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Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves.

ABSTRACT: Cooperation is thought to be highly dependent on tolerance. For example, it has been suggested that dog-human cooperation has been enabled by selecting dogs for increased tolerance and reduced aggression during the course of domestication ('emotional reactivity hypothesis'). However, based on observations of social interactions among members of captive packs, a few dog-wolf comparisons found contradictory results. In this study, we compared intraspecies aggression and tolerance of dogs and wolves raised and kept under identical conditions by investigating their agonistic behaviours and cofeeding during pair-wise food competition tests, a situation that has been directly linked to cooperation. We found that in wolves, dominant and subordinate members of the dyads monopolized the food and showed agonistic behaviours to a similar extent, whereas in dogs these behaviours were privileges of the high-ranking individuals. The fact that subordinate dogs rarely challenged their higher-ranking partners suggests a steeper dominance hierarchy in dogs than in wolves. Finally, wolves as well as dogs showed only rare and weak aggression towards each other. Therefore, we suggest that wolves are sufficiently tolerant to enable wolf-wolf cooperation, which in turn might have been the basis for the evolution of dog-human cooperation (canine cooperation hypothesis).

SUBMITTER: Range F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4424647 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves.

Range Friederike F Ritter Caroline C Virányi Zsófia Z

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20150501 1807

Cooperation is thought to be highly dependent on tolerance. For example, it has been suggested that dog-human cooperation has been enabled by selecting dogs for increased tolerance and reduced aggression during the course of domestication ('emotional reactivity hypothesis'). However, based on observations of social interactions among members of captive packs, a few dog-wolf comparisons found contradictory results. In this study, we compared intraspecies aggression and tolerance of dogs and wolve ...[more]

PMID: 25904666

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Project description:Adaptation during the domestication from wolves (Canis lupus) to dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) is a debated ecological topic. Changes in food and environment are major divergences in the domestication of dogs. Gut microbes play an important role in animal adaptation to the food and environmental changes. In this study, shotgun sequencing was performed to compare the species diversity and functional diversity of gut microbes in wild wolves (group CLW, n = 3), captive wolves (group CLC, n = 4), and domestic dogs (group CLF, n = 4). The results found that Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Fusobacteria, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria were the most abundant phyla and Bacteroides, Fusobacterium, Prevotella, Megamonas, Paraprevotella, Faecalibacterium, Clostridium were the most abundant genera in the gut of wolves and dogs. Groups CLW, CLC and CLF have shown significant difference in gut microbial species diversity and functional diversity. Bacteroides, Fusobacterium and Faecalibacterium were most abundant genera in groups CLW, CLC and CLF, respectively. Their abundance varied significantly among groups. Compared to the wild wolves, the intestinal microbiol genes of domestic dogs were significantly enriched in the carbohydrate metabolism pathway of KEGG database. One hundred and seventy-seven enzymes were detected with significantly higher abundance in group CLF than that in group CLW, and 49 enzymes showed extremely significant higher abundance in group CLF than that in group CLW (q < 0.01) base on the function abundance annotated in CAZy database. It is noteworthy that there were also significant differences in the abundance of 140 enzymes between groups CLC and CLW (q < 0.05). Clustering analysis based on both the species and the function abundance of intestinal microbiota all found that groups CLC and CLF clustered into one branch, while samples from group CLW clustered into the other branch. This result suggests that captive wolves are more similar to domestic dogs than wild wolves in both species composition and function composition of intestinal microbiota.

Project description:Understanding how closely related wildlife species and their domesticated counterparts exchange or share parasites, or replace each other in parasite life cycles, is of great interest to veterinary and human public health, and wildlife ecology. Grey wolves (Canis lupus) host and spread endoparasites that can either directly infect canid conspecifics or their prey serving as intermediate hosts of indirectly transmitted species. The wolf recolonization of Central Europe represents an opportunity to study parasite transmission dynamics between wildlife and domestic species for cases when a definitive host returns after local extinction - a situation equivalent to a 'removal experiment'. Here we investigate whether the re-appearance of wolves has increased parasite pressure on hunting dogs - a group of companion animals of particular interest as they have a similar diet to wolves and flush wolf habitats when hunting. We compared prevalence (P) and species richness (SR) of helminths and the protozoan Sarcocystis to determine whether they were higher in hunting dogs from wolf areas (ndogs = 49) than a control area (ndogs = 29) without wolves. Of particular interest were S. grueneri and S. taeniata, known as 'wolf specialists'. Five helminth and 11 Sarcocystis species were identified, of which all helminths and eight Sarcocystis species were shared between dogs and wolves. Overall prevalence and species richness of helminths (P:38.5% vs. 24.1%; SRmean:0.4 vs. 0.3 species) and Sarcocystis (P:63.3% vs. 65.5%, SRmean:2.1 vs. 1.8 species) did not differ between study sites. However, hunting dogs were significantly more likely to be infected with S. grueneri in wolf areas (P:45.2% vs. 10.5%; p = 0.035). The findings suggest that wolves indirectly increase S. grueneri infection risk for hunting dogs since cervids are intermediate hosts and occasionally fed to dogs. Furthermore, a periodic anthelminthic treatment of hunting dogs may be an effective measure to control helminth infections regardless of wolf presence.

Dataset Information

Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves.

Publications

Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves.

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