Canine club: From wolves to dogs! (2)
Maya: You can also send us a drawing, mystery sound or a question.
Molly: Like these listeners did.
Laura: Hi, my name is Laura. I am seven years old.
Braden: My name is Braden. I'm five years old.
Laura: We're from North Providence, Rhode Island.
Braden: My question is, how do lips get chapped?
Maya: We'll answer that question at the end of the show.
Molly: Plus, we'll howl out the new names on the Brains honor roll.
Maya: Keep listening.
Molly: You're listening to Brains On. I'm Molly.
Maya: And I'm Maya.
Molly: And brace yourself. Here comes the-
[Voice: mystery sound.]
Molly: Are you ready, Maya?
Maya: Yeah.
Molly: Okay [laughs], here it is.
[plays mystery sound]
Molly: What is your guess?
Maya: [laughs] My guess is dog sledding.
Molly: Very good guess.
Maya: Because I heard almost like barking and crunching snow and the sound of a sled on snow being pulled. That sounds really ridiculous but there's a certain sound that has.
Molly: You know what? You sound very informed. That's an excellent guess. We're going to be back with the answer in just a moment.
Automated voice: Brains on.
Molly: Let's get back to the wonderful world of wolves.
Maya: Wolves are social creatures.
Molly: Just like us.
Maya: That means wolves like to live in groups and work together. We call their groups packs.
Molly: We sent our friend Britta Greene to the Minnesota Zoo to learn more about life in a wolf pack.
Britta Greene: A big part of pack life takes place in a den but what is a den exactly? Dawn Devins from the Minnesota Zoo says basically it's a place a mama wolf goes to have her babies.
Dawn Devins: Dens can be anything from a crevice in a rock formation, some fallen logs that a female could dig out underneath and have a safe protected area in order to have her pups born.
Britta: Wolf pups are born small and blind so they depend on their parents for everything. Mom gives them milk and dad hunts fresh food. Usually, after just a few months, they'll be exploring outside but this almost didn't happen for the wolves at the zoo.
[music]
They were born in the wild, in Alaska. There was a big wildfire near their den when they were just two weeks old. Their mom disappeared, she either died in the fire or fled from the flames. Luckily, firefighters saved the pups and they were brought here to Minnesota.
Dawn: We have that one over there. I think that might be Hooper.
Britta: Dawn points out one of the wolves. They live in a pen that looks like Northern Minnesota. This time of year, it's covered in snow, dotted with rocks and cedar and pine trees. Visitors can say hi from behind wooden and chain-link fences. Along with Hooper, there's Gannett, Leah, Stebbins, and X-ray.
Dawn: Even though they are a family pack, they have a variety of colors. Wolves can go anywhere from dark grey and black to almost kind of a, I would almost say like a German Shepherd kind of color, a tawny brown and gray color.
Britta: She says a typical pack in Minnesota is about six to eight wolves, usually siblings and their mother and father. Sometimes the pack will let wolves that aren't relatives join in. Having a pack isn't just about having a family to hang out with, it's also about hunting.
[music]
Britta: Wolf packs often track their prey, like herds of deer, for long periods of time. They are looking for an animal that's weak or sick or old, easier to take down. They'll surround their target and coordinate so they can back each other up. If the deer starts to run away, then Dawn says, they'll attack.
Dawn: They have one of the strongest jaw bites. As you can imagine, when they do catch their prey, they want to hold on to it [laughs].
Britta: It's a total team effort and if all goes well, everyone gets enough to eat. At the zoo though, life is a little easier. Wolves here don't have to hunt to get fed. Actually, the zoo delivers their meat that's ready-to-eat, things like rabbits and chickens. Right now, the wolves are just relaxing, lounging around.
Dawn: I think they're just waiting. They're very good at knowing when it's getting close to dinnertime [laughs].
Britta: I saw this guy just came up and was going to nuzzle the other one and then he took off. Are they buddies, you would say?
Dawn: Yes, they are family members so brothers and sisters [laughs]. If you have family members, you know when somebody comes in the room, it's your turn to move because they might just bully you out of your seat in the living room somewhere.
Britta: Just like in any family, she says, pack mates don't always get along, but at least they know they'll be there for each other when they're really in need.
[music]
Molly: Maya, are you ready to try again that mystery sound?
Maya: Yes, I am.
Molly: All right, here it is one more time.
[mystery sound]
Molly: Maya, do you want to stick with your original guess?
Maya: I think I do.
Molly: You thought it was dog sledding. Here is the answer.
Gretta and Gwen: Our names are Greta and Gwen from Plymouth, Minnesota.
Gwen: The sound you just heard is dog sledding way up north, almost in Canada.
Gretta: The dogs' harnesses were jingling when the dogs sled. You can hear the sled crunching on the ice. Our favorite part is when we go on hills, it feels like you're on a roller coaster.
Gwen: You yell commands to teach the dogs what to do. 'Hike' is go faster. If you go 'Whoa', that means slow down or stop.
