Growing research finds that man’s best friend acts more like humans than canines. This comes as no surprise to dog owners.
Dogs can watch television, display jealousy, have empathy, and even read our facial expressions. Their evolution reveals that they have picked up these tendencies from being wolves to domesticated pets.
The things that mimick our behaviors are that they get along with us, they pay attention to us, and they tolerate us.
Believe it or not, dogs are people watchers. This allows them to determine who is nice and who is not. This is an instinct from many, many years ago. I feel this is a behavior which allows them to make their owner’s safe from harms way.
In a new study, dogs were divided up into three groups: the helper, the non-helper, and the controller.
In the non-helper group, the owner asked for help from another person, who denied the request to help by turning their back without helping. In the control group, the additional person turned his back without being asked to help. In all the experiments, another neutral person sat in the room.
After the first round of experiments, all 3 of the people offered treats to the dog.
The result was in the non helper group, the dogs most frequently favored the treat of the neutral person. In the helper group, the dogs did not favor the the helper or the non-helper over the neutral person.
So, the question is this, are dogs ignoring the people who are mean to their owners? Future research studies will tell.
It is thought that dogs only follow human interactions when food or toys are involved. New research shows that untrained dogs can interact in ways that do not include food and/or toys. As far as trained dogs, they have a tendency to only follow the face of their owner, rather than where they are looking.
Humans short-term memory declines during the aging process, as well as logical reasoning skills. This makes it more difficult to learn new tasks. Research finds similar declines in dogs, however, long term memory is a mystery in the biology of the dog.
The researchers are now studying how the dogs both young and old memorize tasks, and whether they can remember these tasks months later.
The results are a work in progress, but not impossible. Who ever said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
For instance, the untrained dog will follow the owner to the door while the trained dog will keep his eye on the owner at all times. When training the untrained dog for 5 minutes to look at the owner rather than the door, he no longer looked at the door. This is a surprising study because this behavior demonstrates that the dog reacts like a human or a chimp in this case. It is called “double looking.”
Researchers have a very interesting position with following the human verses dog interactions.