An incidental mention of jackals in a book made me curious.  Where did they come on the canine family tree?  I looked it up and was surprised at the results.  Based on DNA studies, they are further removed from the dog than the gray wolf is.  The lineage is quite ancient.  Quite clearly, this is a successful form of predator.  They’re actually omnivores, but they do hunt.  Just a few days ago I saw a red fox while out on my early morning jog.  As I watched it, and it watched me, I was thinking how like a dog it is.  Foxes are, however, still further from dogs on the family tree of life, falling into a separate phylum.  (I use that word advisedly, since since high school it seems that cladistics have become so complex—not that they were ever easy—that you need an electron microscope to tease similar creatures apart.)  When I see coyotes on the jog (quite rare), it seems they are a step further from dogs than wolves.

I grew up with dogs.  Our first lasting one was a good part beagle, and, in my opinion the best dog ever.  We don’t have pets now.  My wife tends to be allergic and pet care complicates travel (when we can afford it), but I often marvel at how well dogs have adapted to us.  And vice versa.  People now take their dogs into grocery stores and other shops.  While in an outdoor goods store recently, I was surprised to see a dog and its human pet stroll by.  The dog was as high as my chest.  (Or at least rib cage.)  And yet, in the wild, a jackal could well attack you.  And they’re biblical.  So biblical that they got picked up as the “father” of the Antichrist in The Omen.  Dogs, in the biblical world, were considered unclean.  I suspect people kept them as working pets anyway.  That’s why our species domesticated them.  The jackal, on the other hand, is a wild animal.

If I saw a jackal while jogging I’d probably mistake it for a dog.  Depending.  Only long hours of studying have taught me to distinguish coyotes (which I very rarely see) from dogs.  Since jackals aren’t native to the Americas, the coyote fills much the same ecological niche.  Since about 2016 they can be found in any area of the continental United States.  They even adapt to city life.  I guess the jackal is the country cousin.  Coyotes attack humans more than gray wolves do, probably because there are many more coyotes.  And they are just about everywhere.  And the reference to the jackal I was was, I assure you, truly only incidental.