Udell said that these results agreed with previous studies that have shown that dogs are not as good at independent problem-solving as wolves, and that they get more distracted by social stimulation.
I'm not sure that's true. I think dogs have fantastic problem solving skills. The solutions, however, are typically to use the human to solve their problems.
Yes, I've observed this behavior as well. If they come across a problem they know they can't solve (i.e. rat in a tree), they come ask you if you have any ideas.
This isn't limited to domestic animals, though. Ravens, upon finding a corpse of an large animal that they can't break the hide to get to the delicious meat, will make a racket to attract predators. Hearing the noise a wolf, coyote, bear, or bobcat comes along opens the dead animal, has a nice meal, and the ravens get the leftovers. That's ravens for you, using their own predators as tools.
Corvidae are smart as hell. I think they're one of the most clever animals around. I'm not sure when or why I started, but I have fed (American) crows for years wherever I live. At my current place, I have been feeding a particular crow (and his mother) as long as he's been alive. I specifically remember his mother setting up shop in the palm tree across the street when she had this particular crow. Anyway, he follows me when I leave the house. This crow literally follows me to the grocery store, or when I go for my run, or to the convenience store. His mother doesn't, though. I have tried to take him in by leaving my lanai door open, but that is just one barrier the crows around here never seem to overcome. I've let other crows into my house before, but the crows in this neighborhood clearly think it is a deadly proposition. I don't know how weird any of this is, but it's just something I've always done.
My grandma feeds wild (hooded) crows and seagulls. She claims to know all of them by name, she even claims they have preferred food (like bread, sausage etc...) and she seems to have a very strong emotional connection with them. Whenever we go to any sort of trip that makes her away from home for a few days, she invariably starts talking about her crows and seagulls, complaining she wasn't able to feed them.
What kind of food do they like?
I also want to do that. I look at and whistle with the birds in my town for quite a while, but I am not sure what would be good food to carry around for them.
Crows go apeshit for plain peanuts and granola bars that I've kinda crushed up or broken into pieces which seem reasonably-sized for them to eat. Usually that means I break a peanut of "average" size into four pieces. Once along that natural split, and then each piece once more. Other birds really like that stuff, too, and whatever the crows don't eat, the smaller ones do. There's always nothing left, perhaps obviously.
Crows will pack hunt rats. I didn’t know they did this until I watched it happen this year. One would peck at it from behind; the rat would squeak and whip around; next crow would hop in and peck it from behind. Rinse, spin, repeat a few times and in 5 minutes or so they were picking meat off the rat.
All I could think watching this, was that I was watching a literal murder of crows.
I've moved from waving the nearest $long_yard_tool randomly to a pellet gun, which has proved to be pretty humane. Something about having an orange tree next to a neighbor's avocado tree really attracts the rats.
There fact that they can't solve problems without us is why we can leave them alone in our houses. Can you imagine a dog with great problem solving skills in your house all day?
• Successfully swiped a (new!) jar of peanut butter from a high up rack in the kitchen without breaking anything
• Broke two small holes through the plastic lid with her incisors
• Unscrewed the lid(!)
• Licked the entire thing empty
RIP my German Shepherd Afghan Hound Mix.
If I had the money, spacetime & resources for it, I'd try to breed some hybrids from Shiba Inu, New Guinea singing dogs (assuming I could do so without endangering the population), Basenji, Huskies, Ibizan Hounds, Border Collies, and a bunch of other breeds, to try to find a new breed with extremely wideband vocalization abilities, few genetic health issues, and very high intelligence. (Haven't found a breed with novel hips yet, however. Most videos one sees of dogs walking upright involve extremely cruel training methods to force the animal into an unnatural behavior which damages their hips - not something one'd want.)
Did you know? Humans have two mutations in the FOXP2 gene affecting the protein structure, one of which dogs also have (not the one famed for causing a change in language skills however. But even so, that seems interesting.)
