“We may have bred a behavioral syndrome into a companion animal,” she says.
Since evolving from wolves at least ten thousand years ago, domestic dogs have helped us find food and protected us from becoming dinner ourselves, all while providing a friendly face and wagging tail. (Read more about how dogs evolved in National Geographic magazine.)
Understanding how our best friends, from Chihuahua to mastiff, became what they are today is a "sexy question,” according to Karen Overall, a canine behavior expert at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn't involved in the new study.
In 2010, in collaboration with Monique Udell, an animal behaviorist at Oregon State University, von Holdt searched the dog and wolf genomes and identified alterations in the WBSCR17 gene that occurred during dog domestication, results they published in Nature. (See "Dog and Human Genomes Evolved Together.")
Their project lay dormant until 2014, when von Holdt and Udell secured funding to set up a new set of experiments with 18 dogs of various breeds—including dachshunds, Jack Russell terriers, and Bernese mountain dogs—and 10 wolves habituated to humans.
The scientists trained all of the animals to open a box that contained a piece of sausage. Then they asked the canines to open the box while in three separate situations: with a familiar human present; with an unfamiliar human; and alone, without a person at all.
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