Now I am not saying dogs are the same as the big game hunting wolves that Mech has studied.
However, I don’t think you can base all of dog behavior off of this dominance literature, which actually comes from the work of Rudolf Schenkel. Schenkel studied captive packs of wolves in Switzerland that, as Dr. Mech pointed out, were unrelated assemblages of individuals.
Schenkel was operating in the culture of ethology within the German-speaking world, which, of course, was heavily influenced by people like Konrad Lorenz (a National Socialist scientist) and other Germans who saw the wolf as the ideal canine. It was wild and hard, just like the society that Germans dreamed of creating with people. The dog and the golden jackal were seen as the degenerates. The golden jackal was almost like the “Jewish” wild dog, while the domestic dog was the creation of too much coddling from the welfare state and other excesses of liberalism.
Although most of these ideas were discredited after the Second World War, these studies and this culture has tinctured our understanding of what dogs and wolves are.
We incorrectly assume that all wolves are like wild ones that live in northern tier and Canada and in northern Europe. What about the ones that live in India or the Middle East? What about the ones that live in Ethiopia? (Yes, those Ethiopian ones are different species, but they aren’t that different from the others.)
We also incorrectly assume that wolves have always behaved the way they do. I think this is a fundamental error.
It takes real work to socialize a modern wolf to a human, and it requires specialized formulas and taking the pups away from their mothers before they are 19 days. I don’t think that hunter-gathers were able to do those sorts of things.
That means that the wolves they domesticated had different tendencies than modern wolves do. Perhaps they had longer critical periods for socialization. Perhaps they were like virtually all other wild dogs that have never been hunted by man– extremely curious about us. If those were both true, then domesticating wolves would have been much easier. So easy that a cave man could do it.
I don’t think you’re getting very much from assuming that wolves and dogs have the same social structure, when it’s obvious that wolves don’t all have the same social structure.
And it also ignores that domestication has allowed dogs certain cognitive shortcuts that allow us to teach them rules and to give them more freedom. The average dog is capable of learning and internalizing rules that wolves would never be able to learn.
One thing I’ve always read was that socialized coyotes and wolves are nearly impossible to housebreak. They just don’t get it. And this sort of throws out the theory that dogs are den animals and won’t soil in the house because they think it’s their den.
What really happens is the dogs learn the rules from their humans where they are supposed to relieve themselves.
And the reason why dogs can do this and wolves can is that dogs learn rules. They seek social approval from people. Wolves might bond to us, but they don’t have the ability to bond with us in exactly the same fashion.
Dogs also need freedom to be dogs. This is always left out of dog behavior discussions, but dogs need to run off leash. They need to meet other dogs. They need smell them, lick them, and hump them (even if it is another dog of the same sex! Dogs do not have much use for our anthropomorphism or our puritanical sensitivities.) They need to self-anoint with disgusting substances and piss on things. They need to wallow in mud puddles and eat deer feces.
They need these things because they are dogs. What would you be like it if you never got to read a good book, listen to good music, or watch a good program on television? What if you never traveled, except to go to the doctor to get a shot or your reproductive organs removed?
I think you’d be pretty barmy.
The real cause of behavioral pathologies in dogs is not dominance. It’s an over-used term. It is that dogs are not allowed to act out parts of their nature. They are kept in suburban yards or in apartments 8, 9, 10, 12 or more hours a day. In most suburban yards, all dogs have to do is listen to the neighbors’ dogs bark at things and then eventually join right in.
The real problems that dogs are facing here is that their natures are forever being bent to suit our needs, and now their fundamental natures are reaching the breaking point.
Where I grew up, dogs were allowed to roam freely. These dogs never bit anyone. They were never in severe fights. They never tried to use aggression to control people because they had other things to think about. If you’re locked in a house and yard all day with nothing to do, at least some of you would develop some weird social pathologies, like trying to take over the house.
The real discussion about the best way to keep our dogs is trying to find some balance. Yes, give the dogs rules, but those rules should exist only to give the dog more safety and more freedom over his or her own life. And communities need to find ways of providing good off-leash spaces for dogs.
