DOGS: A LOVE STORY.

ROMANCE fiction; DOGS; HUMAN behavior; DOMESTIC animals; HUMAN biology; WOLVES; HUMAN-animal relationships

This spiffy little terrier is volunteer number one on day number one of an ambitious project launched by Harvard University evolutionary neuroscientist Erin Hecht to answer basic questions about what dogs do and why they do it. In fact, research out of the Wolf Science Center has found that in some situations, these wild animals are actually more tolerant than dogs: Given food to share, dogs keep their distance from one another. In one study, pairs of wolves or dogs must cooperate to retrieve a piece of meat; wolves work together effectively, but dogs were "abysmally bad", says investigator Sarah Marshall-Pescini. When she tested wolf-human and dog-human cooperation partners, the pattern became clearer. [Extracted from the article]

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