Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and this is a classic episode from our previous host, Christian Sagar. I've known some dogs that are pretty smart. I've also known some that weren't. Bless them, but could wolves be smarter? Hey, brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager. My dogs Winchester and see Blue. They are real smart.
So I was intrigued when I read a new study that said wolves are more intelligent in some ways than my dogs and all their canine friends, whether you have a chocolate lab or a coonhound. Scientists believe that some modern dogs and wolves descended from a common ancestor between eleven thousand and thirty thousand years ago. The new study, which was published in the September Journal of Scientific Reports, is by an international team of researchers at the Wolf
Science Center in Vienna, Austria. They found domesticated dogs cannot make the connection between cause and effect wolves, however, can. They came to that conclusion by testing and comparing how the two species searched for food after giving them hints about where it was located. 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 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 cues. The experiment or pointed to the container
with food, but did not 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 causal clues like noises made when the experiment or shook the container with 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 cue portion. Without direct eye contact, neither a 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 Michelle lamp from the Netherlands reminded us, however, that The differences can be explained by the fact that wolves are more persistent to explore objects than dogs, as because dogs are conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to
find food themselves in nature. What shocked researchers was that the wolves were able to interpret direct eye to eye contact. That understanding of communicative cues, researchers said may have facilitated domestication. The study is unique also in that it used dogs that lived in both packs and with families, but the results of the dogs were independent of living conditions. Today's episode was written by John Partano and produced by Tristan Neil and Tyler Clang. For more on listen lots of
other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production off i Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.