Greta: I learned how to drive the dog sled but I can't stop the brakes because I'm too light.
Molly: Nice work, Maya.
Maya: Yes [laughs].
Molly: You were 100% correct. Have you been dog sledding?
Maya: No, never ever.
Molly: Well, you sounded very knowledgeable about dog sledding. You've got everything right so I'm very impressed with your excellent ears.
[howls]
Molly: Now, we know dogs and wolves have a lot in common and that leads us to this question.
Maya: Hi, my name is Maya. I'm six and a half years old. My question is, why do we have dogs as pets but not wolves? Wolves are still dogs and foxes, foxes are still dogs, so why not have them as pets?
Leila: My name is Leila. I live in Brussels, Belgium. My question is, how did dogs evolve from wolves?
Maya: Here to help us answer these questions is Bridgett VonHoldt.
Molly: She's an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University.
Maya: Welcome, Bridgett.
Bridgett VonHoldt: Hi, thank you for inviting me.
Maya: How did dogs evolve from wolves?
Bridgett: This is a really complex change, to go from a wild animal to being this domestic dog that we have in our lives and in our homes. This process happened over thousands of years. Really, what happened is that people originally formed this relationship, this communication with wild wolves. We suspect that this had a lot to do with how they hunted. That early on, as humans were still hunting and gathering food that way, that there was this relationship and maybe communication with a local wolf pack where they were also doing the same hunting and gathering of food resources.
That transition took thousands of years. This was a really long process. Early dogs or really rather what they were, are wolves, are living closer and closer to human settlements. Some hypotheses say that these wolves were living closer to our trash dumps where we would put empty carcasses or any other food waste we had and eventually, as these wolves were living closer and closer to people, they had to be more tolerant of people's presence. Ultimately, the idea is that these wild wolves were adjusting to human presence and were living in and among the villages. Often, dogs, even early in domestication, were just living with people but not necessarily inside a house and being restrained on a leash or a harness.
Maya: Why can we have dogs as pets but not wolves, that's my original question?
Bridgett: Wildlife are unpredictable, they are not tame, they don't live in a house, it's hard to train them. Most of the reasons why we shouldn't have a wolf as a pet is because it's for the health of the animal and it's not easy to handle them. Through that domestication, we've turned these wolves into dogs, that way we actually have this little animal that we are very closely bonded to. They rely very heavily upon us for everything from food, to shelter and companionship.
Maya: How did this one species of wolves turn into so many different breeds of dogs and types of dogs just like-- Is that human doing or is that natural?
Bridgett: That is such a good question. This ends up being a combination of both. To give maybe a little example of the natural side of this. If you look at maybe a litter of puppies, and they all come from the same mom and dad, sometimes some of the puppies might have brown fur, others might have little splotchy colors, another one might be white with bigger black patches on them but they all come from the same two parents. The natural part of all of this variation in dogs that we see is because every individual has a slightly different set of genes.
Now, if we talk about how people became involved in that. If we imagine that we were a dog breeder and we wanted to maybe create a brand new type of dog, and we saw something interesting, one of the puppies was maybe this unique color that we'd never seen before. We would really want to use that dog, when it grew up, to have more puppies in hopes that it would have more like it. As we started doing that a lot, we found that humans could create lots of differences between animals from tiny little teacup dogs to these giant Great Danes. It's great quite incredible.
Maya: Wow.
Molly: Thank you so much for being here today, Bridgett.
Bridgett: Thank you.
Maya: Bye, thanks.
Bridgett: Thanks. Bye.
Molly: Canines and people have a special relationship. Wolves, in particular, are very important to many Native American tribes. Wolves and humans are seen as brothers and sisters by the Anishinabe or Ojibwe nations.
[wolf howls]
Bizhikiins: Boozhoo. Hello, my name is Bizhikiins or Dylan Jennings. I come from the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Anishinaabeg in Northern Wisconsin. I work as a public information office director at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Wolves have a very, very important role to play in our communities traditionally and even today. A lot of that goes back to a relationship from our original stories, our original stories of creation.
The wolf and original man were some of the two beings that in our stories, went around and named everything in creation, gave everything a name together, and traveled together. At a different part within our stories, it talks about ma'iingan which is the Ojibwe word that describes wolf, and then the Anishinaabeg having to take separate paths, separate trails, and splitting up kind of diverging along that path. What teaching we derive from that is that what happens to one of us will happen to the other.
Well, there was a time, not too long ago, where wolves were almost eradicated from this area, which means that there weren't many left. A lot of that coincided in a time where it wasn't okay to be Ojibwe or to be Native American. They were told to blend in and essentially remove that Ojibwe-ness or that essence of being an indigenous person from their being. Those two things really mirror each other in our history. There are instances where we believe that saying, 'What happens to one will happen to the other' have actually come to fruition, to take care of and look after one another because we are considered to be relatives or, some say, to be brothers.
