From The Economist.
Basically, this study replacates a study done by Brian Hare in which wolves dogs were n tested for their observational learning. Hare’s studies did use wolves that were not kept as dogs.
However, here’s the flaw. The study that Hare did not come up with the methdology. The researchers at Eotovos Lorand University in Hungary came up with them.
They have performed numerous experiments on the dogs and wolves and all of them show the dogs are better at this than wolves are. And they used wolves that were kept as dogs.
I don’t know why this study is so different. It may just be a fluke.
And we get these in science.
And when this happens, we play around a bit to see what is methodological issue.
And if we can’t, we return to what we already know has been accepted through other experimentation. It is called parsimony.
Thus, this study is interesting, but my guess is that wolves are incapable of learning from people at the same level as dogs.
It would make sense. Back in the day, people were not that squeamish about putting down a dog that couldn’t learn it’s job or was uncontrollable (especially hunting or working dogs). People have been selecting for trainability in dogs for a long time, so what we have now SHOULD be ‘fine tuned’ to be a lot more responsive to us than a random wild wolf.
I very much agree.
But I also don’t think we should ignore what we’ve selected for in wolves. Yes, humans have played a role in shaping how wolves have evolved. I’ve never known any species in the wild to do to another what we’ve done to wolves. We’ve killed them in the most bizarre and creative ways imaginable.
When you poison, trap, and shoot a species like that, you are selecting for more nervous animals. If a wolf didn’t have extreme nervousness and very high levels of neophobia (fear of new things), it got killed. Those animals were more likely to reproduce, but over the generations it has produce rather nervous, fearful animals that often are aggressive with each other. Wolves kill strange wolves, dogs, and coyotes. But Karl Bodmer observed wolves in the Old West sharing their kills with dogs. Lewis and Clark had their Newfoundland running loose with them the whole time, and no wolf killed him. Today, he would be wolf meat if he were running in wolf country. Lewis and Clark also killed a wolf with a knife, using a piece of meat to entice him closer.
My theory is that the ancestral wolves from when modern dogs and wolves descend were much more curious and tolerant animals than the modern animals are. Otherwise, they would have been impossible to domesticate, even if you accept Coppinger’s theory that they were just scavengers that we tolerated. Today, you cannot even imprint a wolf pup unless it is taken from its mother before it is three weeks old. However, dogs can imprint and be socialized to other animals if they are introduced within the twelve to sixteen week “critical period.”
My theory is somewhat backed up by the ability of some wolf researchers to get far close to Arctic wolves than other wolves. Arctic wolves have been persecuted, but not to the level of other wolves. Further, captive Artic wolf pups can be socialized to people, although rarely, if they remain with their mothers.
When people persecute an animal to that level, it changes its innate behavior.
Some scientists think that early agricultural man in Africa persecuted the hippopotamus rather hard, and as result, hippos seem to have an almost inherited antipathy toward our species.