Comments on: Dogs Think Like Babies, While Wolves Think for Themselves

By: Peter Walker

Peter Walker — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:33:08 +0000

I suspect that if you were to perform this test on socialized wolf pups, they’d behave like dogs and babies.

We didn’t breed a totally new trait into dogs, most likely, but rather bred them such that juvenile cognition survived into adulthood – neoteny.

By: Jaen

Jaen — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:47:13 +0000

Are independent, ethical thinkers among humans more “wolflike” then? There are any number of sociological experiments relating to torture or even simple decision making, which demonstrate that the majority of humans will relinquish their own consciences and common sense to an authority figure or to the group, without even considering what the agenda of said “authority” or group might be.

Maybe before democracy can crawl out of the lap of oligarchy, humans will have to reliquish their dependence on social affiliations and relearn “thinking with the nose”.

By: Gadfly

Gadfly — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:47:55 +0000

There was a documentary last year some time that tested this exact type of activity comparing dogs to wolves. Interstingly there were different results leading to different conclusions. That study indicated dogs could follow human body language and that wolves couldn’t. The subject animal was shown a reward (meat) then without them being able to see where, it was place under one of two bowls to either side of a human volunteer. The bowls were revealed and the human pointed to the one with the meat. The dogs invariably ran straight for the one with the reward indicating they were following the human lead. The wolves ran randomly to one or the other and then relied on their noses to tell them which bowl to go for. The conclusion was that the dogs could read human body language while the wolves could not. So, surprising that the researchers here got the wolves to respond to find the ball based on body language. Interesting discrepancy.

By: Zachary

Zachary — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:37:27 +0000

Lisette, you can’t learn instincts. Plus, use Occam’s razor. “That cruel human has hidden the ball from me again, I must be wary of him and his deceptive ways.” or the wolf tracks the ball to the location, giving primacy to the evidence of its senses. In this case it’s dogs that have acquired a new trait comparative to wolves. That being of following the lead of a human, an extremely useful skill ofr living with us.

By: Lisette Root

Lisette Root — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:23:27 +0000

Perhaps wolves have learned to be less trusting of humans, on an instinctive level. We are certainly not worthy of their trust in most cases, even though we owe them quite a lot as a species . Kind of sad, really.

By: Joe Maxwell

Joe Maxwell — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:24:43 +0000

If you hide a treat that the dog cam smell, forget what they saw, they follow their nose.

By: Lethal_Teapot

Lethal_Teapot — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:19:15 +0000

The title is misleading. Though the babies and the dogs exhibited the same behaviour, the article suggests they were doing it for different reasons; babies thought they had learned ’something fundamental’ about the world, while the dogs were following orders. So the babies and dogs were not really ‘thinking alike’…

By: Velimir Ikalovic

Velimir Ikalovic — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:04:08 +0000

Dogs, just like domestic cats, don’t grow up mentaly until they end up on the street. When there is no owners to feed them and care about them, they become like their wild relatives.

By: AJ

AJ — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:11:12 +0000

Um, dogs didn’t descend from a common ancestor. They descended *from* wolves, the Gray Wolf specifically.

By: asa walker

asa walker — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:01:59 +0000

i like playing these games with my dogs but i use food. if the dogs are watching me move their treats when they want them they will always, first time out, point at the new hiding place

By: Joseph Smidt

Joseph Smidt — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:43:32 +0000

This is interesting since dogs descend from from common ancestors with wolves after which man domesticated them. The quote is probably correct, somehow domestication must lead to all this since that is the major different since descending from a common ancestor not too long ago.

Very interesting.

By: YouRang

YouRang — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:19:04 +0000

I wonder how absolute this result was. I.E. did 100% of the babies look in A? 90%? Surely much more than 50%.
Also when the babies looked in A, did they continue to search in A or did they very quickly move to B? And for that fraction (0%, 10%…100%) that did switch to B, how long did it take? And what fraction of those that didn’t switch, started to cry?
And how did they manage to make babies, dogs, and wolves sit still while they hid the ball? It seems to me that the details of the dynamics of how they did that in the three cases might be sufficiently different to render the results meaningless.