This is a pretty interesting item that came over the transom.
Dogs are domesticated wolves, but wolves are not dogs. Dogs have been hanging around humans for thousands of years, and that fact has changed what dogs look like and how they behave. For a dog, when you throw a ball or a stick, it is perfectly obvious to them what they have to do: run after it and bring it back. Dogs intuit what you want them to do because they’ve been around humans long enough to pick up various cues regarding our own behavior. Wolves, on the other hand, don’t have much experience with human behavior (beyond being hunted by them). The expectation is that, if you threw an object away while standing near a wolf, it would pay no attention, because it has no reason to think that the object being thrown has anything to do with anything.
So what happened when a researcher threw a ball in the presence of a wolf puppy came as a surprise:
The researchers were stunned.
The findings were made serendipitously when researchers tested 13 wolf puppies from three different litters in a behavioral test battery designed to assess various behaviors in young dog puppies. During this series of tests, three 8-week-old wolf puppies spontaneously showed interest in a ball and returned it to a perfect stranger upon encouragement. The discovery comes as a surprise because it had been hypothesized that the cognitive abilities necessary to understand cues given by a human, such as those required for a game of fetch, arose in dogs only after humans domesticated them at least 15,000 years ago.
"When I saw the first wolf puppy retrieving the ball I literally got goose bumps," says Christina Hansen Wheat of Stockholm University, Sweden. "It was so unexpected, and I immediately knew that this meant that if variation in human-directed play behavior exists in wolves, this behavior could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication."
….
The researchers never really expected wolf pups to catch on. In fact, the first two wolf litters they worked with showed little to no interest in balls let alone retrieving one. They thought little of it at the time. It was what they would have expected, after all. That is until they tested the third wolf litter and some of the puppies not only went for the ball, but also responded to the social cues given by the unfamiliar person and brought it back.
So the tendency to fetch objects exists latent in some wolves, and this trait was without doubt a factor in their domestication into modern dogs. That’s the short version of the story. See the link for a longer version.
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Top Comments (January 18, 2020):
From jayden:
slowbutsure had this to say in Tevye’s post:
Little kids are adorable playing soccer — they’re like schools of fish all crowding around the ball, for minutes and minutes on end. Then they go home a sleep well — that’s the secret!
It just created such a funny picture and I don't even have kids!
Top Mojo (January 17, 2020):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (January 17, 2020):
Thanks to jotter!