Contributed by Alina Lilova

It is no secret to anyone who has ever lived with a pet dog that man’s best friend is a highly social, adaptable and intelligent animal. Both scientific studies and countless personal anecdotes demonstrate without a doubt the canine capacity for experiencing a wide range of emotions, and also for reasoning – and none of it is a surprise, given the dog’s unique position over the millennia as a responsive companion and working partner. Dogs may lack the problem-solving abilities for survival in the wild (compared to wolves, e.g.), but they possess excellent acumen for thriving in their particular ecological niche: the human jungle.

Dogs and Wolves

In the well-publicized recent work by Adam Miklosi and his colleagues in Hungary, dogs were shown to be better than hand-raised wolves at reading human social cues. For example, they tend to understand that when you point a finger at an object, it means “hey, look at that!” Both wolves and dogs have developed an analogous signal for communicating with their own species – they orientate their whole body in order to point to a certain direction – so that alone cannot explain the difference that was observed. It seems more likely that dogs have evolved to understand the human way of pointing, and wolves have not because they sort of don’t care.

In a similar vein of findings, dogs gaze at people when in need of help – but wolves do it far less. Miklosi et al. also showed that their hand-raised wolf pups generally preferred the company of a dog over that of a human, while the opposite was true of dog pups. It is also worth noting that people, in turn, seem to be instinctively proficient in telling apart the different kinds of dog barks. Scientists speculate that the reason why dogs bark in so many situations has to do with their co-evolution with humans – “the other ‘noisy’ terrestrial mammal on Earth.”

Theory of Mind

American psychologists Kundey et al. devised an interesting experiment to test whether dogs take into consideration what people around them can or cannot hear. The results were published last year in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Twenty shelter dogs and twenty private pets each had to choose food from one of two plastic containers – one ‘silent,’ the other ‘noisy.’ The dogs were first taught that the humans didn’t want them to ‘steal’ food from a plate (using “No!” or a similar command). Then they were presented with the containers, which were filled with tasty treats. The containers looked exactly the same: transparent, open at the front, with brass jingle bells hung across the opening. However, the ringers from the bells had been removed in the silent container. With the dog watching, the experimenter would place the treats into each container and carefully demonstrate which one made noise and which one didn’t. Then she would either sit between the two containers looking straight ahead, or hold her head between her knees, facing the ground. Each dog was then given 30 seconds to approach the containers.

The results showed that when the experimenter was looking, less than half of the dogs approached the silent container. In other words, it didn’t matter if the woman was going to hear their transgression because she could see it anyway.  However, when the experimenter wasn’t looking, almost all dogs went up to the silent container – 19 out of 20. They paid attention to what the human would hear and tried to be stealthy.

Findings like these provide evidence that animals have some “theory of mind” – the ability to imagine what others know or believe. The brass bells and the whole set-up of the experiment were new to the dogs. They wouldn’t have been able to calculate in a robotic fashion what’s likely to happen if bells go “jingle-jingle” when you swallow a salami. The authors point out that various species – primates, goats, members of the crow family – have demonstrated a similar ability to benefit from Knowing If Others Know.

The Stray Way

The shelter dogs in Kundey’s study were all found as strays, rather than surrendered by their owners. Yet they did just as well as the pet dogs in deciphering the signals (contrary to what some previous studies had found). The authors suggest a possible explanation – that stray animals, including dogs, often need to find food without being noticed by nearby humans.

Maybe there are a lot of non-pet animals living in close association with humans who are able to read us with surprising skill. It would be nice if we had urban “Jane Goodall’s” venturing out to the many so-called less developed cities and villages of the world to do field studies of the behaviour of free-ranging dogs. We could learn a lot about the evolution, cognitive capacities and psychological needs of our companions.

