The Evolution of Canine Social Behavior

Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Roger Abrantes, ethologist, cand. Art. DHC, DF, MAPBC, The Evolution of Canine Social Behavior by [Abrantes, Roger].
Table of contents

Once pups are weaned around 10 weeks they are independent and receive no further maternal care. There are many different types of behavioural issues that a dog can exhibit, including growling, snapping, barking, and invading human's space. When dogs are separated from humans , usually the owner, they often display behaviors which can be broken into the following four categories: Dogs from single-owner homes are approximately 2.

Furthermore, sexually intact dogs are only one third as likely to have separation anxiety as neutered dogs. The sex of dogs and whether there is another pet in the home do not have an effect on separation anxiety. Dogs that have been diagnosed with profound separation anxiety can be left alone for no more than minutes before they begin to panic and exhibit the behaviors associated with separation anxiety.

Separation problems have been found to be linked to the dog's dependency on its owner, not because of disobedience. Resource guarding is exhibited by many canines, and is one of the most commonly reported behaviour issues to canine professionals. The guarding can show in many different ways from rapid ingestion of food to using the body to shield items.

It manifests as aggressive behaviour including, but not limited to, growling, barking, or snapping. Some dogs will also resource guard their owners and can become aggressive if the behaviour is allowed to continue. Owners must learn to interpret their dog's body language in order to try to judge the dog's reaction, as visual signals are used i. Resource guarding is a concern since it can lead to aggression, but research has found that aggression over guarding can be contained by teaching the dog to drop the item they are guarding.

Canines often fear, and exhibit stress responses to, loud noises. Noise-related anxieties in dogs may be triggered by fireworks, thunderstorms, gunshots, and even loud or sharp bird noises. Associated stimuli may also come to trigger the symptoms of the phobia or anxiety, such as a change in barometric pressure being associated with a thunderstorm, thus causing an anticipatory anxiety.

Tail chasing can be classified as a stereotypy. It falls under obsessive compulsive disorder, which is a neuropsychiatric disorder that can present in dogs as canine compulsive disorder. Dogs who chase their tails have been found to be more shy than those who do not, and some dogs also show a lower level of response during tail chasing bouts. Comparisons made within the wolf-like canids allow the identification of those behaviors that may have been inherited from common ancestry and those that may have been the result of domestication or other relatively recent environmental changes.

Dog pups show unrestrained fighting with their siblings from 2 weeks of age, with injury avoided only due to their undeveloped jaw muscles. This fighting gives way to play-chasing with the development of running skills at 4—5 weeks.

On the effects of domestication on canine social development and behavior - ScienceDirect

Wolf pups possess more-developed jaw muscles from 2 weeks of age, when they first show signs of play-fighting with their siblings. Serious fighting occurs during 4—6 weeks of age. This aggression ceases by 10—12 weeks when a hierarchy has formed. Unlike other domestic species which were primarily selected for production-related traits, dogs were initially selected for their behaviors. These gene variations were unlikely to have been the result of natural evolution, and indicate selection on both morphology and behavior during dog domestication.

These genes have been shown to affect the catecholamine synthesis pathway, with the majority of the genes affecting the fight-or-flight response [57] [58] i. Among canids, packs are the social units that hunt, rear young and protect a communal territory as a stable group and their members are usually related. Feral dog groups are composed of a stable members compared to the member wolf pack whose size fluctuates with the availability of prey and reaches a maximum in winter time. The feral dog group consists of monogamous breeding pairs compared to the one breeding pair of the wolf pack.

Agonistic behavior does not extend to the individual level and does not support a higher social structure compared to the ritualized agonistic behavior of the wolf pack that upholds its social structure. Feral pups have a very high mortality rate that adds little to the group size, with studies showing that adults are usually killed through accidents with humans, therefore other dogs need to be co-opted from villages to maintain stable group size.

The critical period for socialization begins with walking and exploring the environment. Dog and wolf pups both develop the ability to see, hear and smell at 4 weeks of age. Dogs begin to explore the world around them at 4 weeks of age with these senses available to them, while wolves begin to explore at 2 weeks of age when they have the sense of smell but are functionally blind and deaf.

The consequences of this is that more things are novel and frightening to wolf pups. The critical period for socialization closes with the avoidance of novelty, when the animal runs away from - rather than approaching and exploring - novel objects. For dogs this develops between 4 and 8 weeks of age. Wolves reach the end of the critical period after 6 weeks, after which it is not possible to socialize a wolf.

Dog puppies require as little as 90 minutes of contact with humans during their critical period of socialization to form a social attachment. This will not create a highly social pet but a dog that will solicit human attention. To create a socialized wolf the pups are removed from the den at 10 days of age, kept in constant human contact until they are 4 weeks old when they begin to bite their sleeping human companions, then spend only their waking hours in the presence of humans.

This socialization process continues until age 4 months, when the pups can join other captive wolves but will require daily human contact to remain socialized. Despite this intensive socialization process, a well-socialized wolf will behave differently to a well-socialized dog and will display species-typical hunting and reproductive behaviors, only closer to humans than a wild wolf.

These wolves do not generalize their socialization to all humans in the same manner as a socialized dog and they remain more fearful of novelty compared to socialized dogs. In , a study to observe the differences between dogs and wolves raised in similar conditions took place. The dog puppies preferred larger amounts of sleep at the beginning of their lives, while the wolf puppies were much more active.

