Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstue, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vogebam here. Our pet dogs are pretty smart,
Speaker 1: sometimes frustratingly so when there's something you don't want them
Speaker 1: getting into. In some cases, are pups even have smart
Speaker 1: behavioral traits that we selected for over time, like herding
Speaker 1: or guarding. And of course, service dogs are trained to
Speaker 1: help millions of people around the world. But research shows
Speaker 1: that wolves are more intelligent in some ways than our dogs.
Speaker 1: The studying question, which was published in September in the
Speaker 1: journal Scientific Reports, is by an international team of researchers
Speaker 1: at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria. They found
Speaker 1: that domesticated dogs can't make the connection between cause and
Speaker 1: effect wolves, however, can. They came to this conclusion by
Speaker 1: testing and comparing how the two species searched for food
Speaker 1: after being given hints about where it was located. The
Speaker 1: researchers used fourteen dogs and twelve socialized wolves in their experiments.
Speaker 1: During the tests, the animals had to choose between two containers,
Speaker 1: one with food and one without. The first thing the
Speaker 1: researchers did was determined whether the animals could make sense
Speaker 1: of communicative clues by pointing and looking at the container
Speaker 1: with the food. Researchers next wanted to see how the
Speaker 1: dogs and wolves responded to behavioral clues. The experimenter pointed
Speaker 1: to the container with food, but didn't make eye contact
Speaker 1: with the animals. Finally, in the last experiment, the animals
Speaker 1: had to infer themselves which container had the hidden food,
Speaker 1: using only casual clues, like noises made when the experiment
Speaker 1: er shook the container that contained the food. Both the
Speaker 1: wolves and the dogs did well on the communicative clue tests,
Speaker 1: all found the hidden food. Both species, however, failed the
Speaker 1: behavioral clue portion. Without direct eye contact, neither dog nor
Speaker 1: wolf could find the food. During the last part of
Speaker 1: the test, however, only the wolves could make casual inferences
Speaker 1: as to where the food was located. In other words,
Speaker 1: the scientists said the wolves, not the pooches, understood cause
Speaker 1: and effect. Study author at Michelle Lampez said in a statement,
Speaker 1: the results of our studies suggest that domestication has affected
Speaker 1: the casual understanding of our dogs. It cannot be excluded, however,
Speaker 1: that the differences can be explained by the fact that
Speaker 1: wolves are more persistent to explore objects than dogs. Dogs
Speaker 1: are conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have
Speaker 1: to find food themselves in nature. What surprised researchers was
Speaker 1: that the wolves were able to interpret direct eye to
Speaker 1: eye contact. That understanding of communicative clues, researchers said may
Speaker 1: have facilitated domestication. Scientists now believe that some modern dogs
Speaker 1: and wolves descended from a common an ancestor between eleven
Speaker 1: thousand and thirty thousand years ago. But the study we're
Speaker 1: talking about today is unique also and that it used
Speaker 1: dogs that lived both in packs and with families. Study
Speaker 1: author Julian Kaminski said in a statement, the results of
Speaker 1: the dogs were independent of living conditions, and this makes
Speaker 1: our study the first to make a valid comparison between
Speaker 1: these two animal groups in this particular setup. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is based on the article wolves are probably Smarter than
Speaker 1: our dogs on house to works dot com, written by
Speaker 1: John Paritano. Brain Stuff is production of Our Heart Radio
Speaker 1: in partnership of how stuff Works dot Com, and it's
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Klang. The four more podcasts my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.