Résumé
Dog domestication is probably the result of the forging of particularly close relationships between two social species, humans and wolves, around 15,000 years ago. However, a few thousand years later, wolves were progressively excluded from human settlements because of livestock domestication. Then, dogs and wolves took radically different historical pathways, dogs becoming more and more integrated into human societies whereas wolves were rejected and persecuted in large parts of their range until recently. Indeed, under the combined effects of rural abandonment and nature protection laws, wolves are now coming back to their former territories and their populations co-occur not only with humans but also with large populations of dogs, either owned or free-ranging. This co-occurrence produces numerous hybrids, causing difficulties for conservation scientists and wildlife managers. The development of the wolf-dog hybrid problem highlights underlying categorizations behind scientific discourses and questions the relevance of established categories and borders – both interspecific and domestic/wild ones – to describe the diversity of our relationships with animals.