Natures wonders: Counting wolves beat dogs (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, December 26, 2014, 23:15 (3618 days ago) @ David Turell

Wolves grasp counts one thru four better than dogs-http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfish/2014/12/19/dogs-not-great-math-wolves-better/#5465-"The animals couldn't judge the cheese piles by size, but it was still possible they were getting clues without counting. They might be keeping track of the time it took to drop the cheese cubes, for example. So the researchers tried the test again, spacing out the smaller numbers of cheese cubes so they took the same amount of time to drop as the larger numbers. They also tried adding rocks to the experiment: an experimenter dropped the same number of items on each side, but some of the items were small stones, and the dog still had to pick the side with more cheese.-"Even with these controls in place, wolves picked the correct side more often than not. But dogs failed. They performed no better than if they'd been guessing.-"Dogs may have lost their wolfish number sense when they moved in with humans. On the other hand, they gained the opportunity to eat cheese. Who's smart now?"