From Clever Canines:
In their relationship with humans, dogs have developed remarkable interspecies-communications skills, says Mr. Csányi. “They easily accept a membership in the family, they can predict social events, they provide and request information, obey rules of conduct, and are able to cooperate and imitate human actions,” he says. His research even suggests that dogs can speculate on what we are thinking.The latest findings to come out of the department suggest that dogs’ barks have evolved into a relatively sophisticated way of communicating with humans. Adam Miklósi, an ethology professor, set out in a recent experiment to see if humans can interpret what dogs mean when they bark. He recruited 90 human volunteers and played them 21 recordings of barking Hungarian mudis, a herding breed.
The recordings captured dogs in seven situations, such as playing with other dogs, anticipating food, and encountering an intruder. The people showed strong agreement about the emotional meaning of the various barks, regardless of whether they owned a mudi or another breed of dog, or had never owned a dog. Owners and nonowners were also equally successful at deducing the situation that had elicited the barks, guessing correctly in a third of the situations, or about double the rate of chance.
Domesticated dogs versus wild wolves:
Until recently, dogs were thought to be intellectually inferior to wolves. A study published in 1985 by Harry Frank, a psychologist at the University of Michigan at Flint showed that wolves could unlock a complicated gate mechanism after watching a human do it once, while dogs remained stumped, even after considerable exposure. This led some in the field to conclude that dogs’ intellectual capacity diminished during domestication.That never sat well with Mr. Csányi who, like many in dog-loving Hungary, had dogs of his own. Dogs, he suspected, were simply more inhibited than their wild cousins, requiring permission from their masters before doing something as rash as opening a gate, which they may have regarded as a violation of their master’s rules. So eight years ago, he and his colleagues conducted a problem-solving experiment of their own. With their masters present, 28 dogs of various ages, breeds, and levels of training had to figure out how to pull on handles of plastic dishes to obtain meat on the other side of a wire fence. Regardless of other factors, the dogs with the strongest relationship with their owner scored worst, continually looking to their owners for permission or assistance. The best results came from outdoor dogs, who obtained the food, on average, in one-third the time. Most telling, when owners were allowed to give their dogs permission, the gap between indoor and outdoor dogs vanished.
Dogs versus chimps:
Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human’s gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.)
I love this:
Further evidence for that theory comes from an experimental fur farm in Siberia, where Russian geneticists have spent the last 50 years breeding a population of tame foxes. The process was simple: Humans would approach a fox cage, and the foxes that showed the least panic or aggression were selected for breeding. After only 18 generations, the foxes displayed remarkably doglike behaviors: sitting on a person’s lap and barking for attention — actions rarely seen in wild canines.