Advocates should take Lessons from Wolves! Do They? No.. they continue to remain focused upon their own motivations rather than supporting groups that have certain types of rights that they can not nor will ever have. This should show a prudent Individual that they care about the wrong thing. It takes their focus away from the ULTIMATE end result which is protecting your wildlife by using every tool available. Of course I would imagine that it comes from paying their directors exorbitant salaries, some of which are near $500,000 per year.
Then there are those that somehow seem to think that opening their mouth up about banning grazing allotments will get them shunned… Guess what… its not opening that mouth that will ultimately do that for you.
Why wolves are better team players than dogs
Dogs may be social butterflies, but wolves are top dog when it comes to working together as a team. That’s because unlike dogs, wolves haven’t evolved to avoid conflict; instead, members of a pack “sort things out” as they forage together, according to a new study. The work calls into question a long-held assumption that domestication fostered more cooperative individuals.
“This study is a fabulous first go at experimentally comparing the ability of wolves and dogs to cooperate with their groupmates,” says Brian Hare, a dog cognition expert at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the work. “Wolves run circles around dogs.”
We tend to think of dogs as team players because they work with us to hunt, rescue trapped people, herd livestock, and play. But though dogs can be easily trained to work with people, it’s much harder to get them to work with fellow dogs. That’s especially true of village dogs, free-ranging canines with no owners or training that make up some 80% of the world’s pooches. They hang out in loose packs, surviving primarily on garbage and scraps. And there’s very little study of them, says Clive Wynne, a comparative psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Sarah Marshall-Pescini, a comparative psychologist at the University of Vienna, is helping change that. She teamed up with researchers at the Wolf Science Centre in Ernstbrunn, Austria, where dogs and wolves are raised under similar semiwild conditions, albeit with medical care and some daily training. The center houses about 15 mongrel dogs and seven small packs of timber wolves, with two to three wolves in each pack.
There, she tested pairs of dogs or wolves in an exercise that has also been used to study cooperative behavior in chimps and bonobos. She put food on a tray attached to two ropes—but the animals could get the food only if each individual pulled on a different rope at the same time. She and her colleagues carefully evaluated the animals’ behavior before, during, and after the first test as well as on subsequent tests. Both wolves and dogs were curious about the food trays, but whereas dogs approached the food one at a time, the wolves rarely waited their turn. This has been seen in earlier studies: “Wolves will argue over food but also feed at the same time, [but] dogs simply avoid the potential [of] conflict,” Marshall-Pescini explains.
In the new study, wolves were more were more likely to pull the rope at the same time, learning that this teamwork was the secret to their success, Marshall-Pescini and her colleagues report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Overall, wolves got the food 100 of 416 times, whereas dogs succeed only twice in 416 attempts. Thus, says Marshall-Pescini, it seems that as wolves were domesticated, their natural tendency to cooperate shifted from other animals to humans. “Dogs were bred to get along with us and to pay close attention to us, but not necessarily to cooperate the way wolves do,” says Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved with the study.
The next step should look at whether different rearing or breeding alters how dogs work with other dogs, Hare says. And Marshall-Pescini would like to eventually design a test that requires sequential cooperation, so the dogs’ tendency to avoid going after food at the same time will not be a factor. In the meantime, adds Wynne, the new study “takes our consideration of dog-wolf differences to a new level.”
Source: Why wolves are better team players than dogs | Science | AAAS
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Twowolves has it the mark on his preface here!
To advocates:
Please take the Protect the Wolves posting on gaining member numbers to every possible forum and person unfamiliar with it.
The article describes what human breeding of dogs as servants and pets results in
Dogs are children, neotenic, unlike wolves, who grow up.
Wolves respect food when it in possession. This is built into every one.
Here’s a story. THe Wolf who adopted me (I’ve said that he demanded to reach and live with me for two years). once picked up a plastic bait container when we were first together. I was worried about his eating plastic, and tried to take it away. He did everything except tear my hand off. I had to leave him to think clearly, and realized that this is counter to a wolf’s nature.
Believe it or not, he slowly taught me through careful play, to understand when and where something should never be taken. He often played a similar game throughout his life with me. Always, because of my not understanding on that single time, he reinforced both the proper etiquette, and always played with clear affection, clear suggestion that we were playing.
He also exhibited something with food that you will see in dogs ONLY with toys when eliciting play.
He would push food to me to share.
I always shared everything he was in the least curious about, including food. If it were not good, real food to him, he would just let it go.
Wolves do this nose-pushing with food, while dogs have never done so in my presence or to my knowledge.
Again, dogs were bred to be submissive children, and whenever they were insufficiently so, excluded, except in the case of dogs bred to fight.
If Twowolves is intimate with any of his rescues, he might be able to see the spectrum of “growing up” in wolf hybrids. There are extremely distinct differences from either wolf or dog, pretty much exactly dependent upon whether they are 1/4, I wolf grandparent,
1/2, one wolf parent,
3/4, three wolf grandparents.
