Though dogs seemed engaged, they approached the food one at a time, “very respectfully waiting for one to finish before the other started,” she says, which prohibited them from testing out teamwork. Meanwhile, the wolves cooperated well, working together on the level of chimpanzees, according to Helen Briggs at the BBC.
The study also shows that researchers need to conduct more studies on free-ranging dogs, reports Ed Yong at The Atlantic. Similar studies of pet dogs show they work much more cooperatively, likely because they are trained or educated by their human companions. While most people in the United States think of dogs as the popcorn-stealing pal that watches movies in their lap, 80 percent of dogs in the world live wild in the streets of villages or agricultural areas.
“If I ask people to close their eyes and think of a dog, everyone thinks of a pet dog,” Marshall-Pescini tells Yong. “But pet dogs are a really recent invention and free-ranging dogs are more representative of the earlier stages of domestication. We need to base our theories on a different understanding of what a dog is.”
Anyone who’s watched a dogsled team in action knows that dogs are capable of teamwork. Many researchers even believe that due to domestication, dogs are likely more cooperative than their wild wolf cousins. But as Elizabeth Pennisi reports for Science, a new study shows just the opposite, suggesting that wild wolves work together much more coherently than dogs.
When the animals tested were not initially trained to pull the ropes, five out of seven wolf pairs were able to figure out the test and cooperate enough to get the food in at least one trial. For the dogs, only one pair in eight cooperated enough to figure out the test—and they only accomplished it in a single trial.
Is Your Pet The Alpha Dog?
Let’s examine the evidence and see what science has to say. Veterinarian behaviorist, Dr. Ian Dunbar has called dogs “loose, transitory associations” rather than packs. However, family members are much more appropriate. Just as I wouldn’t call my son, daughter, or family member submissive/dominant to me any more than I would claim they are members of my pack. They are members of my family. Regardless of similar DNA, dogs are not wolves just as even though we share nearly identical DNA, humans are not bonobos or chimpanzees.
I will cover domesticated dogs, not wolves, wild canids, or free-ranging wild dogs, however, it is important to mention wolves because most antiquated theories about domesticated dogs are derived from people’s misguided connection between dog and wolf behavior. Families living with dogs do not constitute pack animals (sorry Cesar Millan) nor should they be treated that way. Contemporary Certified Dog Behaviorists, experts, professionals, and scientists refer to dogs as family members.
In short hunting reduces the adult wolf to an infantile state. The combative moose, musk ox or bison, attracts and pressurizes the adult mind of the wolf, regressing it in its emotional memory bank back to its earliest litter experiences. And given its alignment and synchronization about a common object of attraction, just as it once was as a group aligned and synchronized around its mother’s nipples, the puppy-minded wolf begins to feel uninhibited and will experience a total release if and when their quarry becomes con-fused. In the hunt it is regressed from seeing the prey as an intimidating elder, to seeing the prey as a flow rendering MOTHER, who once brought to ground, then ingestion can begin.
I don’t believe it would take much to reverse the tide, in fact we see the signature of the pack instincts in problem behavior every day. In the right environment, with the right prey animal, it would all come back.
This led me to make a distinction between the pack and a group. The pack was the adult mind that displaced the puppy perspective due to life under a high degree of tension. This was the building up of an emotional charge that had two diametrically opposed impacts on the behavior of the individual. On the one hand to escape the pressure of pack life the wolf would be compelled to go off and make contact along the path of highest resistance, i.e., hunt a large, dangerous prey. This squared up perfectly with my observation that dogs that were dominated as puppies by owners and trainers became more aggressive towards people as they became older. But this was a kind of defensive aggression of an emotional overload variety, it offered relief from pack life, but was qualitatively different from joie-de-joie YaBaDaBa-Doo let-me-at-‘im type of aggression I was seeing in the best police dogs, and so that once the fight was over there were no residual hard feelings, the criminal cuffed in the front seat with the dog now calm and relaxed in the back, and this was back in the days before cages separating the dog from the front were standard operating procedure.
“Regarding packs… in the 1960’s I lived in an urban area in Quezon City (Philippines). There were groups of dogs that roamed the streets and appeared to have formed affiliations based on geography. Each street appeared to have its own pack. If a stray dog wandered onto a street where he didn’t “belong”, the pack on that street came together to attack and/or drive that dog out. The dogs also challenged people at times, but I’m not sure what the circumstances were. I was in high school at the time and really didn’t know anything about dog behavior. However, we humans did observe aggressive behavior from these “packs” of dogs and we believed they posed a threat to us and other animals.”
Question: If wolves hunt in packs—and if hunting begat the dog—why don’t free ranging dogs live in packs?