Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris)
Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs’ increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as perfor...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:7477132 2023-05-15T15:50:45+02:00 Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia Virányi, Zsófia Gácsi, Márta Faragó, Tamás Pogány, Ákos Bereczky, Boróka Mária Miklósi, Ádám Kubinyi, Enikő 2020-09-07 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477132/ https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477132/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Sci Rep Article Text 2020 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 2020-09-13T00:26:01Z Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs’ increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as performance increase due to training) makes a crucial contribution to this fundamental difference. In this study, we assessed the development of tractability in hand-raised wolves and similarly raised dogs. We combined a variety of behavioural tests: fetching, calling, obeying a sit signal, hair brushing and walking in a muzzle. Wolf (N = 16) and dog (N = 11) pups were tested repeatedly, between the ages of 3–24 weeks. In addition to hand-raised wolves and dogs, we also tested mother-raised family dogs (N = 12) for fetching and calling. Our results show that despite intensive socialization, wolves remained less tractable than dogs, especially in contexts involving access to a resource. Dogs’ tractability appeared to be less context dependent, as they followed human initiation of action in more contexts than wolves. We found no evidence that different rearing conditions (i.e. intensive socialization vs. mother rearing) would affect tractability in dogs. This suggests that during domestication dogs might have been selected for increased tractability, although based on the current data we cannot exclude that the differential speed of development of dogs and wolves or the earlier relocation of wolves to live as a group explains some of the differences we found. Text Canis lupus PubMed Central (PMC) Scientific Reports 10 1 |
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Article Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia Virányi, Zsófia Gácsi, Márta Faragó, Tamás Pogány, Ákos Bereczky, Boróka Mária Miklósi, Ádám Kubinyi, Enikő Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
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Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs’ increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as performance increase due to training) makes a crucial contribution to this fundamental difference. In this study, we assessed the development of tractability in hand-raised wolves and similarly raised dogs. We combined a variety of behavioural tests: fetching, calling, obeying a sit signal, hair brushing and walking in a muzzle. Wolf (N = 16) and dog (N = 11) pups were tested repeatedly, between the ages of 3–24 weeks. In addition to hand-raised wolves and dogs, we also tested mother-raised family dogs (N = 12) for fetching and calling. Our results show that despite intensive socialization, wolves remained less tractable than dogs, especially in contexts involving access to a resource. Dogs’ tractability appeared to be less context dependent, as they followed human initiation of action in more contexts than wolves. We found no evidence that different rearing conditions (i.e. intensive socialization vs. mother rearing) would affect tractability in dogs. This suggests that during domestication dogs might have been selected for increased tractability, although based on the current data we cannot exclude that the differential speed of development of dogs and wolves or the earlier relocation of wolves to live as a group explains some of the differences we found. |
format |
Text |
author |
Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia Virányi, Zsófia Gácsi, Márta Faragó, Tamás Pogány, Ákos Bereczky, Boróka Mária Miklósi, Ádám Kubinyi, Enikő |
author_facet |
Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia Virányi, Zsófia Gácsi, Márta Faragó, Tamás Pogány, Ákos Bereczky, Boróka Mária Miklósi, Ádám Kubinyi, Enikő |
author_sort |
Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia |
title |
Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
title_short |
Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
title_full |
Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
title_fullStr |
Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
title_full_unstemmed |
Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris) |
title_sort |
comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (canis lupus) and dogs (canis familiaris) |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477132/ https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 |
genre |
Canis lupus |
genre_facet |
Canis lupus |
op_source |
Sci Rep |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477132/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71687-3 |
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Scientific Reports |
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10 |
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1 |
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1766385765056512000 |