An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” describes a search that turns upside down the cliché about wolves (photo ©Katerina Hlavata) are aggressive while dogs are tolerant. Friederike Range, Caroline Ritter and Zsófia Virányi of the Messerli Research Institute of the University in Vienna, Austria, conducted tests on mongrel dogs and wolves raising them in the same conditions. The conclusion is that dogs have a steeper hierarchy and are less tolerant than wolves to their conspecifics.
The generally accepted idea is that thousands of years ago some wolves who were more docile than the average started getting domesticated by humans becoming dogs after generations of controlled breeding. However, according to this research, things may have been a bit different and what most people think about wolves could be wrong.
In one of the tolerance tests of wolves and dogs to their own conspecifics, the researchers provided food to couples consisting of an animal with a high-ranking in the pack and a low-ranking one. The result is that in the dog couple, the low-ranking suffered aggression from the high-ranking one, who wanted to eat as much as he wanted. Instead, among wolves the low-ranking one didn’t suffer the hierarchy and at the same time the high-ranking one was more likely to share the food.
Both among dogs that wolves there wasn’t a lot of aggression but there were signs of threat. The fundamental difference is that low-ranking dogs are subdued so they don’t try to challenge the high-ranking ones even when it comes to getting a portion of the food.
It’s possible that the wolves who were domesticated by humans weren’t the most docile but the most submissive. They accepted humans as pack leaders and that means that they ate what was offered to them without trying to get more. Such a situation could be good for humans, who found good hunting companions that were not very demanding about food.
At least a part of this difference can be explained by the different structure of wild dogs and wolves packs. The wild dogs tend to form packs where there are no relations among the individuals while wolf packs generally tend to be a family. Wolves are generally more generous because usually live with their relatives.
Wolves tend to collaborate with other members of the pack, even the low-ranking ones. Their aggression generally occurs only with strangers, which can also be other packs when they are perceived as enemies. However, also in the search for food several studies show that wolves prefer to go fishing rather than chasing some animal.
Certain ideas are probably due to the fact that the dogs were selected to live together with humans and help them while wolves have always been seen as competitors. It’s an anthropocentric point of view that, for this reason, contains mistakes. The reality is more complex and shows that wolves deserve greater consideration.
