What are some differences between a normal pet dog and a wolf?
Merry Walker sums a lot of it up, but I would just like to add one thing. Wolves and dogs are both intensely social creatures — but wolves are superbly adapted to be social with other wolves, and dogs are superbly adapted to be social with humans. The two types of social are not at all the same. As an illustration, dogs have a primate trait that wolves do not — it’s called “gaze attention”. It’s such a normal human thing to do that you probably never really think about it — but if someone is looking at something we can’t see, we turn around or move to see what they are looking at. Dogs do that too; if they see us looking at something, they look where we look. We have bred them to pay attention to the things that concern us. Wolves don’t. If they see us looking at something, they ignore whatever we are looking at and the direction we are looking, in order to keep an eye on us. Their concern is not what concerns us, it is what we are going to do, and whether that will affect them in a
The biggest difference is that dogs are domesticated, and wolves are wild animals. What that means is that dogs can be good pets and companions, while wolves are still wild and not suited to living with people. Because they are related, there are a lot of similarities, but wolves represent one end of the spectrum and domestic dogs the other. Wolves are generally bigger and considerably more intelligent than dogs. They are certainly more aware of their environment than dogs, and respond to other animals and humans differently. Wolves don’t bond with humans readily the way dogs will. Wolves have a complex pack structure that dogs don’t, even when they go feral and pack up. Wolves are constantly testing each other’s dominance, while dogs generally accept whatever established heirarchy they live in. Wolves are active and able hunters, while many dog breeds have lost that talent. Wolves are stronger than dogs. Wolves pace, dogs trot. Dogs can be trained, wolves can’t (with possible rare exc
