Word: haring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Foxy Dogs To understand how dogs evolved this skill, Hare traveled to Siberia. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists set up an experiment on a farm outside the city of Novosibirsk to understand how animals were domesticated. They decided to study foxes, which are closely related to wolves and dogs...
More than 40 generations of foxes have now been bred in Novosibirsk, and the results speak for themselves. The foxes that the scientists bred selectively have become remarkably doglike. They will affectionately run up to people and even wag their tails. In 2003, Hare traveled to Novosibirsk and ran his pointing test on baby foxes. The ordinary ones failed miserably. As for the doglike ones, "they did just as well as puppies right out of the box," Hare says. As the animals were bred for their affability, a new side of their social intelligence was apparently awakened...
...foxes are a guide, dog evolution may have begun with a similar shift in personality. Ancestors of dogs could cooperate to hunt, but the cooperation had limits. Wolves are fiercely competitive, as each one tries to claw its way to the top of the pack. Hare proposes that aggressive wolves evolved to have an easygoing personality thanks to a new opportunity: trash...
...question the research of Topál, Hare and others raises is why chimpanzees--who are in most ways much smarter than dogs--lack the ability to read gestures. Hare believes that the chimps' poor performance is one more piece of proof that the talent is rooted not in raw intelligence but in personality. Our ape cousins are simply too distracted by their aggression and competitiveness to fathom gestures easily. Chimps can cooperate to get food that they can't get on their own, but if there's the slightest chance for them to fight over it, they will. For humans...
Deeper understanding of the mind of the dog will come with more testing, and Hare and other researchers are planning it--on a grand scale. They're designing new experiments to compare different breeds and to search for genes that were transformed as the animals' social intelligence evolved. Plenty of dog owners are signing up for the studies Hare will be launching this fall. "We'd be happy with thousands," he says...