Scientists find that wolves can show attachment toward humans:
When it comes to showing affection towards people, many dogs are naturals. Now comes word reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution on September 20th that the remarkable ability to show attachment behaviour toward human caregivers also exists in wolves.
The findings were made when researchers at Stockholm University, Sweden, tested 10 wolves and 12 dogs in a behavioural test specifically designed to quantify attachment behaviours in canids. During this test 23-week-old wolves spontaneously discriminated between a familiar person and a stranger just as well as dogs did, and showed more proximity seeking and affiliative behaviours towards the familiar person. Additionally, the presence of the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves calming them in a stressful situation. These discoveries build on a slowly accumulating body of evidence contradicting the hypothesis that the abilities necessary to form attachment with humans, arose in dogs only after humans domesticated them at least 15,000 years ago.
[...] "That was exactly what we saw," says Dr. Hansen Wheat. "It was very clear that the wolves, as the dogs, preferred the familiar person over the stranger. But what was perhaps even more interesting was that while the dogs were not particularly affected by the test situation, the wolves were. They were pacing the test room. However, the remarkable thing was that when the familiar person, a hand-raiser that had been with the wolves all their lives, re-entered the test room the pacing behaviour stopped, indicating that the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves. I do not believe that this has ever been shown to be the case for wolves before and this also complements the existence of a strong bond between the animals and the familiar person."
[...] "Wolves showing human-directed attachment could have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication," she says.
Journal Reference:
Christina Hansen Wheat, Linn Larsson, Patricia Berner, Hans Temrin, Human-directed attachment behavior in wolves suggests standing ancestral variation for human–dog attachment bonds [open], Ecology and Evolution, 2022. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.9299
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Monday October 03 2022, @06:14AM (5 children)
... to Humans. Typically Via the Jaw Muscles.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Monday October 03 2022, @08:39AM (3 children)
Funny, but wrong - generally, wolves are profoundly afraid of humans.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 03 2022, @09:24AM (2 children)
American wolves, yes. Eurasian wolves, much less so. It depends on whether you're talking to a Euro or an American how applicable that profound fear of humans is.
Like most people, I was afraid of wolves when I was young. I distinctly remember an article in the Pennsylvania Game News when I was a teen. In the state of Michigan, there had been (at that time) one sole documented instance of a wolf "attack" on a human. And, that attack appeared to have been an accident. Guy was out in the field, and about to climb over a fence, but bent over to tie his boots more securely before doing so. When he stood up, he was directly in the path of a wolf jumping the fence. The guy suffered minor injuries, and needed medical attention, so it was documented.
That article piqued some interest in my young self, and I started looking for more material on wolves. Of course, that predated Google by decades.
As with most subjects, the sensational is published far and wide, the more honest mundane almost never gets published.
Europe is a different world for wolves. There are many documented cases of wolf attacks. Euros brought their legitimate fear of wolves to the New World, where that fear has little application.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:05AM (1 child)
Uh... not exactly. From a wildlife biologist with a particular interest in wolf/human interaction:
http://www.vargfakta.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Geist-when-do-wolves-become-dangerous-to-humans-pt-1.pdf [vargfakta.se]
.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:05PM
I've read your link in the past. It's certainly not irrelevant, but I don't think it's quite on target, in context.
I was addressing that statement, specifically. Historically, healthy wolves did not attack humans in America. The article you link to addresses several facts, starting with how much mankind has altered the wolf's ecosystem, how man has encroached on the wolf's living space, how man has become careless in the near absence of predators, and how man has acclimated wolves to the presence of man.
Long story short, captive wolves, hybrid wolves, and wolves forced to feed in proximity to man are in fact losing their fear of man. And, even so, it is still rare for a wolf to attack a human. Things may get worse. Actually, we should expect things to get worse. There are ever more people, encroaching where the wolves live. The more man interacts with wolves, the more likely that an attack will occur.
Entire packs of wolves have been released into the wild, already accustomed to associating man with food. That's going to be a problem. Those wolves have already taught their offspring that man is not to be feared.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 03 2022, @08:42AM
I think you're gonna find that the fangs' presence makes a huge difference in the strength of the attachment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Monday October 03 2022, @06:25AM (9 children)
Don't get me wrong... I have had multiple dogs in my life and I am well aware of how attached they can be; as well as the reverse of how attached humans become to their dogs.
I am not surprised that wolves can exhibit the same behavior. HOWEVER, ...
So if I read this correctly... a hand raiser during their entire lives... So someone who has been with the wolf-pup for 161 days(23 weeks) in a row... hand raising them, I assume this means feeding them by hand... in any case someone that has interacted daily with the pup and very likely treated them well.
So basically... a young wolf treated well by a someone every day of their life actually recognized that person and felt relaxed by them? Mind you, canines (both dogs and wolves) are pack animals... they live to socialize as part of a group. I'd be shocked if they were not relaxed by the familiar person who obviously after over 5 months became a part of their social pack through close interaction.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday October 03 2022, @07:25AM (2 children)
I think this falls under the "Duh, we all knew this, but now we have scientific evidence" category.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday October 03 2022, @08:12PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:13AM
Spotted hyenas (which test better on cooperative intelligence than do chimps) can also display attachment to (and memory for) individual humans.