Dogs also have to be allowed to socialize as puppies. They need to grow up experiencing things. They do need some basic training here, but the really important thing is for puppies to see things like buildings, cars, strangers, horses, and all sorts of other things.
Just as wolves are far more complex than you could imagine, the relationship between man and dog is something far too complicated to get caught up in discussions of hierarchy. But just as not all human relations are based upon dominance and submission, the relations between dogs and between dogs and people cannot be so horribly reduced.
I am glad that the scholarship on wolves and dogs that was so tainted by Nazi and early twentieth century German science is now being replaced with better scholarship. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Lepzig and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest have finally begun to look at the domestic dog very differently. Their studies are shining light on the remarkable abilities that domestic dogs have evolved to live with these mercurial naked apes with nuclear weapons and God complexes.
And if we’re going to have a discussion about dog behavior and how to best keep them, that’s where we should be looking.
I personally don’t want to live with a pack of big game hunting wolves. I want to live with domestic dogs.
My dog is definitely better-behaved when she gets lots of off-leash walking. And I like her to go do her dog things while I do my human things, like standing in one place for a long time taking pictures. If I had to live somewhere I couldn’t run my dog off leash, I wouldn’t have a dog.
While the ancient origins of dogs are mighty interesting, I find basing training methods off of wolf behavior akin to basing marriage counseling off of the study of apes. It’s not 100% preposterous, but it’s entirely unlikely to produce any worthwhile breakthroughs.
If there’s a specific technique that works, it should stand on the merit of its own efficacy, not a division 10-100,000 years in the making.
Some points:
* Our ability to live with and communicate with the domestic dog is AMAZING!
* Our ability to live with and communicate with any other species, wolves among them, is highly limited and mostly unimpressive. Only the horse is even in the same time zone.
* The single most effective advance in dog training (IMO) is the clicker. This has nothing to do with wolves, wolf behavior, or any sort of animal ancestry.
* What more do we really want? Is there some major issue that is, as of yet, unsolved when it comes to understanding dogs, working with them, and training them? If there’s this big void that needs to be filled with pseudo-science and theories of parallelisms, what created that void and do we really need to fill it?
* Baring a universal translator gadget, I really can’t see any great advancements in the human-dog relationship… it’s pretty fantastic as it is now.
The way I see it, the big game hunting wolves are Neanderthals.
Dogs are modern humans. (Although Neanderthals are actually more distinct from us genetically than wolves are from dogs, I am still going with tho analogy.)
The cognitive abilities dogs have developed through domestication are only now beginning to be appreciated.
After the researchers began studying dogs, studying social carnivores has become very important to scientists wanting to study social cognition.
Some researchers have started looking at hyenas:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/science/04hyen.html
What, you mean screaming, waving my arms about wildly and throwing shit at my husband isn’t going to produce a harmonious marriage?
Probably not.
Unless your husband is into the Madwoman of Chaillot types.
Wolves still behave like the wolves before here, there and somewhere.
In Eastern Karelia, wolves go and eat the garbages in old people’s yards and farms.
There’s not much habitation there in Russian Karelia and the most of then are old.
It is a paradise for the animals.
On the contrary, in Finnish Lappland, they want to kill every wolf there, claiming that the wolves kill the reindeers.
The truth is that the car and train traffic kills far more reindeers than the wolves.
You might not believe this but the US has a fair number of wolves.
Not just in Alaska, but Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the UP of Michigan all have healthy wolf populations. The West has wolf populations that are reaching the level where they can be managed (and may have to be).
