Wolves Are Smarter Than Dogs?

A new study put dogs and wolves head to head in the intelligence department. Guess which species won? Find out on BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain
stuff is 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

(00:25):
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

(00:47):
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 she's 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

(01:11):
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

(01:34):
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

(01:57):
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

(02:19):
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. That's because dogs are

(02:42):
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 for
facilitated domestication. The study is unique also in that it

(03:04):
used dogs that lived in both packs and with families,
but the results of the dogs were independent of living conditions.

(03:45):
Today's episode was written by John Paritano, produced by Tristan McNeil,
and For more on this and other topics, please visit
us at how stuff works dot com.