Wolves on treadmills, for science

Kinda hard to believe this will tell them anything much about wild animals, but still... wolves on treadmills.

“The central goal of the treadmill project is to have two or more animals running together to see how well they run and whether this affects their willingness to share food afterwards. Also, we want to see how this affects their heart rate and heart rate variability [Both dogs and wolves have learned to wear heart rate monitors]. We’ll be starting this winter. Wolves are social hunters, and we expect a great willingness to cooperate in wolves, but less so in dogs.

“Additionally, we want to expand this work to wolf-dog and wolf-human dyads (I already jogged with Kaspar [a wolf] as a trial). Questions of how well wolves and dogs coordinate with humans are, again, relevant for domestication.”

"Wolves spend a great amount of their time running together as a pack. Therefore, the treadmill should be a more natural way of testing how willing the animals are to work and run together and afterwards share their food. Does it depend on their partner? If yes, can we also see this in their behavior or physiology? Heart rate and cortisol will tell us something about how stressed or relaxed the animals are with different partners, and these parameters can also tell us something about energy expenditure; in humans, for example, it take more energy to work together with someone you don't like so much.”

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dog-spies/why-the-world-s-longest-treadmill-was-created-for-wolves/