I’m getting in on this rather late(I’m away from computers a few days and man, Retrieverman, I can’t keep up!)–were you going to have another segment on the “Alpha Roll”? I gots PLENTY to say to that, and the many responses you got! Not necessarily contradictory, just a lot of experiences with the phenomenon in dogs, wolves, and people trying to be dogs or wolves! But back to THIS subject–yes, there can be GREAT differences between different subspecies of wolves in various, often vastly different environments, and areas where the pressures from humans also vary greatly, so it would not be suprising if wolves of the distant, prehistorical past were different from modern wolves in certain ways. Animals, wolves certainly, have different “cultures”, similar to humans, so some of the different behaviour is not necessarily instinctual, but learned. And wolves can be as individualistic as humans, that’s for sure! I do disagree that it is “complicated” to socialize wolves with humans–that needs to be more specifically stated that it is complicated for MODERN humans to properly socialize with wolves, in my opinion(even so, it CAN still be done). With our expectations of how we want our dogs to behave, our attitudes towards tamed wild animals(NOT the same as truly DOMESTICATED animals–people often use these terms–tame and domesticated–interchangeably, and they are both quite different phenomenon!) are prejudiced from the outset–and people DO have incredibly marvelous relationships with all kinds of “wild” animals besides dogs and horses–just not necessarily CONTROLLING relationships(hey, look at domestic cats, for example!), but quite extraordinary all the same–it is from such beginnings that domestication started in the first place, I believe. I also think dogs and wolves DO have the same BASIC social structure–domestication HAS changed a lot, but dogs and wolves still recognize and communicate with each other quite well(and I include coyotes in this), but other types of canids DO NOT have quite the same signals and behaviour–like African Wild Dogs and Dholes. And I think wolves can learn ANYTHING a dog can learn, and often learn it QUICKER, but they simply don’t wish to COMPLY most of the time! They are NOT automatically subserviant to humans–they have not been selected for thousands of years to be so. They most certainly CAN be housebroken–but they do not(nor do many dogs) recognize the INSIDE of a house as a “den”–a true den is a much smaller affair, of course(like a dog crate, for example!). But make no mistake, they can learn–it is just most people I have known who raised wolves, wolf hybrids, or coyotes as pets, were rotten, inconsistent trainers! Most modern humans are not as insistent as a wolf! Look at the wolves used for movie and T. V. work–that can involve some very specific training, and those trainers can get it done(although their methods may not always be the humane-est!). To have a good relationship with wolves in a tame(preferably not “captive”) situation, they need MORE freedom than dogs, which is what they can almost never be given, due to the human-developed environment most tame(and therefore captive) wolves must be kept in. But ancient hunter-gatherers did NOT have these modern restrictions–tamed wolves could come and go as they pleased–the ones that stayed around after sexual maturity were quite naturally, and without any forcing necessary, the ones that eventually led to domestic dogs. Common sense, really. And this could be viewed as a variety of an adaption of “Wolf Culture”. I like your view of wolves as Neanderthals, Retrieverman, and dogs as modern humans, but I would say wolves are more like “wild” hunter-gatherer peoples(of which we have so few left) and modrn humans are “domesticated”–fully modern physically, but different culturally, and the differnces between dogs and wolves is a matter of simply domestication, rather than speciazation. Make no mistake, DOMESTICATION is a BIG DEAL though!!
The thing about wolves is they might have bigger brains, but they have cognitive hang-ups that prevent them from learning things that dogs learn very easily– even so called-primitive dogs.
I don’t know if it’s willfulness or not, but they seem to never learn rules from people, which is why they are unsuitable as house pets.
Some SAR dogs apparently learn that their jobs are to rescue live people. If they find too many dead people, they stop working. They will often plant a live person for them to find, just to keep the morale up.
A book you might want to check out is this: http://www.amazon.com/If-Dogs-Could-Talk-Exploring/dp/0865476861
The thing about talking dogs is a bit far fetched, but the studies are fascinating!
Lots of comparative studies on wolves and bottle-raised wolves that have been kept in a human environment.
