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The social hierarchy of the wolf pack is based on the family structure. Parents have the highest status and are the leaders of the pack, and therefore the puppies must have the hereditary ability that allows them to recognize and remember their mother. Is it possible that the DNA of dogs no longer contains such a gene.
Biologists claim that close contact with relatives, awareness and understanding of kinship are necessary for wolves both for the normal functioning of the pack and for taking care of the puppies. On the other hand, unlike wolves, domestic dogs do not stay in the family group for a long time: often after a couple of months after birth, the litter disperses and most puppies never see their parents again.
Among dog owners, however, there are a fair number of superstitions about the short memory of dogs. Myths about five seconds and the fact that dogs immediately forget everyone are familiar to many.
Professor Peter Hepper from the School of Psychology at King's University Belfast conducted an interesting experiment. To determine whether puppies can recognize their mothers, he took several bitches with litters no older than 4-5 weeks and placed them in special experimental conditions.
The test setup was a room where two wire enclosures stood along the opposite wall from the entrance. The mother of the puppy was placed in one of them, and another dog of the same age and breed was placed in the other. The experimenter recorded which cage the puppy went to after entering the room, and how long he spent time talking with the dog that was there.
The results were unequivocal: 84% of puppies preferred communication with their own mother. Even when young dogs from "native" and "foreign" litters were planted in the enclosures instead of adult dogs, 67% of the puppies confidently went to their brothers and sisters.
If everything is more or less clear with small puppies, how about mature ones?
Hepper suggested that the main role in the recognition of biological relatives is played by odor signals. To find out, he removed the "live" dogs from the enclosures, leaving instead a large piece of litter where the target dogs slept for several days.
As expected, the experiment confirmed the enormous influence of smell: 82% of the puppies preferred the smell of their mother, and 70% - the smell of their siblings.
By the time the puppies are able to take care of themselves, they are connected to the mother by very strong bonds, thanks to which they can accurately determine that their mother came from hunting to the den, and not some strange dog - everything is logical here. Much more interesting is what happens in the relationship between the bitch and her offspring later, when the young grow up.
You can find out this only by working with adult animals, and Hepper repeated the entire series of experiments, taking two-year-old dogs instead of puppies. All animals that participated in the experiment were separated from their mother at the age of 8 weeks and had never seen her before the time of testing.
Starting with an assessment of whether bitches could recognize the scent of their offspring after so many years of separation, Hepper found a startling result: 78% of the mothers sniffed the fabric with the scent of her offspring longer than the scent of an unfamiliar dog of the same breed, age and sex. They recognized! But the most amazing thing was that 76% of the dogs showed a clear preference for the fabric impregnated with the scent of their mother. Remember: the puppies have long grown up and haven't seen their mother for about two years!
It is quite clear that tens of thousands of years of living with humans have not changed the dog's genetics so much that it no longer remembers its parents. Having become adults, dogs do not forget their mother.
