Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain
Speaker 1: stuff is Christian Sager. My dogs Winchester and see blue.
Speaker 1: They are real smart. So I was intrigued when I
Speaker 1: read a new study that said wolves are more intelligent
Speaker 1: in some ways than my dogs and all their canine friends,
Speaker 1: whether you have a chocolate lab or a coonhound. Scientists
Speaker 1: believe that some modern dogs and wolves descended from a
Speaker 1: common ancestor between eleven thousand and thirty thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: The new study, which was published in the September Journal
Speaker 1: of Scientific Reports, is by an international team of researchers
Speaker 1: at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria. They found
Speaker 1: domesticated dogs cannot make the connection between cause and effect wolves, however, can.
Speaker 1: They came to that conclusion by testing and comparing how
Speaker 1: the two she's searched for food after giving them hints
Speaker 1: about where it was located. Researchers used fourteen dogs and
Speaker 1: twelve socialized wolves in their experiments. During the tests, the
Speaker 1: animals had to choose between two containers, one with food
Speaker 1: and one without. The first thing researchers did was determined
Speaker 1: whether the animals could make sense of communicative clues by
Speaker 1: pointing and looking at the container with the food. Researchers
Speaker 1: next wanted to see how the dogs and wolves responded
Speaker 1: to behavioral cues. The experiment or pointed to the container
Speaker 1: with food, but did not make eye contact with the animals. Finally,
Speaker 1: in the last experiment, the animals had to infer themselves
Speaker 1: which container had the hidden food, using only causal clues
Speaker 1: like noises made when the experiment or shook the container
Speaker 1: with the food. Both the wolves and the dogs did
Speaker 1: well on the communicative clue tests all found the hidden food.
Speaker 1: Both species, however, failed the behavioral cue portion. Without direct
Speaker 1: eye contact, neither a dog nor wolf could find the food.
Speaker 1: During the last part of the test, however, only the
Speaker 1: wolves could make casual inferences as to where the food
Speaker 1: was located. In other words, the scientists said the wolves,
Speaker 1: not the pooches, understood cause and effect. Study author Michelle
Speaker 1: lamp from the Netherlands reminded us, however, that the differences
Speaker 1: can be explained by the fact that wolves are more
Speaker 1: persistent to explore objects than dogs. That's because dogs are
Speaker 1: conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to
Speaker 1: find food themselves in nature. What shocked researchers was that
Speaker 1: the wolves were able to interpret direct eye to eye contact.
Speaker 1: That understanding of communicative cues, researchers said may have for
Speaker 1: facilitated domestication. The study is unique also in that it
Speaker 1: used dogs that lived in both packs and with families,
Speaker 1: but the results of the dogs were independent of living conditions.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by John Paritano, produced by Tristan McNeil,
Speaker 1: and For more on this and other topics, please visit
Speaker 1: us at how stuff works dot com.