By Site Editor
The Wildlife Science Center in Columbus welcomed several litters of wolf puppies into the world last spring, and they have become a part of Duke University’s groundbreaking work on viewing dog and wolf intelligence.
The pups are about to become television celebrities, too, as they will star in National Geographic Wild’s program featuring Dr. Brian Hare and his canine cognition studies. The center is happy to help out in its ongoing work to benefit Mexican gray wolves, and its goal is to educate people about all of its resident wild animals.
Peggy Callahan, executive director of the Wildlife Science Center, said Hare and Duke University’s work came from a separate study that led to the birth of the puppies, allowing the center to hand-raise the animals for the cognitive study, she told the Post Review.
“Hare and others found a connection between temperament in dogs and certain levels of certain hormones,” Callahan said. “When you start with puppies, one of the things that breeders or trainers spend all of their energy doing is temperament assessment of dogs in order to place them in the right situation. And that’s especially important with service dogs and military dogs.”
As a result, she continued, Hare jumped on that bandwagon. Yet no one had done this with wolves.
“So what he is very interested in and what we are very interested in is the comparison between how wolves think and process information versus how dogs think and process information,” Callahan said. “How is that manifesting temperament in response to human cues for food? How is this actually mimicked? How do the hormone levels reflect the observations in temperament and behavior?”