Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves - PubMed (original) (raw)

Testing the myth: tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves

Friederike Range et al. Proc Biol Sci. 2015.

Abstract

Cooperation is thought to be highly dependent on tolerance. For example, it has been suggested that dog-human cooperation has been enabled by selecting dogs for increased tolerance and reduced aggression during the course of domestication ('emotional reactivity hypothesis'). However, based on observations of social interactions among members of captive packs, a few dog-wolf comparisons found contradictory results. In this study, we compared intraspecies aggression and tolerance of dogs and wolves raised and kept under identical conditions by investigating their agonistic behaviours and cofeeding during pair-wise food competition tests, a situation that has been directly linked to cooperation. We found that in wolves, dominant and subordinate members of the dyads monopolized the food and showed agonistic behaviours to a similar extent, whereas in dogs these behaviours were privileges of the high-ranking individuals. The fact that subordinate dogs rarely challenged their higher-ranking partners suggests a steeper dominance hierarchy in dogs than in wolves. Finally, wolves as well as dogs showed only rare and weak aggression towards each other. Therefore, we suggest that wolves are sufficiently tolerant to enable wolf-wolf cooperation, which in turn might have been the basis for the evolution of dog-human cooperation (canine cooperation hypothesis).

Keywords: aggression; agonistic behaviour; domestication; dominance; tolerance.

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Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Relative duration (percentage of trial duration; maximum 300 s) of individuals feeding alone (if the behaviour occurred) dependent on their dominance status in the tested dyad (high/low). Boxes represent the interquartile range, bars within boxes are median values and whiskers indicate the 5th and 95th percentiles.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Frequency of agonistic behaviours (1/s) in the two species according to the individuals’ dominance status in the (a) bone and (b) meat condition. Boxes represent the interquartile range, bars within boxes are median values and whiskers indicate the 5th and 9th percentiles.

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