spiritdogs:Breeding is a complicated pursuit, certainly, because there are more variables than just hunting ability versus aggression. But, I doubt you will convince someone who thinks that the only solution to most canine problems is to to heighten their prey/play drive. That would be like saying that the solution to all human behavior problems is to run the Boston marathon.
You're missing my point almost entirely. Breeding for certain types of hunting skills automatically makes dogs more social. But breeding only for "social" characteristics can cause behavioral problems, aggression among them, that the breeder wasn't expecting. As for you analogy to the Boston Marathon, that's just silly. First of all if you think my solution to all canine problems is to heighten the dog's prey drive, you don't really understand anything I've said here. Either that or you're using hyperbole to bolster a weak argument.
As for the marathon analogy, that's ridiculous. What can I say? Human beings are much more complicated than dogs.
But the fact remains that the primary reason dogs are social, and the primary reason that they've been in a symbiotic relationship with the human (and proto-human) race for so many tens of thousands of years is directly related to the unique form of group hunting that evolved in wolves and that some other wild canids also exhibit. Incidentally, other than canines human beings are the only other land mammal who hunts animals larger and more dangerous than themselves. So there's another connection to the hunting instincts right there.
I haven't read Miklosi's study, but I did glance through some of his book. And it looks interesting. My main problem with the dog-pup/wolf-cub study is that if you ask me there weren't enough controls in place. Raising a puppy is a much more complicated process than can be scientifically evaluated properly. There are far too many hidden variables. You can raise three different pups from the same litter and each one will be paying attention to you in a different way at different times. And even if your response to each pup's behavior is always exactly the same (which it couldn't possibly be) the pup will extract different information from each interaction in any number of different ways that might not be apparent at the time, if at all, ever. So to take only 5 dogs and 5 wolves and have them interact with 10 humans, and expect the results to be conclusive or even an indicator of much of anything is quite a stretch. Then there's the fact that most humans have different unconscious, emotional responses to puppies than they would to a wolf cub, no matter how cute she is. These unconscious differences might be quite small, but over time they would be magnified, because each social interaction will set a template -- or will alter whatever template is already in place -- for the next experience, and the next, and the next.
There are lots of genetic differences between dogs and wolves, and being more likely to look to a human beings for cues about behavior may very well be one of them. (Or it may be that we have genetic differences in our emotional responses to dogs as opposed wolf puppies.) But even so, without taking all kinds of hidden variables into account, doing larger samples, etc., you can't reach any rational conclusion about this. Is it genetic? It may be, at least partially. But there's probably a lot of hidden learning going on during the initial relationship between the young animals and the researchers. And whatever the kind of results have been "reached" so far that certainly doesn't mean that dogs are more intelligent than wolves or chimps, just that their adaptive emotional and social forms of intelligence are probably somehow tied to their interactions with human beings (probably through the process of EEC). It just means that dogs are more flexible, socially and emotionally, than wolves. We already knew that. And it has nothing to do with higher levels of intellect -- it's a huge mistake to think it does.
Anyway, that's how I see it,
LCK
"Clicker training has not taught me a whole bunch, other than that people can get wrapped up in fads and catch phrases." Bob Bailey
"If a lion could talk we would not be able to understand him." Wittegenstein. "If a lion could talk we would understand him perfectly, but we would learn very little about ordinary lions from him."Daniel C. Dennett
"Dogs don't care who's alpha and who's not. Only emotionally dysfunctional owners and trainers do." Jack Field