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The dog puppies also preferred the company of humans, rather than their canine foster mother, though the wolf puppies were the exact opposite, spending more time with their foster mother. The dogs also showed a greater interest in the food given to them and paid little attention to their surroundings, while the wolf puppies found their surroundings to be much more intriguing than their food or food bowl.

The wolf puppies were rarely seen as being aggressive to each other or towards the other canines. On the other hand, the dog puppies were much more aggressive to each other and other canines, often seen full-on attacking their foster mother or one another. Despite claims that dogs show more human-like social cognition than wolves, [64] [65] [66] several recent studies have demonstrated that if wolves are properly socialized to humans and have the opportunity to interact with humans regularly, then they too can succeed on some human-guided cognitive tasks, [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] in some cases out-performing dogs at an individual level.

For canids to perform well on traditional human-guided tasks e. After undergoing training to solve a simple manipulation task, dogs that are faced with an insoluble version of the same problem look at the human, while socialized wolves do not. Dogs reach sexual maturity and can reproduce during their first year in contrast to a wolf at two years. The female dog can bear another litter within 8 months of the last one.

The canid genus is influenced by the photoperiod and generally reproduces in the springtime. Domestic dogs are polygamous in contrast to wolves that are generally monogamous. Therefore, domestic dogs have no pair bonding and the protection of a single mate, but rather have multiple mates in a year. There is no paternal care in dogs as opposed to wolves where all pack members assist the mother with the pups. It is proposed that these differences are an alternative breeding strategy adapted to a life of scavenging instead of hunting.

Domestic dogs tend to have a litter size of 10, wolves 3, and feral dogs Dogs differ from wolves and most other large canid species as they generally do not regurgitate food for their young, nor the young of other dogs in the same territory.


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Regurgitating of food by the females for the young, as well as care for the young by the males, has been observed in domestic dogs, dingos and in feral or semi-feral dogs. In one study of a group of free-ranging dogs, for the first 2 weeks immediately after parturition the lactating females were observed to be more aggressive to protect the pups.

In absence of the mothers, they were observed to prevent the approach of strangers by vocalizations or even by physical attacks. Moreover, one male fed the litter by regurgitation showing the existence of paternal care in some free-roaming dogs [78]. Space used by feral dogs is not dissimilar from most other canids in that they use defined traditional areas home ranges that tend to be defended against intruders, and have core areas where most of their activities are undertaken. Urban domestic dogs have a home range of hectares in contrast to a feral dogs home range of 58 square kilometers.

Wolf home ranges vary from 78 square kilometers where prey is deer to 2. Wolves will defend their territory based on prey abundance and pack density, however feral dogs will defend their home ranges all year. Where wolf ranges and feral dog ranges overlap, the feral dogs will site their core areas closer to human settlement. Despite claims in the popular press, studies could not find evidence of a single predation on cattle by feral dogs.

Studies have observed feral dogs conducting brief, uncoordinated chases of small game with constant barking - a technique without success. In , a study reviewed 5 other studies of feral dogs published between and and concluded that their pack structure is very loose and rarely involves any cooperative behavior, either in raising young or in obtaining food.

Studies using an operant framework have indicated that humans can influence the behavior of dogs through food, petting and voice. Food and 20—30 seconds of petting maintained operant responding in dogs. A study using dogs that were trained to remain motionless while unsedated and unrestrained in an MRI scanner exhibited caudate activation to a hand signal associated with reward. Importantly, the scent of the familiar human was not the handler, meaning that the caudate response differentiated the scent in the absence of the person being present. The caudate activation suggested that not only did the dogs discriminate that scent from the others, they had a positive association with it.

Although these signals came from two different people, the humans lived in the same household as the dog and therefore represented the dog's primary social circle.

Research has shown that there are individual differences in the interactions between dogs and their human that have significant effects on dog behavior. In , a study showed that the type of relationship between dog and master, characterized as either companionship or working relationship , significantly affected the dog's performance on a cognitive problem-solving task. They speculate that companion dogs have a more dependent relationship with their owners, and look to them to solve problems.

In contrast, working dogs are more independent. In , a study produced the first evidence under controlled experimental observation for a correlation between the owner's personality and their dog's behaviour. Service dogs are those that are trained to help people with disabilities such as blindness, epilepsy, diabetes and autism.


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    7. Detection dogs are trained to using their sense of smell to detect substances such as explosives, illegal drugs, wildlife scat, or blood. One learns reading this, that all behavior has a function, not a purpose and that these two terms cover very different aspects. Understanding this will help understand the behaviour of the family dog. Abrantes walks the walk as well. No arm chair theoretician, he has titled hunting dogs, in the field, as well as trained at the professional level all canine units in Denmark, including police, drug and customs dogs, as well as dogs from all three Military Disciplines.

    The Evolution of Canine Social Behavior

    Three paws up on this one. Overview Music Video Charts. Opening the iTunes Store. If iTunes doesn't open, click the iTunes application icon in your Dock or on your Windows desktop. If Apple Books doesn't open, click the Books app in your Dock. Never look at dogs in the same way again! Learn how to analyze what you see when observing dogs to prevent problems or improve behavior. Follow the helpful photographic sequences and text to learn how to identify the subtle changes in canine body posture that tells you what a dog is thinking. Develop a profound appreciation for the intelligence and adaptability of dogs.

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