> http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19926700.200
> Dogs aren't stupid wolves; they are much smarter
> 20 August 2008
> NewScientist.com news service
> Kate Douglas
>
> IF YOU have ever caught a dog stealing food, you will know the feeling: a
> sense
> that the dog knows it has done wrong and feels... well, guilty. Maybe
> that's
> pushing it - but try telling a dog owner that their pet cannot experience
> pain,
> excitement, love or other mental states we usually reserve for humans. You
> won't
> get very far.
>
> Until a decade or so ago, scientists interested in animal behaviour would
> have
> dismissed these observations as sentimental anthropomorphising. They
> considered
> popular attitudes to pet dogs silly, and saw the animals themselves as
> little
> more than dumbed-down wolves. Above all, there was a widespread view that
> domesticated animals in general were "artificial" products of human
> breeding,
> irrelevant to anyone interested in studying real animal behaviour.
>
> How times have changed. Last month more than 200 experts attended the
> first
> Canine Science Forum in Budapest, Hungary, where they discussed, among
> other
> things, what is going on inside the mind of a dog. While still some way
> from
> painting a full picture of the canine Umwelt, their work is making it
> clear that
> our inclination to invest dogs with human-like states of mind isn't as
> unscientific as it might appear. Dogs really do have some remarkable
> mental
> skills that allow them to thrive in their strange habitat - our world.
>
> Domestic dogs evolved from grey wolves as recently as 10,000 years ago.
> Since
> then their brains have shrunk, so that a wolf-sized dog has a brain around
> 10
> per cent smaller than its wild ancestor (see "Wild at heart"). That was
> one
> reason why animal behaviourists felt dogs were merely simple-minded
> wolves. It
> has become clear, though, that despite the loss of brain volume, thousands
> of
> years spent evolving alongside humans have had a striking effect on dog
> cognition.
>
> Right from wrong
> For one thing, researchers are increasingly convinced that dogs must
> possess
> some sense of right and wrong in order to negotiate the complex social
> world of
> people. A pioneer in this area is Marc Bekoff from the University of
> Colorado at
> Boulder, who has spent decades watching animals at play. He has championed
> the
> idea that in many social species, including dogs, one of the functions of
> rough-and-tumble play is to develop a rudimentary sense of morality (New
> Scientist, 13 July 2002, p 34).
>
> The fact that play rarely escalates into full-blown fighting shows that
> animals
> abide by rules and expect others to do the same. In other words, they know
> right
> from wrong. Bekoff argues that this is a survival adaptation that allows
> animals
> to smoothly navigate other social interactions.
>
> Friederike Range from the University of Vienna, Austria, takes the concept
> of
> dog morality even further. In a series of experiments, her team rewarded
> dogs
> with a food treat if they held up a paw. They found that when a lone dog
> was
> asked to give its paw but received no treat, it would persevere for the
> entire
> experiment, which lasted 30 repetitions. However, if they tested two dogs
> together but only rewarded one, the dog who missed out would make a big
> show of
> being denied its treat and stop cooperating after just a few rounds. "Dogs
> show
> a strong aversion to inequity," says Range. "I prefer not to call it a
> sense of
> fairness, but others might."
>
> "Dogs show an aversion to inequality. Some might call it a sense of
> fairness"This is quite a claim: even the idea that primates respond to
> unfairness in a similar way to people is highly contested. So why would a
> dog
> need such a trait? Range points out that the concept of inequality is
> crucial
> for the stability of human societies; without it we would not punish
> freeloaders. Dogs probably evolved this response to help them negotiate
> our
> social world.
>
> While the relationship between people and dogs may be built on fairness,
> it is
> mediated through effective communication. Perhaps that is why many
> researchers
> are fascinated by this aspect of canine cognition.
>
> Dogs obviously do not have complex language, but they do bark. Barking is
> rare
> among adult wild canids and feral dogs, suggesting that it evolved during
> domestication to allow dogs to communicate with us, says Péter Pongrácz
> from
> Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
>
> Pongrácz and his colleagues have produced evidence that dog barks do
> indeed
> contain information that people can understand. In 2005 they found that
> even
> people who have never owned a dog can recognise the emotional "meaning" of
> barks
> produced in various situations, such as when playing, left alone and
> confronted
> by a stranger (Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol 119, p 136).
