Fetching a thrown ball is one of the most quintessential dog behaviours, right up there with begging for scraps and tail wagging. But new research suggests that fetching may be older than dogs themselves, as some wolf pups also seem to enjoy the game.
The first observations of wolf pups fetching balls for humans happened unexpectedly, says Christina Hansen Wheat at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Hansen Wheat鈥檚 team studies the behavioural changes involved in domestication using dogs and wolves as a model. The team hand-reared wolf pups from three litters from the age of 10 days. When they were 8 weeks old, the team put the pups through a standardised series of tests to evaluate their behaviour.
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One of these tests was having an unfamiliar human toss a tennis ball across the room to see how much it captured the pup鈥檚 attention. Almost all of the pups from the 2014 and 2015 litters flatly ignored the ball. One gave it a passing glance.
The next year, one pup shocked the scientists by not only chasing down the ball and snatching it up, but bringing it back to the human when coaxed.
Hansen Wheat was watching from another room. 鈥淚 literally got goosebumps,鈥� she says, adding that dogs鈥� ability to interpret socially communicative behaviour from humans 鈥� like following a human鈥檚 cues to bring a ball back 鈥� has been considered a consequence of the domestication process.
鈥淩etrieving for a human has never before been shown in wolves,鈥� says Hansen Wheat.
In the end, three wolves from the 2016 litter fetched the balls, and one did it on all three trials of the test. Others played with the ball but wouldn鈥檛 return it. Hansen Wheat thinks the difference is likely to be rooted in the pups鈥� genetics, since the litters were brought up under identical conditions.
Evan MacLean at the University of Arizona finds the ball retrieval particularly intriguing. 鈥淭he first part 鈥� chasing, picking up in mouth 鈥� is largely within the predatory play repertoire,鈥� says MacLean. 鈥淭he returning with the object to the person is decidedly more dog-like.鈥�
But MacLean notes that the 鈥渇etch鈥� part may have been incidental. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not clear if the return to the person is really about bringing the object back, or just a social approach and the wolf still happens to have the ball in her mouth,鈥� says MacLean.
Whatever the pups鈥� intention, MacLean and Hansen Wheat agree that the findings suggest there is variation in human-directed play behaviours in wolves, and it could have been targeted early in dogs鈥� domestication at least 15,000 years ago.
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Similarities between dogs and wolves can give insights into what our forebears valued when they set upon creating dogs, says Hansen Wheat. In this case, a rare fetch may have been a way into our hearts.
鈥淲e connect with our dogs when we interact with them, for example, through play,鈥� she says. 鈥淲olf puppies showing human-directed behaviour could therefore have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication.鈥�
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