How people got together in the Wolf Science Center

Over years, researchers at the Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle (KLF) studied social complexity and cognition in birds along the rationale that lifestyle would select for cognition and in turn, context-general cognition would affect lifestyle.

For many years, we wanted to extend this work to wolves. But working with wolves is neither easy nor cheap. Years ago, the first initiative by F. Range to start a wolf project at the KLF failed due to ill funding. In the meanwhile she accepted a PostDoc position on social learning at the University of Vienna.

She established the Clever Dog Lab together with Ludwig Huber and Zs. Viranyi to study domestic dogs' cognition.
But Friederike and Zsofia quickly realized that they would need to study wolves as well to really understand the various aspects of learning capabilities in dogs and whether these are artifacts of domestication or routed in the evolutionary history of that species.

Now, a window of opportunity has opened via a core partnership of F. Range, Zs. Viranyi and K. Kotrschal, with the participation of the KLF and in collaboration with the Cumberland Game Park, resulting in the Wolf Science Center.