I’m not sure what types of things you think wolves have difficulty learning that is taught to dogs–I have seen wolves taught to “sit”, “come”, “down”, even to jump through a hoop! The movie wolves must be trained, in most cases, to station at a particular mark, which they do consistently. This is with all manner of distractions and crew people around, and off-leash–not easy for many dogs! My own wolf-hybrids I had in the past(low and mid and high percents) were all obedience trained in an official dog school, and were always some of the best scoring in the class!(I mainly took them all to dog school for the excellent socializing such an atmosphere provides, but they did great nonetheless!) They were also good sled dogs, competent and reliable on recall off leash, and no more difficult to house train than any other dogs I’ve had(despite everyone telling me all these things were impossible with even part-wolves!) So I just don’t see them as having some cognitive hang-up about learning from a human! One problem with a lot of wolf behaviour studies involving captive wolves, is that the researchers are scientists, NOT animal trainers, nor do they wish to unnaturally influence wolf behaviour–this is completely different from the typical pet/companion relationship possible with one of these animals. Sadly, most people I have seen with wolves or hybrids as pets/companions were POOR trainers, and many used the readily accepted, and inaccurate view that, “Oh, they CAN’T be trained”, as an excuse not to even TRY(some “stubborn” dog breeds have to contend with this foolish philosophy as well, like Siberian Huskies, for example). I was unwilling to accept that with my animals, and although my expectations were not high, and I would never have FORCED them to do things they didn’t want to(or weren’t “paid” for in treats!), I was pleasantly suprised at the results I got, and amazed how well-behaved my animals were in comparison to other peoples’ dogs! I was also told some African Wild Dogs I worked with at a Zoo were “untrainable”–a common statement describing African Wild Dogs in the literature(probably because nobody TRIED!). In a short period of time, I had 3 African Wild Dogs answering and stationing to their names, fairly competent on recall(important in shifting them on and off exhibit) and hand-feeding where before they would never willingly approach a human. And I DO NOT consider myself a training wizard–just a lot of patience, time, and basic common sense. The WILLINGNESS of domestic dogs to submit and be obediant to humans is definetely better by far, but make no mistake, wolves CAN be trained in basic stuff no different(in technique and results on basic stuff like “sit!”) than dogs.
Dogs can learn very sophisticated rules than wolves just can’t. There has never been a seeing-eye wolf. I have never read of a wolf that was as reliably house-broken as most domestic dogs are.
I also don’t think wolves could ever be as responsive to human body language as things like retrievers and border collies are.
Take this one:
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/06/10/smartdog.php
I still feel there is a vast difference between “can’t” and “won’t”! But I will agree that after thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding for specific purposes, dogs are superior for our uses over wolves–but that doesn’t mean wolves are incapable of understanding or of reading us. Wolves can pick up the most subtle cues from the prey animals they hunt, and this ability can certainly allow them to read our body language and expressions. There just isn’t as much contact or examples of it as with the millions of dog/human relationships that exist. And from experiences I’ve had with captive wolves and wolf dogs, they can learn to read people very well indeed–just not from an OBEDIENCE stand point. The wolf-hybrids I had were SO intuitive to strangers, that I learned very quickly to heed their behaviour around people–if they were leery of individual people(which was RARE with my heavily socialized animals) it behooved me to be leery also, as for sure, those individuals were up to no good. I have seen this in some of my dogs, too, but it was more pronounced in my part-wolves…..
In the experiments at Budapest, the wolves were raised exactly the same way domestic dogs were, and they had a very hard time locating food simply through gestures from humans. The dogs did better than chimps.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5598/1634
Thanks for the interesting articles, Retrieverman–I always enjoy reading about this stuff even if I might not agree 100%! I’m assuming because no one else is chiming in may be because this is an older older entry, and people have moved on, so I will continue this discussion as if I am communicating just one-on-one here–oops, gotta go just now and do a check on a duck with the zoo vets…..
