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Societies of wolves and free-ranging dogs
\"Wolves are charismatic emblems of wilderness. Dogs, which descended from wolves, are models of urbanity. Do free-ranging dogs revert to pack living or are their societies only reminiscent of a wolfish heritage? Focusing on behavioral ecology, this is the first book to assess societies of both gray wolves and domestic dogs living as urban strays and in the feral state. It provides a comprehensive review of wolf genetics, particularly of New World wolves and their mixture of wolf, coyote and dog genomes. Spotte draws on the latest scientific findings across the specialized fields of genetics, sensory biology, reproductive physiology, space use, foraging ecology and socialization. This interdisciplinary approach provides a solid foundation for a startling and original comparison of the social lives of wolves and free-ranging dogs. Supplementary material, including a full glossary of terms, is available online at www.cambridge.org/9781107015197\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Societies of Wolves and Free-ranging Dogs
Wolves are charismatic emblems of wilderness. Dogs, which descended from wolves, are models of urbanity. Do free-ranging dogs revert to pack living or are their societies only reminiscent of a wolfish heritage? Focusing on behavioral ecology, this is the first book to assess societies of both gray wolves and domestic dogs living as urban strays and in the feral state. It provides a comprehensive review of wolf genetics, particularly of New World wolves and their mixture of wolf, coyote and dog genomes. Spotte draws on the latest scientific findings across the specialized fields of genetics, sensory biology, reproductive physiology, space use, foraging ecology and socialization. This interdisciplinary approach provides a solid foundation for a startling and original comparison of the social lives of wolves and free-ranging dogs. Supplementary material, including a full glossary of terms, is available online at www.cambridge.org/9781107015197.
eBook
Anthropogenic food resources sustain wolves in conflict scenarios of Western Iran
This study was funded by the Iranian National Science Foundation (INSF), the National Geographic Society (grant GEFNE128-14toJVL-B) and the UK Wolf Conservation Trust. J.V.L.B. was supported by a Ramon&Cajal research contract (RYC-2015-18932) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.
Journal Article
Numerical assessment in the wild: insights from social carnivores
Playback experiments have proved to be a useful tool to investigate the extent to which wild animals understand numerical concepts and the factors that play into their decisions to respond to different numbers of vocalizing conspecifics. In particular, playback experiments have broadened our understanding of the cognitive abilities of historically understudied species that are challenging to test in the traditional laboratory, such as members of the Order Carnivora. Additionally, playback experiments allow us to assess the importance of numerical information versus other ecologically important variables when animals are making adaptive decisions in their natural habitats. Here, we begin by reviewing what we know about quantity discrimination in carnivores from studies conducted in captivity. We then review a series of playback experiments conducted with wild social carnivores, including African lions, spotted hyenas and wolves, which demonstrate that these animals can assess the number of conspecifics calling and respond based on numerical advantage. We discuss how the wild studies complement those conducted in captivity and allow us to gain insights into why wild animals may not always respond based solely on differences in quantity. We then consider the key roles that individual discrimination and cross-modal recognition play in the ability of animals to assess the number of conspecifics vocalizing nearby. Finally, we explore new directions for future research in this area, highlighting in particular the need for further work on the cognitive basis of numerical assessment skills and experimental paradigms that can be effective in both captive and wild settings.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.
Journal Article
Social Modulation of Contagious Yawning in Wolves
On the basis of observational and experimental evidence, several authors have proposed that contagious yawn is linked to our capacity for empathy, thus presenting a powerful tool to explore the root of empathy in animal evolution. The evidence for the occurrence of contagious yawning and its link to empathy, however, is meagre outside primates and only recently domestic dogs have demonstrated this ability when exposed to human yawns. Since dogs are unusually skillful at reading human communicative behaviors, it is unclear whether this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the evolutionary history of mammals or evolved de novo in dogs as a result of domestication. Here we show that wolves are capable of yawn contagion, suggesting that such ability is a common ancestral trait shared by other mammalian taxa. Furthermore, the strength of the social bond between the model and the subject positively affected the frequency of contagious yawning, suggesting that in wolves the susceptibility of yawn contagion correlates with the level of emotional proximity. Moreover, female wolves showed a shorter reaction time than males when observing yawns of close associates, suggesting that females are more responsive to their social stimuli. These results are consistent with the claim that the mechanism underlying contagious yawning relates to the capacity for empathy and suggests that basic building blocks of empathy might be present in a wide range of species.
