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posted by janrinok on Friday January 17 2020, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the awwww dept.

Scientists unexpectedly witness wolf puppies play fetch:

When it comes to playing a game of fetch, many dogs are naturals. But now, researchers report that the remarkable ability to interpret human social communicative cues that enables a dog to go for a ball and then bring it back also exists in wolves. The study appears January 16 in the journal iScience.

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."

More information: iScience, Wheat and Temrin: "Intrinsic ball retrieving in wolf puppies suggests standing ancestral variation for human-directed play behaviour" https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(19)30557-7 , DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.100811


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @07:20PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @07:20PM (#944680)

    The researchers toss the ball. The wolf puppies fetch it. The reseachers get excited and call their colleagues over to see. Then the wolf puppies eat all the researchers. Wolves are pretty smart.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday January 17 2020, @07:58PM (3 children)

      by Hartree (195) on Friday January 17 2020, @07:58PM (#944692)

      As opposed to dogs who learned to wag their tails and give sad puppy eyes and the researchers magically gave them food.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:30PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:30PM (#944735)

        It's like they re-discovered how domestic dogs and wolves are related. Kind of like how clockboy invented a clock.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:05AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:05AM (#944808)

          now see here, you bring that invention of yours to the white house cause we need more people like you here

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @03:51PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @03:51PM (#944988)

            Obama praised him, Trump would have had him deported.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @08:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @08:41PM (#944716)

      Or maybe the wolves are the ones experimenting on how we would react to them catching the ball

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @07:48PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @07:48PM (#944684)

    Or it could just be that we choose to domesticate animals that are most able to interact with us favorably and dogs (and hence their close cousins the wolves) fit that category. Perhaps the reason we don’t generally have wolves as pets is that they are bigger and more dangerous compared to dogs.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 17 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 17 2020, @07:58PM (#944691) Journal

      Or maybe simply are more difficult to house train.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @09:27PM (#944733)

        There could be more than one reason

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:41PM (#945077)

      Canines are pretty much all related very closely, I don't think there are any other groups that can interbreed between so many species. Dogs are just really inbred wolves selected for temperament, aesthestics, and purpose.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday January 17 2020, @07:55PM (1 child)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday January 17 2020, @07:55PM (#944689) Journal

    I'm just going to leave this [youtube.com] here.

    --
    Hollywood: Where good books go to be abused.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @02:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @02:34PM (#944974)

    "and returned it to a perfect stranger upon encouragement"

    Does "encouragement" here mean electric shocks or other forms of torture? Researchers these days are those who could not get regular jobs and are stuck with doing repetitive work with no results in sight, no hope of forward progress in life and no job satisfaction.

    So they torture and kill animals.

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