Dogs (Canis familiaris) and wolves (Canis lupus) coordinate with conspecifics in a social dilemma.

Abstract

Cooperative hunting is generally considered to be a cognitively challenging activity, as individuals have to coordinate movements along with a partner and at the same time react to the prey. Wolves are said to engage in cooperative hunting regularly, whereas dogs could have maintained, improved, or reduced their cooperative skills during the domestication process. We compared the performance of individuals from two wolf packs and two dog groups with similar gender and rank structure. Members of these groups were tested in dyads with a problem-solving paradigm that involved aspects of a hunting-like situation. Subjects needed to coordinate their actions in order to get food. They were confronted with a social dilemma, in which an individual benefit from being selfish, unless the partner also chooses the selfish alternative, in which case the whole dyad loses. In the task, one partner was required to draw a barrier toward it by rushing forward, allowing the other partner to access the food, at which point both partners were allowed to access the food. Most dyads could solve the problem, with significant variation in their performance but no differences between species. However, the probability of taking the risk in a dyad depended on the species and rank of the individual and on cofeeding in the dyad. The results of this study show that wolves do not always outperform dogs when coordinating their actions, but that the cooperative behavior of Canis depends on many factors, including rank, type of task, and tolerance within the dyad.

From animal collective behaviors to swarm robotic cooperation

“…Wolf packs regularly engage in cooperative hunting through coordinative actions, which is an important aspect of cooperation [ 23 ]. There exists an obvious linear and completely transitive hierarchy based on the direction of submissive behaviors in wolf packs [ 24 ].…”

The Indispensable Dog

“…However, the dogs they tested were pets living together in human households where human intervention may have imposed levels of tolerance that the dogs left to themselves might not have developed (Marshall-Pescini et al, 2017b). Bräuer et al (2013Bräuer et al ( , 2020 claimed to have demonstrated cooperation in pairs of pet dogs on a task where the dogs had to pass through one of two gateways in a barrier. However, this task is not a clear test of cooperation because each gateway was not wide enough or open long enough to permit two dogs to pass.…”

Intra- and inter-specific cortisol coregulation

“…Whilst it could be argued that dog-dog cortisol coregulation (Chapters 4 and 5) is a product of dogs' domestication by humans (evidenced by increased sensitivity to social cues (Udell et al, 2010) and occurrence of epigenetic mutations of the HPA axis (Kikusui et al, 2019;Pörtl and Jung, 2017)), and did not originate from a common ancestor, I believe that the coregulation in canids pre-dates domestication and was already a key aspect of the socioecology of the undomesticated ancestor of modern-day dogs, the wolf (Canis lupus). Wolves have been shown to be as sensitive to human cues as domesticated dogs (Lampe et al, 2017;Range et al, 2019;Wheat and Temrin, 2020) and can outperform dogs in conspecific cooperation tasks (Bräuer et al, 2019;Marshall-Pescini et al, 2017). It is believed to be these cooperative abilities, accompanied by selection (self and/or artificial) for behaviours that increase the propensity for wolves to be in close proximity to humans (Lazzaroni et al, 2020;Pendleton et al, 2018;g.…”