Wolves and Dogs: Between Myth and Science

Friederike Range received her Master in Animal Physiology at the University of Bayreuth (1998) and her PhD at the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA (2004). This was followed by post-doctoral fellowships at the Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle at Grünau (2004-2005), and at the Dept. of Neurobiology and Cognition, University of Vienna (2005-2008), both Austria. In 2011, Friederike Range moved to the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, where she habilitated and in 2018 became an Associate Professor and head of the Domestication Lab. 2007 she co-founded the Clever Dog Lab, 2008 the Wolf Science Center. Both labs are embedded today in the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and have developed into internationally highly regarded research groups. Friederike Range is interested in the evolution of mind and her research focuses on social behavior and cognitive abilities of non-human animals. Her early research career concentrated mainly on primates, but she is now primarily focused on investigating dogs and their closest wild-living relatives, wolves.

Sarah Marshall-Pescini graduated in Psychology from St Andrews University (1998) and then went on to do her PhD (2003) at the same University working on social learning in children and chimpanzees. After the PhD, she returned to Italy, her home country, working at Milan University for 8 years, setting up a dog cognition lab. Since 2013 she has joined the team at the Wolf Science Centre and later the Domestication Lab at Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology (Veterinary University of Vienna), where she now works as a senior scientist. Since 2016 she co-supervises a field site studying free-ranging dogs in Morocco and another studying wild wolves in the Italian Apennines. Her research focuses on the social behaviour of wolves and dogs.