Wolf-Dog Hybrids Are More Fearful but as Social and Playful as Dogs

Abstract

Domestication is a selection process where animals become more docile and easier to handle than their wild counterparts. This selection for ‘tameness’ has been suggested to lead to several behavioral modifications in domesticated animals, such as becoming more social and more playful towards humans, and also less aggressive and less fearful than their wild counterparts. The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, which is well-known for their pro-social relationship with humans. In an attempt to understand which behavioral changes occurred when the dog was domesticated, we used wolf-dog hybrids as a proxy for wolves and compared their behavior with the behavior of German shepherds, Siberian huskies, and Alaskan malamutes, which were the main dog breeds they were mixed with. We found that wolf-dog hybrids were as social as the dogs and that they did not show any signs of aggression. While the wolf-dog hybrids were less playful than German shepherds, they had the same levels of human-directed playfulness as Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes. The long-lasting fear reactions of the wolf-dog hybrids in this study, while almost absent in the three dog breeds, suggest that this fearfulness is a heritage from wolves, while dogs have adapted during domestication to have less fearful reactions in human environments.