Social Play and Play-Soliciting by Infant Canids

The development of social interaction was studied in infant coyotes, beagles, and wolves. In this paper, social play behavior is discussed. Social play may be characterized in a number of ways: (i) actions from various contexts are incorporated into labile (unpredictable) temporal sequences; (ii) the “play bout” is typically preceded by a metacommunicative signal which indicates “what follows is play”; these signals are also observed during the...