Of course, some studies have already been done, and scientists usually divide free-ranging dogs into several categories based on their dependence on humans – from owned dogs allowed to roam without supervision to completely feral animals. In my home town of Sofia, the most conspicuous street dogs are probably community pets who live near apartment blocks and on parking lots. They are generally well socialised and attached to certain people but don’t lavish attention on strangers. There are also feral dogs who have to make it on their own in abandoned factory yards or remote wooded areas. They are wary of humans and avoid contact, more like urban foxes in the UK, coyotes in American cities, and pariah dogs in Asia.

However, there is another broad class of dogs that I feel would make a very interesting object of behavioural observation: the street-savvy downtown dwellers who live in the most crowded places of the city. What beggar tactics do they employ towards the large variety of people they meet? How do they cope with the traffic? Are they less territorial? How big are their home ranges? And how about those few who learn to ride on public transportation? A docile temperament, flexibility and high sensitivity to human social cues would all be necessary for success in such an environment.

Cute metro rider in Moscow:

A Personal Story

A month ago my friend and I had a hilarious encounter with just such a smart and hypersocial four-legged citizen. She was a chubby, spayed female who apparently went by the name Siamese (no, she was not a cat!). She bumped into our bench in Borisova Garden while playing with another dog. It took only one word and a brief stroke, and she was all over me: she hopped on the bench, onto my lap, nearly climbed on my head, licking my nose and wagging her tail frantically – behaving as if we were old friends. It was a total assault, and most unexpected! (I have to say my friend was quite startled by this extreme display of affection ). The dog was well versed in people behaviour and knew, on the basis of my one-second signals, that her tactic would pay off. It immediately made me feel as if we were old friends indeed, and Siamese gained 15 minutes of company for her walk and even a little food treat.

Together with her playmate, she followed us around and ran up to other benches to say hello. The dogs’ antics seemed to be well tolerated by some people and not so much by others, but the animals acted as if fully aware when it was going to “work” and when it wasn’t. When told off, they did not persist, yet did not appear to lose their good spirits. Siamese strutted around like she owned the place. The second dog vanished, but she followed us right to the end of the park and into the downtown area. There she waited patiently at two very busy streets, and from experience I knew not to worry about her. She would stand on the sidewalk with her head tilted slightly sideways, perhaps watching the cars go by, and would start crossing just before the traffic light changed to green. My friend, a psychologist, wondered if she was going along with the crowd, but then noticed that Siamese was putting her feet on the street before any of the human pedestrians. The dog paid attention to the cars, the people – to the traffic lights.

Behind me, a boy was telling a girl the story of a dog who had taken to riding on trams: “They learn,” he said to her, and he was right. We don’t see a lot of downtown strays who lack the ability to dodge traffic or cross the street along the shortest route. The reason is simple and sad – those who cannot learn, often do not make it to adulthood…

Cars are surely a new evolutionary pressure for the domestic dog as well as for the cat and many other animals, both in towns and in the countryside – almost as if a new super predator has appeared on the face of the Earth – and if not for the widespread use of dog leashes and the restriction of cats indoors, perhaps the entire dog and cat populations would be turning “traffic smart” by now. I do advocate keeping your dog on a lead when out in the streets (not just the busiest streets), but observing free souls like Siamese reminds me that everything has pros and cons.

This is like the debate over children’s right to play: how safe is too safe? The kids of both human and nonhuman mammals love a good game, and they learn a lot of vital physical and social skills in play situations that involve some risk and danger. Parents as well as pet owners, and society as a whole, need to be creative and think up environments that are both challenging and safe enough, so that young minds can develop to their full natural potential.*

*For more on that, you can read the article “Play, Play, and Play Some More: Let Children Be the Animals They Have the Right to Be” on ethologist Mark Bekoff’s blog.

Sources:

Kundey, Shannon, et al. “Domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) react to what others can and cannot hear.” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 126 (2010), pp. 45-50.

Miklosi, Adam. “Human-Animal Interactions and Social Cognition in Dogs.” In The Behavioural Biology of Dogs, ed. by Per Jensen, CAB International 2007.

Tags: dog intelligence, free-ranging dogs, theory of mind

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Animal Intelligence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.