There's a guy who documented an attempt to raise one as a pet. Finally gave it up and the hyena went to a wildlife rescue, but 3 years he later visited the hyena and got a reaction that could be translated as WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN??! Really obvious that the hyena had not lost that attachment.
If you read up on rogue wolves on the American frontier, it's fairly obvious (at least to me as a pro dog trainer) that these lone wolves take an interest in their human pursuer that goes beyond ordinary wild behavior -- ie. the oddball wolves display a doglike interest toward human activities.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 03 2022, @09:36AM (2 children)
Anecdote:
I've had dogs all my life. Bonding has been stronger, and less strong with different dogs. The current dog, I hand fed from the age of about 2 or 3 days, because Mama just laid down and died. Started with 9 puppies, successfully raised two females to eat solid food. This little lady is bonded so tight, she hates for me to get out of her sight for a single minute. Unfortunately, her sister was an expert in tunneling out of the dog pen, and less expert at chasing cars, so I lost her. The loss of her sister only made that bond to "Daddy" even closer.
I imagine that if you bottle feed any mammal, that mammal is going to bond to it's care giver. We might even try the infamous honey badger with that.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday October 03 2022, @11:48PM
When I was in college I found three kittens, barely a week old, abandoned by their mom. The runt died the first night after the other two slept on top of him. I bottle fed the two remaining until they could handle solid food and they were all over me whenever I was home.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:24AM
Same thing happens with kittens, lambs, calves, foals, chickens, pigeons... hand-feed 'em at the early stage, and you're their mama.
2 out of 9 that made it implies either some disease like herpes that causes fading deaths, or a lack of expertise at bottle-feeding. (I say, having hand-reared a lot of pups for one reason or another. Most of the advice you'll see around is counterproductive.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 03 2022, @10:41AM (2 children)
This was my thinking when I read this to. Considering that dogs (canis lupus familiaris) are basically domesticated wolves (canis lupus) that we did breed to our liking. Is it really strange then when you take some five month old wolf pups that you hand-raised since it was ten days old and teach them to do dog tricks that they will act like them and recognize them as part of the pack or as a friend or leader or food-figure?
If anything from a purely practical standpoint what this probably did show is how humans did raise wolves thousands of years ago -- find pups and separate them from their actual parents (or kill them) and then raise the pups as your own and they'll consider you their parent. If it takes you have the next generation, for those pups that are incompatible with the process they are discarded.
So they used the same, or similar, tests used on human infants. But this time on dog/wolf pups and in some regard got similar results -- nobody likes a stranger, everything likes familiar things and everyone remembers who feeds them.
I wonder what they did with the wolf pups afterwards. The paper doesn't tell as far as I can see. Perhaps they didn't want to end on a downer after all their other happy results. But they can't go back to the wild and wolves are not allowed to be raised as pets. They don't allow dog-wolf hybrids either. I suspect termination unless they found a lot of Zoos that wanted pups.
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday October 03 2022, @12:04PM (1 child)
I don't know about Swedish law but there are plenty of US states where it's legal to own a wolf, albeit with restrictions and special permitting conditions. According to the paper they conducted the experiment with 9 caregivers and 10 wolves over several years, so it's possible they were just people adopting wolf pups? At a minimum it doesn't read like they had one or two trainers who just churned through a bunch of pups each.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 03 2022, @01:12PM
Yes there are differences in law in that regard. It's not legal in Sweden to own or raise a wolf or wolf-dog hybrids, hybrids are terminated if found out. So they can't have given them away or let the breeders or trainers keep them. The only option is that some kind of zoo or animal sanctuary kept them. After an experiment like this they can most likely not be put out into the wild either as they will have picked up traits not suitable for a wolf, and it's interaction with humans, and wild wolves would probably not accept them either as they would or could be considered weird from their perspective to I would think.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Monday October 03 2022, @12:06PM (2 children)
FTFA :
Bullshit!
How do you think the humans domesticated wolves in the first place? A loose attachment, at least, was already being formed. Wolves would hang around human groups because they knew there would be food leavings. Humans amused themselves by tossing bones to the wolves. Both Wolves and humans started to recognise individuals on the opposite side, and the wolves even got names. Wolves started to follow the human's hunting expeditions, for pickings. Then wolves actually helped with the hunt. You know the rest of the story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2022, @01:30PM
Didn't they make a movie about this? Something, something, Kevin Costner...?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:30AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_hyenas_in_Harar [wikipedia.org]
Also, there's a guy in Syria who corners half-grown striped hyenas in their dens and captures and tames them, and uses them as livestock guardians. (Video exists.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2022, @03:10PM
And you get a shitpost.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by datapharmer on Tuesday October 04 2022, @01:30AM
I was going to say they could have just saved some time and watched the movie Dances with Wolves, but then I remembered that the extended cut on that film spanned something insane like 6 vhs tapes, so maybe the research was actually faster.