Scientists Find That Wolves Can Show Attachment Toward Humans
hubie writes:
Scientists find that wolves can show attachment toward humans:
When it comes to showing affection towards people, many dogs are naturals. Now comes word reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution on September 20th that the remarkable ability to show attachment behaviour toward human caregivers also exists in wolves.
The findings were made when researchers at Stockholm University, Sweden, tested 10 wolves and 12 dogs in a behavioural test specifically designed to quantify attachment behaviours in canids. During this test 23-week-old wolves spontaneously discriminated between a familiar person and a stranger just as well as dogs did, and showed more proximity seeking and affiliative behaviours towards the familiar person. Additionally, the presence of the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves calming them in a stressful situation. These discoveries build on a slowly accumulating body of evidence contradicting the hypothesis that the abilities necessary to form attachment with humans, arose in dogs only after humans domesticated them at least 15,000 years ago.
[...] "That was exactly what we saw," says Dr. Hansen Wheat. "It was very clear that the wolves, as the dogs, preferred the familiar person over the stranger. But what was perhaps even more interesting was that while the dogs were not particularly affected by the test situation, the wolves were. They were pacing the test room. However, the remarkable thing was that when the familiar person, a hand-raiser that had been with the wolves all their lives, re-entered the test room the pacing behaviour stopped, indicating that the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves. I do not believe that this has ever been shown to be the case for wolves before and this also complements the existence of a strong bond between the animals and the familiar person."
[...] "Wolves showing human-directed attachment could have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication," she says.
Journal Reference:
Christina Hansen Wheat, Linn Larsson, Patricia Berner, Hans Temrin, Human-directed attachment behavior in wolves suggests standing ancestral variation for human-dog attachment bonds [open], Ecology and Evolution, 2022. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.9299
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