A new study has found that puppies have a gift for understanding human gestures that their close relatives, wolves, don’t have, not even pups raised by humans.
“Dogs are born with the ability to understand that we’re communicating with them and working with them,” said lead author Hannah Salomons, a doctoral student in social cognition at Duke University in North Carolina. ”
Hound puppies from the nonprofit Canine Companions for Independence participated in the study. Image credit: Jared Lazarus, canine.org
This idea is backed up by findings published in the journal Current Biology, showing that domestication of wolves into dogs changed the way dogs think.
For the study, researchers compared the cognitive abilities of 44 puppies between 5 and 18 weeks of age and 37 wolves. Wolf pups were born and raised at the Wildlife Science Center in Stacey, Minnesota, and have had almost constant human contact from shortly after birth, with keepers spending most of their time with the pups, hand-feeding them, and sleeping with them at night. .
By contrast, puppies stayed with their mothers until 6 weeks of age and with their litter of companions until 8 weeks of age. During this time, their interaction with humans is minimal. After eight weeks, the puppies were living with human households, and most of the puppies in the study underwent cognitive tests before being adopted.
In a cognitive test, researchers hid food in one of two bowls, then pointed and looked at the bowl containing the food, or placed a building block next to the bowl to let the puppies know where things were.
Compared to wolves, puppies were twice as likely to receive human cues, and they headed straight for the bowl of food. Many puppies follow the prompts on their first try without any special training.
In another test, puppies were given a container with food that was airtight so they couldn’t open. Still, wolves usually try to open containers on their own, while puppies spend more time making eye contact with humans and asking for help.
The study also found that puppies were 30 times more likely than wolves to approach strangers, even though they had relatively little early human contact. “For the puppies we studied, if you walked into their enclosure, they would surround you and want to climb on top of you and lick your face, whereas most wolves would hide in corners,” Salomons said. .”
In non-social cognitive tasks such as memory tests, there were no differences between the two groups of pups.
The study supports the “domestication hypothesis,” which states that ancestors of dogs, selected for their friendliness and attractiveness to humans, would pass on their cooperative genes for generations to eventually become domesticated dogs.