I'm not sure what you mean, could you elaborate? Do you mean they might be able to figure out how to steal the meat in the freezer, escape, play with the printer machine etc...
A canine geneticist and an expert in animal behavior showed this to be the case and their research agrees with previous studies, but because you happen to think otherwise, it must not be true.
Maybe I'm missing something and you can help me out, but I really don't understand this sort of thinking.
The issue of the word "tool" having been used in reference to you in particular not withstanding, it's pretty well understood that collaboration is not tool-using.
I like the neoteny view of dogs: as wolves retaining juvenile (puppy-like) characteristics into adulthood (reproductive maturity).
But the genetic link found here need not be at odds, for it could be the genetic basis of neoteny, and explain other characteristics, like those found in the Siberian fox domestication experiment (see other comments), and other domesticated animals.
It may also be that homo homo sapiens has also been domesticated by this same genetic mechanism... although an extreme mutation results in Williams-Beuren syndrome, a milder mutation may be prevalent, compared with, say apes, neanderthals, or other hominids (though, sufficient DNA for comparative analysis is unlikely).
I just visited Bali and encountered the Bali Street Dog for the first time, which is apparently a semi-feral breed that basically doesn’t care about humans at all http://bawabali.com/bali-heritage-dog/2585-2/
I wonder if they lost the genes that the study identified as causing hyper-sociability, or if they still have it but the phenotype is suppressed for various reasons (e.g. environmental)
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Dmitri Belyayev's decades-long study on silver foxes produced animals that began to distinguish markedly different morphological features (bushy tails, floppy ears, spotted coats) and physiology (lower adrenaline and stress hormone levels, smaller skulls, longer breeding seasons, larger litter sizes) by selecting strictly for tameness, which they defined simply as aggression toward humans.[0] Belyayev was forced to live in Siberia to carry out this work as Mendelian geneticists and biologists were officially condemned (denounced as "fascist" and many were executed) by the Soviet state as it supported Lysenkoism, a Lamarckian psuedo-scientific theory that minimized the role of genes on behavior, which allied well with Soviet and Marxist ideology.
I'm skeptical of this research. What if the breeder's subjective evaluation of tameness was influenced by bushy tails and floppy ears, as most people's would be? You'd end up breeding both traits in, without the same genes being involved.
"At seven or eight months, when the foxes reach sexual maturity, they are scored for tameness and assigned to one of three classes. The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. (Even Class III foxes are tamer than the calmest farm-bred foxes. Among other things, they allow themselves to be hand fed.) Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the “domesticated elite,” are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs."
Pretty hard and fast criteria. Hard to let a slightly bushier tail affect your evaluation of whether a fox just snapped at you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man describes research that also had hard and fast criteria, yet thumbs somehow ended up on scales anyway. The criteria you quote are a little fuzzy around the edges. "Eager to establish human contact" might well be correlated with fox cuteness.
_The Mismeasure of Man_ is biased garbage written by someone with an axe to grind who attacked strawmen and may well have made up some of his findings of 'bias' and more importantly, has completely failed to predict subsequent decades of psychological, psychiatric, and genetics results: IQ is stronger and more vindicated than ever and a major driver of molecular genetics & neuroimaging research. Try again.
How do you (unconsciously) select for attributes that do not exist? It was not until several generations that the first physiological changes began to be observed and those were in hormone levels, not morphology. In fact, the physiological, anatomical, and morphological changes were entirely unanticipated. The testing & categorization methodology is described in the article:
The tests for tameness took the following form, which was still in use as of 2009. "When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the pups are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I.[5] After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old."
Dogs were bred with this friendliness to be willing laborers with their own safety being a secondary concern to doing a job given to them. Think of how quickly and eagerly this would be used by those who want exploitable labor from humans.
I'm not sure that's true. I think dogs have fantastic problem solving skills. The solutions, however, are typically to use the human to solve their problems.