In interacting for short periods with wolf hybrids, I haven’t been able to see differences with hybrids who had 7/8 wolf, except minor physical differences
Here is what you will find, and what long observers know:
At each point, a hybrid understands less human language, understands less that they are commanded to do something.
Wolves understand what is IMPORTANT to any who they have intimacy with. This is conveyed by emotional intensity. They tend not to question reasons, but accept the importance another wolf or intimate human places upon the event and the autonomy of another. They might signal discomfort themselves..
This can only be understood without conflation, by a human involved with a wolf in conditions of freedom. Just as it takes both wolves to choose for a bond, you also are subject to a wolf’s choice, and they SEE yours.
(they smell more than you understand, too,, and your every tensing, every response to anything they take in. Dogs can do much of this, even though they are like pups for their lives.)
Humans rarely give complete signals when they believe that a wolf can be a “pet.” this grave mistake causes the wolf to demand its adult right (wolves are teenage about 22 months, and will increasingly seek their adult rights from then on, even though they do not attain physical , brain, cognitive, maturity until about 5.
Some of the sacredness of which TWOwolves speaks is that complete respect for the autonomy of another, and every wolf, no matter HOW friendly, deserves it. You will find nothing about life without recognition that every Other is a truly sacred being.
All of This may be too complex for understanding through comments.
Some of their astonishing skills grow pretty early, and they are ALWAYS awake and learning. But they make either only a single strong lifetime bond, or sometimes a good serial bond of equality,.
Since most live to around 3, they are still like mid-late teens, more promiscuous, etc.
A short comment won’t tell you much, but experimenters do not form that deep bond. I admit that I experimented in some ways, but they were made to find out differences, and the one with whom I had that bond, knew what I was doing, and sometimes experimented on me to find what I knew. He would then actually attempt to teach me the right way, in the same way that we spend part of our time teaching, part, playing, part exploring and seeking new things personally, and as a pair..
Wolf raisers do not form that bond, although they can be really knowledgeable and friendly,, and loving, with wolves. There is one I can think of who is more knowledgeable than just about any wolf biologist about these and other social things. In the end, though, there is no human that is as good for a wolf, as another wolf. It is a necessary tragedy for a wolf, if [s]he was born captive, but a worse tragedy is a human wants to bond with a wolf, but does not abandon all human values, and instead confines or ignores in any way.
this too is part of why a wolf is sacred.
I used to leave the window open when visiting any store or other place, so that the wolf could choose to explore.* I would NEVER attempt to abuse him, but just apologize to the store people. He quickly took in enough to satisfy his curiosity. In many cases we would leave FAST, in order to beat authorities out of there.. He ALWAYS understood any real emotion I had.
They are far faster and more accurate at this than ANY human. Wolves hit that wariness when still two months or so old, and this cannot really be studied as it looks like “fear”, when in fact it is evaluation based upon inherited characteristics, and is conscious cognition.
Humans also fail to watch closely enough the arguments and levels of fighting that wolves do. They are exquisitely aware as are the best diplomats, of situations.
Wolves DO have protocols which they will not allow to be breached. Even if humans or another wolf do so, and they must submit, they WILL remember, and will ALWAYS base their relationship and choice to disperse, escape, leave, that other.
Whether wolf or bear or rattlesnake, it must be regarded as a grave wrong to deny the sacredness of another. There are traditions tat know this, and the same word meaning sacred, means stay away, apart, do not intrude.
* the wolf soon grows to evaluate extremely quickly, and by adulthood, can take only one look at a place, something, to find out what’s going on in relation to itself or its bonded partner. But it will retain this curiosity, for its lifetime.
I say to people, “above all things, the wolf is a communicator.” They read every being, and will establish complex communications with intimates. But as you see with dogs that are ignored, they will cease with anyone who does not “get it.
I still, whenever I see a strong wolf hybrid, signal them. Most dogs, not even a husky or wolflike dog without enough wolf, will respond so surely, and every 1/2 hybrid will get highly curious and interact. (even wild wolves in places they aren’t persecuted,will watch, taking in information until it suits their previous knowledge.
Yet without use of wolf language, even a wolf will learn to evaluate a human as unable or not interested. They CAN act toward us as we do to them, ignoring the herdlike weird humans.
Some dogs clearly try to communicate things like desires, worries, directions, etc, and I see them often doing so, but learn to give up because their “owners” have no senses other than word babble left. They are not at all really idiots.
This cannot be clearly written about, and again, wolf researchers can’t see the complex intimacies and strong communications. I’ve been around this – In order to make scientifically defensible research, they have to avoid the only important thing. Direct intentional interactive communication. Wolves will not be directed without intimacy and good reason in the experience of the wolf.