>
> His team has now developed a computer program that can aggregate hundreds
> of
> barks recorded in various settings and boil them down to their basic
> acoustic
> ingredients. They found that each of the different types of bark has
> distinct
> patterns of frequency, tonality and pulsing, and that an artificial neural
> network can use these features to correctly identify a bark it has never
> encountered before. This is further evidence that barking conveys
> information
> about a dog's mental state (Animal Cognition, vol 11, p 389). They also
> discovered that people can correctly identify aggregated barks as
> conveying
> happiness, loneliness or aggression. "Even children from the age of 6 who
> have
> never had a dog recognise these patterns," says Pongrácz.
>
> Dogs are not just able to "speak" to us, they can also understand some
> aspects
> of human communication. At the forum in Budapest, Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto
> University in Japan described as-yet unpublished work that examined what
> is
> going on inside a dog's mind when it hears a stranger's voice. She played
> dogs a
> series of recordings of unfamiliar voices - both male and female - with
> each
> voice followed by a photo of a human face on a screen. If the gender of
> the face
> did not match that of the voice, the dogs stared longer, a sign that their
> expectations had been violated.
>
> "This suggests that dogs generate an internal visual representation of a
> male or
> female correlated with the voice," says Takaoka. She suggests that this
> ability
> to infer information about a person from their voice alone might help dogs
> communicate with people. This is similar to what we do when we judge
> someone's
> age, sex or mood from the way they talk in order to gain information upon
> which
> to base our interactions.
>
> Meanwhile, Juliane Kaminski at the University of Cambridge has been
> investigating how dogs interpret other forms of human communication.
> Experiments
> have already established that dogs can use human gestures such as pointing
> and
> gazing to find hidden food or toys (Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol
> 115,
> p 122). Kaminski wanted to know whether dogs simply learn to associate
> these
> kinds of gestures with a reward, or actually understand that these
> gestures are
> intended as a form of communication. This concept of "intentionality" is
> considered to be highly sophisticated.
>
> To find out, she adapted a test originally done with 1-year-old children.
> A
> reward is placed under one of two containers, which are then moved around.
> The
> experimenter then makes either a communicative gesture, pointing, gazing
> or
> both, to indicate where the reward is, or makes a similar but
> non-communicative
> gesture, such as checking her watch or moving her head in its general
> direction.
> Just like babies, dogs usually choose correctly after deliberate pointing
> or
> gazing, but did no better than pure chance when she used a
> non-communicative
> action.
>
> So when we point or look, dogs understand that we are trying to tell them
> something. "Domestication seems to have shaped dogs in a way which enables
> them
> to use these gestures from as early as six weeks," she says.
>
> To what extent, though, can dogs understand referential communication such
> as
> icons and pictures? To find out, Kaminski recruited three dogs that could
> already identify dozens of toys by name and fetch them from another room
> on
> request.
>
> Copydogs
> Kaminski wanted to know how far she could push the dogs towards using
> referential communication. When the dogs were shown a replica or miniature
> of a
> toy they returned with the correct original, showing that they understood
> some
> forms of iconic communication. In a paper to be published in the journal
> Developmental Science, she reports that one dog even managed to retrieve a
> toy
> after seeing a picture of it.
>
> This observed behaviour puts dogs among the elite. Other animals,
> including
> chimps and dolphins, can be taught to do similar things, says Kaminski,
> but only
> after intensive training. Dogs of even average intelligence can be trained
> to do
> it more readily. Some, including the three in the experiment, learn it
> spontaneously.
>
> "Dogs identify human communicative behaviours in ways similar to human
> infants,"
> says Jószef Topál from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In fact, he
> believes
> the similarities between dogs and infants do not end there, arguing that
> evolution has left dogs with a mind primed for social interactions in much
> the
> same way as our own.
>
> The first step in human socialisation is for a baby to become attached to
> its
> carer, and we have known for some time that dogs attach to their owners in
> the
> same way. For example, dogs will explore an unfamiliar room if their owner
> is
> present, but become anxious and timid if the owner leaves - a pattern of
> behaviour that is also seen with babies and their primary carers.
