It was breeding, genetics, manipulation of life. You and your dogs didn't have to hunt any more. They had come to live in the human tribe, where the dog thugs helped boss them around and, at the same time, kept those menaces, undomesticated predators, away. People as hunters might have been meddling around with dogs, but that was only being a bit insolent about the laws of nature. The pastoralists were actually raising their fists to nature's dictatorship.
Nature is chance, cruel chance.
From the time a beam of sunlight just happened to filter through a molecule of chlorophyll in a random pool full of amino acids on a planet where water just happened to exist in its universally rarest form, liquid. . . If it was a dry year out on the plains and the wildebeest didn't turn up, the humans and the lions and the hunting dogs and the hyenas lost a certain proportion of their population - the pups, the cubs and the children, mainly. If your best hunter made a bad throw and only wounded the buffalo and then was gored to death, there went your best hunter and many dinners and ultimately, perhaps, Grandmother and a couple of babies. But with pastoralism, if it doesn't rain, you up stakes and walk along with your specially brain-damaged herds until you find a place where it has rained. And if a hunter is gored, that's his own fault and it serves him right for being atavistic and macho and trying to recapture the old days - or probably just lusting after something besides mutton.