Many dogs are naturals at displaying affection toward people. Now we know that wolves, like humans, can form strong bonds with people who care for them. This was reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution on September 20.
Researchers at Stockholm University in Sweden tested 10 wolves and 12 dogs using a behavioral test created specifically to measure canid attachment behaviors. In this test, 23-week-old wolves spontaneously distinguished between a familiar person and a stranger just like dogs did, with the familiar person displaying more proximity-seeking maand affiliative behaviors. Furthermore, the familiar person’s presence served as a social stress buffer for the wolves, calming them in a stressful circumstance. These results add to a growing body of evidence that disproves the idea that dogs didn’t learn how to bond with people until at least 15,000 years ago, when they were brought up by humans.
As stated by Dr. Christina Hansen Wheat, PhD in Ethology from Stockholm University, Sweden, “We felt that there was a need to thoroughly test this.” I believe it is now appropriate to entertain the notion that, if variation in human-directed attachment behavior exists in wolves, this behavior could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication. This idea is supported by earlier studies that made significant contributions to this question.
Understanding how domestication affects behavior is something that Dr. Hansen Wheat is interested in. She and her team raised wolf and dog puppies from the age of 10 days and subjected them to various behavioral tests to investigate this. In one of those tests, a familiar person and a stranger alternately enter and exit a test room to put the animal in an unsettling and stressful situation. The test’s underlying theory is that by introducing this unstable environment, attachment behaviors like proximity seeking will be stimulated. It was originally designed to evaluate attachment in human infants.
In essence, the purpose of the Strange Situation Test was to determine whether or not wolves and dogs could distinguish between a familiar person and a stranger. In other words, did they greet and make physical contact with the familiar person more often than they did with the stranger? If wolves and dogs behaved in the same way, it would indicate that this ability is not specific to dogs and has not evolved that way.
Dr. Hansen Wheat states, “That was exactly what we saw.” It was abundantly clear that the wolves, like the dogs, valued familiarity over unfamiliarity. However, what was possibly even more intriguing was that while the wolves were significantly impacted by the test scenario, the dogs were not. The test room was being paced by them. The curious thing was that the pacing behavior stopped when the familiar person, a hand-raiser who had been with the wolves their entire lives, returned to the test room, suggesting that the familiar person served as a social stress buffer for the wolves. This has never been demonstrated to be the case for wolves, in my opinion, and it supports the notion that there is a strong bond between the animals and the familiar person. ”
Dr. Hansen Wheat continues by saying that there are parallels between wolves and dogs that can help us understand the origins of the behavior in our dogs. She adds that although it may come as a surprise to some that wolves can relate to people in this way, it also makes sense looking back on it.
“Wolves who showed attachment to people may have had a selective advantage in the early stages of dog domestication,” the author says.
Now that Dr. Hansen Wheat and her team have spent three years hand-raising wolves and dogs in the same way, they will continue to look at the data they have collected to find more behavioral differences and similarities.
