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

By: Zac

Zac — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:33:05 +0000

Corretion Romulus and Remus were raised by a she wolf nothing ever said otherwise or history books are wrong.

By: Zooey

Zooey — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:29:03 +0000

I wonder what Romulus and Remus, as babies, would have done since they were raised by wolves

By: Lois

Lois — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:13:53 +0000

I dont think AJ knows what “COMMON ANCESTOR” means.

By: katie

katie — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:13:58 +0000

That’s assuming the dogs were looking for the toy. Maybe they were thinking the point was to go to location A. Wolves wouldn’t indulge us, but domestic dogs do. And yes, toys are different than food.

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.