges, because there’s not a lot of literature on sled horses. But the rough yardstick seems to be that on average, horses draft capacity is about 13% of their body weight, at about 3 kmh. Overall, the figures on most draft animals suggest a draft capacity of 10 to 14% of body weight at an average speed of 2.4 to 4 kmh. Dogs on the othe hand, have a draft capacity of 30% body weight and speeds averaging 6 kmh.
So, astonishingly, dogs as working animals seem to be a lot more efficient than horses, and in fact most draft domesticates. Horses, Asses, Ox and Cow, Buffalo, Yaks, Llama, Mules... Dogs beat them all like red headed stepchildren or ... rented mules. Only Reindeer and Camels, proportionately, approach the work capacity of Dogs.
I suppose that begs the question that, since their work ability it so much greater, why did dogs take second place to so many domesticates. Part of it is packaging. A 350 kg horse can carry a load between 40 and 75 kg. In comparison, 350 kgs of dogs can carry 90 to 140 kgs in pack, but that’s ten dogs. That’s a hell of a lot of critters to wrangle, there’s time and effort costs in packing and unpacking. So, the substantially greater carrying capacity of dogs is undercut basically by management costs, lots of it.
The other factor, and the real determining factor, for dogs versus other draft animals is maintenance costs. Dogs, and everything else, gotta eat. Now, the trouble is, dogs are what we might consider ‘high value’ consumers. They eat meat. They’re not picky, they’ll eat fish, rough fish, they’ll eat fresh meat, old meat, skanky meat, they’ll crunch bones, eat birds and mice whole, devour garbage. Someone on this thread called dogs omnivores. That’s about 80% wishful thinking, dogs will devour berries readily, and I once watched a dog try and eat an apple, they’ll eat plant based products which have been cooked, boiled or otherwise processed for human consumption. But apart from nibbling a bit of grass now and then, they’re not really set up for herbivory. Now, dogs are pretty ecumenical in their tastes, and they’ll eat a lot of rough crap that we won’t touch, but basically, that’s still a pretty high end diet, and that means that they’re relatively expensive to feed. They’ll eat our garbage which is free, and our leftovers, but to keep them going in numbers large enough to be socially useful for draft labour, we need to harvest more than that, and even if we’re harvesting or processing relatively cheap low end stuff in human terms, its still expensive. Plus, of course, smaller animals proportionately eat more.
Now, we go over to most other draft animals - they’re pretty strict herbivores, and better yet, they’re herbivores who are really eating bottom end stuff - grasses and forage. Basically, its stuff that is free, grows easily without as much investment of time and effort and is usually plentiful. So its free food, which means basically free horsepower. At the bargain basement end, the only real cost to cattle and horse fodder is a potential lost opportunity cost because we’re not using those fields to grow human food. But even there, a lot of that land isn’t suitable for human food, or not necessary for one reason or another. You can’t beat those economics.
In fact, horse and cattle fodder is so cheap in comparison to the output of labour, that its found to be cost effective in many cultures, including ours, to actually invest additional time and energy in cultivating and stacking hay and building a draft animal feed industry.
The OTL Inuit used dogs intensively, and looking at dogs labour capacity, you can see why. They’re very very efficient. The OTL Inuit were particularly known for it in part because their environment, particularly their access to sea resources, allowed them to produce enough low value protein to keep dogs in business. This may actually help explain why many inuit remained so closely tied to the sea and coastlines. Not only were they dependent on sea protein, but their draft animal labour force, depended on it too.
As I understand it, many aboriginal cultures in North and South America, before the advent of the horse, used dogs as draft animals, although the amount of draft animals available for labour depended on the amount of low grade protein surplus that they culture was able to produce. This was tricky for agricultural civilizations particularly, since the protein surplus tended to drop or vanish and diet shifted to the products of agricultural cultivation.
But you know, thinking about it, there are a lot of American Indian civilization timelines on this site, and perhaps the economics of dog labour has been overlooked. For instance, the Andean cultures had incredibly rich fisheries which produced potentially a lot of low grade protein. So perhaps there’s something there. Of course, the Andeans had Llama, and effective coastal transit, so they didn’t necessarily need the dog as a labour domesticate.
The economy issues involving dogs remain suggestive. Given dietary issues, you couldn’t support a huge population of dog labour. But a really specialized canine labour force could be very viable in a civilization. Possibly as military or logistics bearers, stuff like that, or pack animals for extremely high value trade goods.
Or possibly, some interesting pod might be the development of a ‘dog bean’. A protein plant that’s not useful for humans, grows in agriculturally marginal territory, but is edible to canines and sustains a bigger dog labour population. Kind of out there, but it’s a better bet than bear cavalry.
But I’m wandering here. Canine domesticates, sled and pack animals, were critical to the success and survival of the OTL Inuit and their rapid spread. In this timeline, things are much the same for the early history at least up to the Agricultural revolution.
Of course, there are subtle effects. The human population in this timeline, because of the availability of root crops, is substantially increased. The dog population also increases, after all, more humans are producing more garbage and leftovers edible to canines. More humans are also available to engage in harvesting/fishing/hunting and obtaining the rough low end protein that canines can subsist on.
But not enough. The human population is several times greater than in our timeline. The canine population increases, but not proportionately. The OTL Inuit diet of 95% meat allows for a surplus to be generated to maintain the canine population. The much heavier Thule population is putting a lot more pressure on wild fish and meat resources, more harvesting, but they’re starting to approach the limits, and so maybe canine share is dropping. And of course, the heavier Thule population’s only getting 75% of its diet from meat, so there’s less flesh coming into the system.
Within the Thule, this has some interesting effects. With fewer sled and pack dogs, it’s a lot harder for many Thule to move around, or to move as rapidly or with as many goods. So there’s a tendency towards smaller, more focused resource areas. As dogs become proportionately fewer, they become more valuable, higher status within the community. And this makes sense, the wealthy Thule in the clan or tribe who controls a dog team can move faster and further, and carry more weight longer. This drives increasingly complex social hierarchies among the Thule, gradations of status and wealth within communities, and particularly between communities. Some Thule communities will have better access to fish or game resources, and be able to sustain larger dog populations, and therefore maintain social dominance. Access to dogs, or access to dogs abilities to transport goods and people is not necessarily automatically universal, but is something that the relatively poor must negotiate or bargain for with the relatively rich.
There may be some further diversification of Canine labour. We can assume that OTL Inuit, in addition to pack and sled animals, may have used canines as guard animals, hunting and tracking aids, possibly even war animals. In this timeline, with more root plants in the diet, Canines might be used to sniff out edible plants, particularly in the winter, the way pigs are used to sniff out truffles. Or they may be used in some cases as diggers.
Canine labour is essential to Thule culture, but as forces leading to an agricultural revolution build up, that creates a catch 22. The revolution is all about plants. Dogs are all about meat. At the time when the Thule may start to need canine labour the most, they might also find it in the most severely short supply.
