Researchers Discover That Wolves Can Show Attachment Toward Humans



Scientists at Stockholm University in Sweden assessed 10 wolves and 12 dogs using a behavioral test that was created specifically to measure canid attachment patterns. The family of carnivorous animals known as Canidae, which also includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, and several more living and extinct dog-like mammals, is made up of canids.

In this experiment, 23-week-old wolves spontaneously distinguished between a familiar person and a stranger just as well as dogs did, with the familiar individual displaying increased proximity seeking and affiliative behaviors. Furthermore, the known person's presence served as a social stress buffer for the wolves, relaxing them in a stressful circumstance.

These findings add to a growing body of evidence that refutes the theory that dogs only developed the skills needed to form attachments with people when humans tamed them at least 15,000 years ago.

As stated by Dr. Christina Hansen Wheat, PhD in Ethology from Stockholm University, Sweden, "We believed that there was a need to thoroughly verify this." I believe it is now appropriate to entertain the notion that, if variation in human-directed attachment behavior exists in wolves, this behavior could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication. This idea is supported by earlier studies that made significant contributions to this question.

Dr. Hansen Wheat is fascinated by the impact of domestication on behavior. She and her team produced wolf and dog puppies starting at 10 days old and put them through various behavioral tests to investigate this. In one of those tests, a familiar person and a stranger alternately enter and exit a test room to put the animal in an unsettling and uncomfortable scenario. The test's underlying hypothesis is that by introducing this unstable environment, attachment behaviors like proximity seeking would be enhanced. It was originally designed to evaluate attachment in human neonates.

In essence, the purpose of the Strange Situation Test was to determine whether or not wolves and dogs could distinguish between a familiar person and a stranger. Did they greet and make physical contact with the familiar person more frequently and with greater displays of affection than they did the stranger? If wolves and dogs behaved in the same way, it would indicate that this skill is not particular to dogs and has not evolved that way.

Dr. Hansen Wheat states, "That was exactly what we saw. It was very evident that the wolves, like the dogs, valued familiarity over unfamiliarity. However, what was possibly even more intriguing was that while the wolves were significantly impacted by the test scenario, the dogs were not. The test room was being paced by them. The surprising thing was that the pacing behavior ceased when the familiar person—a hand-raiser who had known the wolves their whole lives—reentered the test room, suggesting that the familiar person served as a social stress buffer for the wolves. I don't think this has ever been demonstrated to be the case for wolves, and it supports the notion that there is a deep relationship between the creatures and the familiar person.

Dr. Hansen Wheat continues by saying that there are parallels between wolves and dogs that can help us understand the origins of the behavior we observe in our dogs. She adds that although it may come as a surprise to some that wolves can relate to people in this way, it also makes sense looking back on it.

In the early stages of canine domestication, "wolves demonstrating human-directed attachment may have had a selective benefit," the author claims.

To find out more about the behavioral distinctions and similarities between wolves and dogs, Dr. Hansen Wheat will now continue to work with the data she and her colleagues have gathered over the course of three years hand-raising wolves and dogs under identical settings.

No specific grants from funding organizations in the public, private, or not-for-profit sectors were given to this research.

By STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY 

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