The Wolf Science Center (WSC) in Vienna, Austria, is a unique facility reshaping our understanding of the differences between wolves and dogs. It is a controlled research environment dedicated to comparative canid cognition. By studying the ancestral species alongside its domesticated counterpart, the WSC has yielded insights that challenge long-held assumptions about canine evolution and domestication.
The Unique Research Approach
The WSC’s methodology, sometimes called the ‘Mesocosm Approach,’ provides exceptional scientific validity. Researchers hand-raise both North American Grey Wolves and mixed-breed dogs under identical conditions from a very early age. Wolf pups are brought in around two weeks of age, while dog pups typically arrive shortly after. Both are socialized intensively with humans and conspecifics.
This highly controlled environment isolates innate (genetic) differences between the species from those resulting from environmental socialization. By comparing a wolf raised like a dog to a dog raised like a wolf, scientists determine which cognitive and behavioral traits were altered by domestication. The animals live in small, stable packs and are continuously trained using positive reinforcement, ensuring they are comfortable participants in the scientific studies.
Dissecting Social Cognition and Cooperation
The WSC’s research into how wolves and dogs cooperate within their own species is a significant contribution. Contrary to the assumption that domestication made dogs more cooperative, studies show that wolves often outperform dogs in tasks requiring synchronized action. In a cooperative string-pulling task, where success required two animals to pull ropes simultaneously, wolves were more successful than dogs.
Wolves rapidly learned to coordinate their actions and focused on the task, while dogs tended to pull the ropes at alternate times, leading to failure. This difference is attributed to the wolf’s socioecology, which depends on coordinated pack hunting for survival. Their social structure permits the tolerance and synchronization necessary for complex cooperative problem-solving.
Dogs may have been selected for reduced conflict and a more tolerant temperament, which constrained their ability to coordinate with a conspecific when a reward was involved. This avoidance of potential competition suggests that domestication shifted the focus of dog social skills away from conspecific cooperation. The findings highlight that the wolf’s superior cooperative ability was a pre-existing trait that was either maintained or lessened in the dog.
Understanding Human-Animal Communication
The WSC is famous for its experiments on inter-species communication, particularly the use of human gestures. Studies compare how similarly raised wolves and dogs respond to cues like pointing and gaze-following. When a human points to a hidden food location, dogs are spontaneously better at interpreting this cue than the hand-reared wolves.
This suggests that the ability to understand human pointing was specifically selected for during domestication, rather than simply resulting from exposure to humans. While wolves can be trained to follow human gaze and pointing, the dog’s superior response appears to be an innate, genetically prepared ability that emerges early in development.
Researchers found that dogs show a greater propensity for communicative gazing at humans, often alternating their gaze between an unsolvable task and the human partner. This “gaze alternation” is a form of intentional communication, similar to that seen in human infants, and is less common in the hand-raised wolves. The selection for this socio-communicative skill allowed dogs to solicit help and communicate with humans.
Rewriting the Domestication Narrative
The findings from the WSC have challenged the traditional narrative of dog domestication. The research suggests that dogs were not selected for superior intelligence or problem-solving skills, which wolves retain in areas like conspecific cooperation and individual learning. Instead, domestication appears to have favored a specific suite of socio-communicative skills directed toward humans.
Dogs were selected for reduced aggression, increased tolerance, and an enhanced ability to accept humans as social partners. This selection for tameness and human-directed communication came with a trade-off, potentially reducing the wolf’s ancestral abilities in independent, complex problem-solving and conspecific cooperation. The dog’s success lies in its unique capacity to integrate with the human social environment, a trait partially present in the wolf but amplified through domestication.