….okay, back again–one thing I think I need to make clear in this discussion, that I might inadvertantly sound like I’m doing, is giving the impression that I am one of those people who thinks wolves are “more intelligent” than dogs over-all–I absolutely do not! I have gotten to hang out with lots of “wolf people”(scientists, behaviourists, and zoo keepers) over the years, and I’ve actually raised their ire on more than one occaision insistenting such sweeping generalizations are inaccurate. But these new experiments on domestic dog ability to “read” humans better, I feel like nit-picking about in the same way. Perhaps most people could care less about the distinction between “can’t” and “won’t”, but I think it is an enormous difference, and NOT recognizing that is what leads to these inaccurate sweeping generalizations regarding animal intelligence and cognitive ability, which leads to yet more misconceptions about animals(we gots plenty of them as it is!). I think this particular experiment had a lot of effort and thought put into it, and it was very interesting, but it still didn’t change my mind on this issue, for several reasons(which I am going into because–whether you agree or not, you hopefully will also find interesting and food-for-thought and further pondering on this fascinating subject). One biggie is that one must be very careful with such experiments’ conclusions–ESPECIALLY ones where so much time, effort and expense has been put into them–as there is a lot of human political pressure to achieve the desired results, and this inevitably skews the analysis in favor of the experimentors’ preconceptions. This particular one had lots of “seemed” and “appeared-to-be” kind of comments(which were an attempt at honesty, at least, which I appreciate) which lead me to believe that no definite conclusions can be made from it. Another GLARING error, in my opinion, was that the wolves and dogs were NOT exactly treated and trained equally–they made a heroic attempt to up to a point, but then the wolves got “abandoned”(and this WOULD BE the WOLVES’ viewpoint, no doubt) by their surrogate humans, into an enclosure with a pack of strange wolves–this would IMMEDIATELY begin to skew the results, I think. Up to that point, it seems the wolves were performing competently on basic obedience issues quite favorably with the dogs–then they stopped responding consistently–with my experienes, this really stood out as quite unfair to the wolves. They are extremely sensitive animals–it can be quite difficult to gain their trust and cooperation, but easy as heck to create distrust, and lose that close relationship forever–most dogs are much less sensitive this way(but there certainly are exceptions there, too). My own wolf-hybrids could be very aloof and uncooperative if I had to be gone even just a day or two(which I only rarely, RARELY dared do), upon my return–it took awhile to get back to normal. I can well see WHY these wolves, formerly CONSTANTLY in touch with their human caretaker, suddenly becoming aloof and less responsive after the switch. They would also be more sensitive and concerned about what their actions were having on their new pack-mates, and this very real tension almost certainly made them less focused on “their” people. And they were also maturing, and very likely had less interest in obeying a human–none of these things meant they were less able than the dogs to “read” human expressions and follow human commands. I personally–this particular experiment aside–can well believe domestic dogs have greater ability to read us because THEY WANT TO, and have been bred and selected for this for centuries. If some other critter–a wolf or an ape or a cat–doesn’t respond consistently or willingly, I do not think this automatically implies they are somehow inferior at reading us. I REALLY have a problem with the notion that chimpanzees are not as good at reading human cues and expressions–I lived with both wild chimps and baboons in Africa for months, and I can tell you, they can read you like a book! But they have zero desire to OBEY you! But if you are exploitable in some way that they think will benefit THEM, watch out! Chimps in captivity are notorious for becoming unmamageable upon reaching maturity–their lack of cooperation is NOT that they can’t read us as well, but exactly the opposite! They know darn well they can overpower us and dominate us, and they have no desire to try and please us the way dogs do. The same with captive wolves(depending on the circumstances of captivity–I would trust a captive wolf I knew WAY more than a captive chimp!). All this boils down to a DESIRE to communicate and cooperate, not a lack of ability to do so(I think), and THAT is what makes most dogs so special as companions for us! Am I nit-picking here?
Another MAJOR point, I think, in this experiment, is the basic etiquette among wolves and apes/monkeys of not staring at each other–this is considered threatening behaviour among many social critters. Their view of a dog staring intently at it’s humans(waiting for that next cue) would probably be, “My, what a rude, cheeky dog!” So perhaps dogs have been selected for “rudeness” as well as a cooperative spirit! A lot of “non-doggy” people would probably agree!