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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

Just like your dog, some wolf puppies can play fetch too

This finding might provide clues into how dogs evolved into such good boys

Maddie Bender

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Yale University

“Stop trying to make fetch happen” is probably what everyone said to researchers in Stockholm, who recently released a preprint describing a surprising feat: three wolf puppies spontaneously retrieving a thrown ball. Previously, play between species that is based on social-communicative cues — like when a human throws a ball and says “Fetch!” — was thought to be unique to dogs, but the 8-week-old pups, named Sting, Lemmy and Elvis, showed otherwise.

Over a course of three trials, Lemmy and Elvis responded to the assessor’s call and retrieved the ball twice, and Sting responded to the call and brought back the ball all three times. 

In this study, researchers brought in a “puppy assessor” to measure 13 wolf pups against the metrics used to describe the behaviors of dog puppies. During one of the test situations, the assessor, whom the wolves had never met, threw a tennis ball across a room, called the name of the wolf pup and encouraged it to bring the ball back. Over a course of three trials, Lemmy and Elvis responded to the assessor’s call and retrieved the ball twice, and Sting responded to the call and brought back the ball all three times. The other 10 wolf pups either played with the ball on their own or showed no interest in it.

Dog playing fetch with ball
 Previously, play between species based cues — like when a human throws a ball and says “Fetch!” — was thought to be unique to dogs.Photo by Tadeusz Lakota on Unsplash

Other than being what I imagine was an incredibly cute situation, this research fills in an important gap in our knowledge about how wolves evolved into dogs. Most scientists support the theory of self-domestication, in which the friendliest members of a species gain an evolutionary advantage (such as greater access to food or protection). Descendants of these super-friendly wolves eventually gained the traits we associate with pooches, like puppy-dog eyes and floppy ears. But for this kind of selection to take place, there would need to be pre-existing variation in wolf populations that made some pups friendlier than others. 

Though all dogs are good boys, Sting, Lemmy and Elvis might be examples of these intrinsically better (wolf) boys. 

Source: https://massivesci.com/notes/wolf-dogs-puppies-fetch-balls-evolution-domestication/