Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Dogs love food, but apparently they love their humans more. They will refuse to accept treats from somebody who have snubbed their masters, a team of Japanese scientists report in a research that will be published later this month in the journal Animal Behaviour.
In the study, Kyoto University comparative cognition professor Kazuo Fujita and his colleagues tested three groups of 18 dogs in situations where their owners needed to open a box. In each of the three groups, the owner was accompanied by two people unfamiliar to the canine.
According to the Daily Mail, in the first group the owner asked for assistance from one of the two people, but that individual actively refused to help. In the second, the owner again asked for help, but this time the individual agreed to do so. The third group was a control in which neither person interacted with the dog’s owner.
The third member of each of the first two groups was not asked for assistance, and thus did not either agree or refuse to help out the dog’s owner, remaining neutral throughout the trial. At the conclusion of the box-opening event, the dogs were offered food by the two unfamiliar people and the researchers monitored their reactions.
Shaft my owner? I’ll shaft you
Those dogs who witnessed their humans’ call for help being refused were more likely to choose to take food from the neutral third-party, ignoring the person who ignored their masters. On the other hand, dogs whose owners were helped and dogs whose owners did not interact with either observer showed no preference when it came to food acceptance.
“We discovered for the first time that dogs make social and emotional evaluations of people regardless of their direct interest,” Fujita told AFP, noting that if the creatures were acting exclusively in their own interest, there would be no differences among the groups and roughly the same number of canines would have accepted food from each person.
“This ability is one of key factors in building a highly collaborative society, and this study shows that dogs share that ability with humans,” the professor added. Not all animals demonstrate this ability, he said. While one study suggests that tufted capuchins do, “there is no evidence that chimpanzees demonstrate a preference unless there is a direct benefit to them.”
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