Why Study Social Behaviour In Dogs ?

Why Study Social Behaviour in Dogs?

 Just like their ancestors, dogs are highly social animals. Some intriguing insights into their social life may be achieved by studying both dogs themselves and their close relatives. In my group, we have spent a long time studying more or less social canids (C. aureus L. (golden jackals), C. latrans Say (coyotes), C. lupus L. (wolves)) and domestic dogs (C. lupus forma familiaris) of various breeds tackling questions dealing with social development, social communication, social organization, play and aggression.

The animals lived under comparable semi-natural conditions, where group size, sex ratio and so on were kept constant. Closely related canids, such as domestic dogs of various breeds and their progenitor, the wolf, when kept under comparable living conditions, show conspicuous similarities, but also a number of differences in social behaviour and its ontogeny – with marked intraspecific variability. Hence, comparative studies of social canids and dogs offer excellent opportunities to record constant traits with regard to the development and significance of individual or species-typical behaviour particularities – as well as those induced by domestication and breeding (Feddersen-Petersen, 2004).

Pack-living wolves are social canids par excellence. They develop a very high degree of sociality, a fact that may be judged as a kind of pre-adaptation for domestication: many capacities fit with the very high degree of social contacts and interactions of humans, living in reproductive units (families).

Wolves show a variety of facial expressions and body postures, while for many dog breeds the possibility to communicate precisely is lost due to an extreme diversity in morphological characters. Regarding the mimic area, inmany dog breeds we find only fragments of the wolf’s diversity, fine details and gradations. In brachycephalic breeds, the forehead is always wrinkled, as is the nose area, and teeth baring often is not possible because of prominent flews. Thus, several facial regions and a lot of signals have been lost for communication. The channel of acoustic communication is partly hypertrophic in all breeds analysed so far. Categories of function/emotion expressed include social play, play soliciting, exploration, care-giving, social contact and ‘greeting’, fear and agonistic behaviour. Interactions range from mildly agonistic biting of infants by adult dogs to affiliative acts like grooming. Via bark differentiations, the dog vocalizations seem to have developed into an increasingly communicative component of social interactions. In our studies, the German shepherds and especially the bull terriers were found to bark extraordinarily often and in a variety of social contexts. Furthermore, sounds occurring in different phonetic qualities were more common in domestic dogs than in wolves. The evolution of the barking system could be a parallel to the vocalizing human social partner.

Studies of social behaviour in canids may not only be interesting from the point of view of communication biology. Tomasello and Call (1997) summarized their review of primate cognition by noting that ‘The experimental foundation for claims that apes are “more intelligent” than monkeys is not a solid one’. While some authors (Flack and de Waal, 2000) focus on nonhuman primates as the most likely animals to show precursors to human morality, others have argued that we might learn as much or more about the evolution of human social behaviour by studying social carnivores (Bekoff, 1995).

According to Bekoff (2000), comparative data on social behaviour in canids may broaden the study of animal sociality. For example, when more or less social canids (wolves, domestic dogs, coyotes, golden jackals) engage in social play, they appear to expect to be treated fairly by their conspecifics. While golden jackals (Canis aureus L.) usually show play signals when rough play sequences are turning into aggressive encounters, in wolves (Canis lupus L.) play signals punctuate longer lasting social plays as a kind of ‘play markers’ (sensu Bekoff, 2000). Social canids like wolves also learn rules to coordinate their lives. Furthermore, pack size in wolves is regulated by social factors, which will be clear from examples given in the continuation of this chapter.