There's no agreement on how dog domestication happened - whether some brave wolves started hanging around human camps to get scraps or whether humans actively kidnapped wolf puppies to raise them. Would the wolves behave this way if there were distractions in the room, for example, or if the ball were thrown by a machine instead of a person?
#Fetch puppies series#
"I think it opens up a series of interesting questions and other studies you could do to try to look at this in a more controlled and systematic way." "But I think it's an intriguing observation," he says. To him, it doesn't appear to be exactly the same kind of goal-oriented game of "fetch" that a dog would play with its owner. Watching the video, MacLean sees two discrete behaviors: first, chasing the ball and biting it, and then later coming back to the person while carrying the ball. "To my knowledge, this is actually the first test ever to look at whether wolves do something like this," he says.
"I think it will surprise dog owners as much as it surprised me that wolves actually can fetch a ball, or retrieve a ball for a person," she says.Įvan MacLean, who studies dog cognition at the University of Arizona, says this is an interesting observation that no one has made before. As part of her work, she raised litters of wolf puppies, feeding them and acclimating them to her presence but not playing with them or training them.Īt the age of 8 weeks, the wolf pups were put through a series of standard behavior tests that were administered by a person the wolves had never met. To try to get clues about how that happened, scientists such as Christina Hansen Wheat of Stockholm University in Sweden have been studying the differences between dogs and modern wolves. More than 15,000 years ago, when humans were still hunter-gatherers, this large predator somehow began cozying up to people, eventually becoming their "best friend." Wolves are large, dangerous carnivores, and yet they were the first animals that humans tamed. But wolves are thought to be less responsive to human cues because they haven't gone through thousands of years of domestication.Įxactly how dogs emerged from a now-extinct population of ancient wolves is a mystery. This behavior wouldn't be surprising in a dog. Some wolf puppies are unexpectedly willing to play fetch, according to scientists who saw young wolves retrieve a ball thrown by a stranger and bring it back at that person's urging. Many pups, such as this one named Flea, wouldn't fetch a ball. Scientists put several litters of wolf puppies through a standard battery of tests.
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