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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:Selection of behavioral traits holds a prominent role in the domestication of animals, and domesticated species are generally assumed to express reduced fear and reactivity toward novel stimuli compared to their ancestral species. However, very few studies have explicitly tested this proposed link between domestication and reduced fear responses. Of the limited number of studies experimentally addressing the alterations of fear during domestication, the majority has been done on canids. These studies on foxes, wolves, and dogs suggest that decreased expression of fear in domesticated animals is linked to a domestication-driven delay in the first onset of fearful behavior during early ontogeny. Thus, wolves are expected to express exaggerated fearfulness earlier during ontogeny compared to dogs. However, while adult dogs are less fearful toward novelty than adult wolves and wolf-dog hybrids, consensus is lacking on when differences in fear expression arise in wolves and dogs. Here we present the first extended examination of fear development in hand-raised dogs and European gray wolves, using repeated novel object tests from 6 to 26 weeks of age. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence in support of an increase in fearfulness in wolves with age or a delayed onset of fear response in dogs compared to wolves. Instead, we found that dogs strongly reduced their fear response in the period between 6 and 26 weeks of age, resulting in a significant species difference in fear expression toward novelty from the age of 18 weeks. Critically, as wolves did not differ in their fear response toward novelty over time, the detected species difference was caused solely by a progressive reduced fear response in dogs. Our results thereby suggest that species differences in fear of novelty between wolves and dogs are not caused by a domestication-driven shift in the first onset of fear response. Instead, we suggest that a loss of sensitivity toward novelty with age in dogs causes the difference in fear expression toward novelty in wolves and dogs.

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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