Journal Article
Wolves Are Better Imitators of Conspecifics than Dogs
Domestication is thought to have influenced the cognitive abilities of dogs underlying their communication with humans, but little is known about its effect on their interactions with conspecifics. Since domestication hypotheses offer limited predictions in regard to wolf-wolf compared to dog-dog interactions, we extend the cooperative breeding hypothesis suggesting that the dependency of wolves on close cooperation with conspecifics, including breeding but also territory defense and hunting, has created selection pressures on motivational and cognitive processes enhancing their propensity to pay close attention to conspecifics' actions. During domestication, dogs' dependency on conspecifics has been relaxed, leading to reduced motivational and cognitive abilities to interact with conspecifics. Here we show that 6-month-old wolves outperform same aged dogs in a two-action-imitation task following a conspecific demonstration. While the wolves readily opened the apparatus after a demonstration, the dogs failed to solve the problem. This difference could not be explained by differential motivation, better physical insight of wolves, differential developmental pathways of wolves and dogs or a higher dependency of dogs from humans. Our results are best explained by the hypothesis that higher cooperativeness may come together with a higher propensity to pay close attention to detailed actions of others and offer an alternative perspective to domestication by emphasizing the cooperativeness of wolves as a potential source of dog-human cooperation.
Journal Article
The role of life experience in affecting persistence: A comparative study between free-ranging dogs, pet dogs and captive pack dogs
Persistence in object manipulation has been consistently associated with problem-solving success and it is known to be affected, at the individual level, by life experience. Differences in life experiences are particularly poorly studied in the problem-solving context and mainly refer to the comparison between wild and captive animals. Dogs represent interesting study subjects, since dog populations differ widely in their life experiences. In this comparative study we investigated subjects' persistence when presenting a novel object containing food that could not be accessed (impossible task) to three dog populations with very diverse life experiences: free-ranging village dogs (in Morocco), pet dogs (in Vienna) and captive pack living dogs (Wolf Science Center-WSC). We found that pet dogs and captive dogs (WSC) were more manipulative and persistent than free-ranging dogs. The low persistence of free ranging-dogs is unlikely the effect of a lack of exposure to objects, since they are confronted with many human' artefacts in their environment daily. Instead, we suggest that the higher persistence of captive dogs and pet dogs in comparison to free-ranging dogs might be due to their increased experience of human-mediated object interaction. This provides subjects with a socially guided experience in manipulating and interacting with objects increasing their motivation to engage in such tasks.
Journal Article
Neophilia in wolves and dogs
The study of domestication provides a unique opportunity to analyze the effects of natural selection in the attraction towards novelty, because selective pressures on domesticated animals are often greatly diminished or different from their wild counterparts. In this study, we investigated the neophilic levels of three groups of canids differing in their level of contact with human environments both from an evolutionary and ontogenetic perspective: wolves, pack-living dogs, and pet dogs. In order to study their neophilic response, we presented the animals with two objects. The first of these objects was displayed in the animals’ enclosure for several days. After the animals were habituated to this first object, the second one was introduced together with the first one in a shorter test session meant to explore their preferences for either of the objects. We predicted that dogs —and pet dogs in particular— to display higher levels of neophilia, because human-created environments tend to change at a faster pace, and thus, a higher drive to explore these changes would be more beneficial than in a comparably more stable environment. Our results show no apparent differences between the groups in terms of latency to approach the new object, nor in the identity of the object they approached first. Nonetheless, all groups interacted more with the new object during the test phase. Wolves also interacted longer with the object presented in the first phase of the experiment.
Journal Article
Differences in dogs’ and wolves’ human-directed greeting behaviour: facial expressions, body language, and the problem of human biases
Dogs and wolves communicate effectively with humans, yet differences in their human-directed facial expressions and the role of relationship strength in shaping these behaviours remain poorly understood. This study explored the facial expressions of human-socialized wolves and dogs when greeting a bonded or familiar human through a fence. We hypothesised that differences would arise due to the domestication process, shaped further by the strength of their relationship. Additionally considering the bidirectionality integral to greeting interactions, we explored whether humans show different facial displays toward dogs versus wolves, expecting stronger differences in less bonded human partners due to unconscious biases. There was little overall difference between wolves’ and dogs’ facial expressions. However, wolves mainly displayed attentive, forward-directed ears, whereas dogs exhibited more ear positions associated with ambivalence or submission, such as rotated and downward-pushed ears. Dogs spent more time in proximity, gazing and tail wagging towards the human than wolves while both species showed more displacement behaviours (paw lift, whining, yawn) with bonded than familiar human partners. Interestingly, humans displayed more frequent, intense, and positive facial expressions toward dogs than wolves, suggesting implicit biases in human attitudes that were only partially influenced by familiarity. These results highlight the complexity of (studying) human-animal interactions. To what extent dogs’ submissive yet human-seeking behaviour is indeed species-specific, or rather results from biased human treatment during their life, and which specific mechanisms drove the likely bidirectional influence remains to be explored.
Journal Article