Richard Collins: Dogs’ behaviour inherited from wolves

Baby wolf cubs near their den site. One howling for his mother.

DOGS love to chase a ball. Were they taught to do this by our ancestors? An animal able to retrieve carcasses would provide a valuable service during hunts, as wildfowlers’ dogs still do today. Pups responding well to human commands could have been selected and trained. Now, however, a discovery made at Stockholm University is challenging this idea. Retrieving, researchers there claim, is not an artificially acquired behaviour. It’s innate, inherited from the dog’s ancestor of at least 15,000 years ago, the wolf.