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Dogs and Wolves in Colonial America

2025· reference-entry· en· W4417350875 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Strother E. Roberts

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of American History · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
Field
Topic
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCONQUESTIndigenousColonialismLivestockHerdingPopulationDomestication

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Wherever colonizing Europeans settled in the Americas from the 1490s through the turn of the 19th century, they brought their dogs with them. In New Spain, New France, New Netherland, and the Anglo-American colonies, European dogs participated actively in the colonizing project. War dogs helped in the conquest of Indigenous lands, guard dogs stood watch over enslaved laborers, and herding dogs protected the livestock species that colonizers introduced to the Americas and upon which colonial economies depended. At the same time, European colonizers often viewed wolves and Indigenous dogs as a threat. As conquest and epidemic disease devastated Indigenous human communities, their dogs either perished as well or were left to live feral in the countryside, where they were persecuted as threats to livestock. Wolves fared no better: private colonists and their governments hunted and trapped them, all while clearing the land upon which these predators depended to make room for agriculture and European livestock. By the end of the colonial period, both wolves and Indigenous-descended dogs had largely been eliminated from the portions of North America occupied by European settlers. Meanwhile, North America’s population of European-descended dogs continued to grow and expand their range, pushing into the continental interior as they accompanied settlers from Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.687
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.000
Bibliometrics0.0060.003
Science and technology studies0.0000.010
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.037
GPT teacher head0.333
Teacher spread0.297 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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