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How
“Wolf-Behavior” Has Slowly Disappeared Within Dogs
Studies of
free-ranging dogs have documented the ways in which wolf behavior has
been attenuated or extinguished over the course of evolution. In cities
and villages, dogs that wander freely generally do not form packs, and
while each dog has an identifiable home range that he sticks to, these
ranges overlap almost completely with those of other dogs.
Free-ranging dogs do engage in wolf-like urine marking throughout their
range, but they show almost no inclination to defend their territory
against intruders. Even when feral dogs do form into packs, as they do
sometimes in rural areas or in and around garbage dumps, these do not
behave like wolf packs. Feral dog packs will sometimes more actively
defend a territory and kill dogs that intrude, but they lack many of
the more developed cooperative behaviors of wolves, such as care of the
young by all adult members of the group. Reproductive behavior is also
much looser, or at least certainly much more variable.
Ray Coppinger, a researcher, observed a huge range of sexual behavior
among village and feral dogs around the world. At one extreme, male New
Guinea singing dogs are fiercely competitive, but in a very
non-wolf-like way; they behave more like the males of species that
occupy and defend individual territories, and the mere sight of another
male provokes attack. At the other extreme, and perhaps much more
typical of dogs, were the village dogs he encountered in Venezuela who
"were observed to line up and breed a female sequentially, with little
aggression between them."
There is certainly no simple explanation for all of these behavioral
differences between wolf and dog. Changes in neurotransmitter and
hormonal levels, disruptions of the juvenile stages of development in
which behaviors are molded, and the persistence of juvenile traits into
adulthood are all factors in the transformation. The overall picture
that emerges is that dogs are less confrontational and fearful, and
while they retain a capacity for asserting dominance (as well as for
acquiescing in subordination), their social interactions lack the
urgency or insistence that one sees in wolf society. There is simply
less at stake.
The social pressure cooker of the wolf pack has been replaced with a
tepid cauldron. Dogs have no need and no inclination for the packed and
charged social world of their ancestors. That essentially all male dogs
mark their home range with raised-leg urinations (as do the relatively
unsocial male coyotes), that no male or female dog is inhibited from
breeding by other dogs, and that most free-ranging dogs do not form
coherent packs suggests that dog society has fragmented from a group of
fiefdoms to a rather more democratic polity.
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How
“Wolf-Behavior” Has Slowly Disappeared Within Dogs
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