Are Wolves Smarter Than Dogs?

Intelligence is tricky to define, but research has shown that wolves understand cause and effect where dogs don't. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/pets/wolves-are-smarter-than-dogs.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:43):
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

(01:04):
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

(01:27):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:10):
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,

(02:31):
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

(02:53):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:38):
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.