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