Some say that dogs and wolves are not that different from each other, and that a wolf cub raised by humans will turn out just like a dog. But is this true?

Researchers have indeed proved that the DNA of dogs and wolves is 99.8% the same, but the behavior of these two animals differs a lot. An experiment conducted at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, clearly showed that.

The researchers took wolf cubs of 4-6 days of age and placed them with caretakers, who previously had experience raising puppies. Humans spent 24 hours a day with the cubs. At first, it seemed that the cubs were not different from puppies at all. But the first differences arose quite soon.

Unlike puppies, the wolf cubs didn’t even try to cooperate with humans. They did what they wanted to do, completely disregarding the actions or wishes of their caretakers.

When the humans opened the fridge to have breakfast, the cubs appeared next to them and grabbed whatever they saw first, not paying any attention to their caretakers’ prohibitions. The cubs would destroy everything, jump on tables, push things off the shelves, resource guarding was very prominent. The deeper into the experiment, the worse it got. It was complete torture for the caretakers.🙈

A comparative analysis of puppies and wolf cubs of the same age showed that little wolves didn’t react to human gestures, avoided eye contact. Attachment tests showed that they didn’t differentiate between their humans and other people. All in all, they basically behaved as if they were still in the wild.

That experiment proved that training plays a very insignificant role with wolf cubs, and that the difference between dogs and wolves is much greater than the environment in which they were raised.

So, no matter how one might try, a wolf cannot be turned into a dog. And the root of this difference lies in nothing more than the historical process of domestication. 🐶