Abstract
The results of current wolf-dog studies on human-directed behaviors seem to suggest that domestication has acted on dogs’ general attitudes and not on specific socio-cognitive skills. A recent hypothesis suggests that domestication may have increased dogs’ overall sociability (hypersociability hypothesis). The aim of the present study was to test one aspect of the hypersociability hypothesis, whereby dogs should be more interested in social human contact compared to wolves, and to investigate the relative roles of both domestication and experience on the value that dogs attribute to human social contact. We compared equally raised wolves and dogs kept at the Wolf Science Center (WSCw, WSCd) but also dogs with different human socialization experiences i.e., pet dogs and free-ranging dogs. We presented subjects with a simple test, divided in two phases: in the Pre-test phase animals were exposed to two people in succession. One person invited the animal for a social/cuddle session (contact provider) and the other fed the animal (food provider). In the Test phase, animals could choose which of the two persons to approach, when both stood in a neutral posture. We directly compared WSCd with WSCw and free-ranging dogs with pet dogs. We found that in the Pre-test, WSCd and free-ranging dogs spent more time with the contact provider than WSCw and pet dogs, respectively. The results regarding the free-ranging dog and pet dog comparison were surprising, hence we conducted a follow-up testing pet dogs in a familiar, distraction-free area. Free-ranging dogs and this group of pet dogs did not differ in the time spent cuddling. In the test phase, WSCd were more likely than WSCw to approach the two experimenters. However, neither for the WSCd-WSCw comparison nor for the free-ranging dogs-pet dogs comparison, we could find a clear preference for one person over the other. Our findings support the idea that domestication has affected dogs’ behavior in terms of their overall interest in being in proximity with a human partner also in case of dogs with a relatively sparse socialization experience (free-ranging dogs). However, it remains unclear what the driving motivation to interact with the human may be.
Highlights
Based on comparative studies of dogs and wolves (e.g., Frank and Frank, 1982b, 1985; Frank et al, 1989; vonHoldt et al, 2017; Range et al, 2019) a number of hypotheses have been proposed regarding the role that domestication has had in shaping dogs’ cognition, behavior and sociability
Test Phase Overall, we found that WSC dogs were more likely to make a choice than WSC wolves
Wolves and dogs did not differ in the probability to approach the Cuddle Person (CP) nor in the proportion of time spent in her proximity
Summary
Based on comparative studies of dogs and wolves (e.g., Frank and Frank, 1982b, 1985; Frank et al, 1989; vonHoldt et al, 2017; Range et al, 2019) a number of hypotheses have been proposed regarding the role that domestication has had in shaping dogs’ cognition, behavior and sociability. More recent studies considering wolves and dogs raised in a similar manner questioned these conclusions, since, when highly socialized with humans, wolves show social abilities (such as cooperating with humans (Range et al, 2019), following human communicative cues (Range and Virányi, 2013; Lampe et al, 2017), and using gazing themselves to communicate (Heberlein et al, 2016) which are similar to those of dogs These contrasting results sparked a debate regarding the relative role that domestication and experience play in the dog-wolf differences observed, where some authors posited that domestication has a greater effect than life experience in shaping dogs’ human-related socio-cognitive abilities while others suggested that the role of life experience is predominant (e.g., Hare and Tomasello, 2005 vs Miklósi and Topál, 2005; Riedel et al, 2008 vs Wynne et al, 2008; Udell et al, 2011 vs Miklósi and Topál, 2011). Dogs and wolves are successful when cooperating with a human in a string-pulling task, wolves are more likely to initiate movement, but less likely to follow the human partners’ initiative than dogs while dogs tend to wait for the human to take the lead (Range et al, 2019)
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