>
> Topál has now moved on to the next stage of human socialisation, which
> involves
> a specialised form of learning called pedagogy. While animals, including
> chimps,
> learn by emulation - watching others complete a task and then using a
> mixture of
> copying and extemporising to achieve the same result - we are uniquely
> capable
> of exact imitation. This is the defining feature of pedagogy, and it
> occurs
> spontaneously between infants and their carers (New Scientist, 1 April
> 2006, p
> 42).
>
> Pedagogy begins with the teacher using eye contact, gesture and
> vocalisation to
> direct the attention of the learner. Dogs, uniquely among animals, do the
> same.
> "Dogs' performance matches children's," says Topál. He believes that these
> attention cues trigger a receptive attitude in dogs that is comparable to
> pedagogical learning in humans.
>
> This is backed up in experiments by Ludwig Huber and colleagues at the
> University of Vienna in Austria. They based their work on a classic
> pedagogy
> experiment in which an instructor demonstrates to a toddler how to turn
> off a
> light using her forehead. In one version of the demonstration, the
> instructor
> has her hands clearly visible on the table. In the second version, her
> upper
> body is wrapped in a shawl so that she can't use her hands. When invited
> to turn
> the light off for themselves, toddlers who were shown the first version
> use
> their heads, but those shown the second use their hands. The
> interpretation is
> that the first group conclude that there must be a good but non-obvious
> reason
> for using the forehead method, as otherwise the instructor would have used
> her
> hands.
>
> Huber has found that dogs do exactly the same thing. In an experiment
> where dogs
> had to pull a lever to obtain a reward, the default choice was to use
> their
> mouths. They would do this even after a demonstrator dog had used its
> paw - but
> only if the demonstrator had a ball in its mouth. If it used its paw when
> it
> could have pulled with its mouth, then they copied the action exactly.
>
> Findings like these are leading some researchers to propose that dogs have
> at
> least a rudimentary form of "theory of mind", the mental capacity that
> enables
> us to understand the desires, motivations and intentions of others. It is
> generally accepted that a few other animals, including great apes, are
> capable
> of this mind reading to some extent, but it is nevertheless a quality
> reserved
> for only the most intelligent of species. So that puts dogs in
> intellectually
> elevated circles.
>
> Alexandra Horowitz from Barnard College in New York agrees. Her own recent
> study
> illustrates the point: when dogs play together, they use appropriate
> signals for
> grabbing attention or signalling the desire to play depending on their
> playmate's apparent level of attention, such as whether it is facing them
> or
> side-on (Animal Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-008-0175-y). That could
> best be
> interpreted as a rudimentary theory of mind, she says: not quite mind
> reading,
> but more sophisticated than simply reading body language and reacting in
> stereotyped ways.
>
> We've come a long way. The study of dog psychology began with Pavlov, and
> even a
> few years ago the notion of dogs having a theory of mind would have been
> dismissed out of hand. As we delve deeper, however, the inner world of
> dogs is
> starting to look awfully familiar. Maybe we should be the ones feeling
> guilty
> for not realising it sooner.
>
>
> From issue 2670 of New Scientist magazine, 20 August 2008, page 33-35
> Wild at heart
> Genetic evidence tells us that domestic dogs are descended from grey
> wolves,
> with dogs being biologically classified as a subspecies of Canis lupus.
> Put a
> wolf into the alien environment of a human home, though, and it becomes
> very
> clear that domestication has taken dogs a long way from their wild roots.
>
> The traits that we prize most in dogs are simply not there in wolves: they
> are
> hard to train, wary of new experiences, scared of strangers and
> unpredictably
> aggressive. They also have some rather antisocial habits. For example,
> they
> scent-mark a lot, like to escape and would probably trash your home. On
> the
> upside, wolves don't bark - although that probably limits their ability to
> communicate with people (see main story). Instead, they howl.
>
> Owning a pet wolf is increasingly fashionable and there are plenty of
> websites
> offering tips to would-be wolf tamers. However, the best advice, according
> to
> canine behaviour expert James Serpell from the University of Pennsylvania,
> is
> don't. "Wolves do not make ideal house pets," he says. That might also
> help to
> explain why our ancestors apparently only domesticated wolves once,
> despite the
> two species living together over large swathes of the globe for millennia.
> --
> Frederick Martin McNeill
> Poway, California, United States of America
> mmcneill@fuzzysys.com
> ******************************************
> "I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people
> believe."
> - Leo Rosten
> ******************************************