Dogs, and the newest study...

[Italiahaircolor]

My husband was telling me about this last night, and I found it to be so interesting...esspecially since we''ve been posting lately about the stray dog who attempted to save his friend who was hit on the highway...

Apparently, dogs know what is "fair" versus what is "unfair"...

here is the article...

___________________________________________________________from: San Francisco Chronical

What parent hasn''t heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something? Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.

Ask them to do a trick, and they''ll give it a try. For a reward, they''ll happily keep at it.

But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get a sausage treat for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again. Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.

"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, who led a team of researchers testing animals at the school''s Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."

Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.

Range said she wasn''t surprised at the dogs'' reaction, since wolves - the ancestors of modern dogs - are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other.

In the reward experiments reported in today''s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It''s the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."

Those that refused at the start were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.

The dogs sat side by side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other. The dogs were asked to shake hands, and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn''t, the unrewarded animal stopped playing. When both got a reward, all was well.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that - unlike primates - the dogs didn''t seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

 

[Italiahaircolor]

As a two dog family, I totally believe this study was dead on. Mark and I have a rule for the Chihuahua''s--poop and pee means play---and if one does it, but the other doesn''t then only one gets to play...the one put back in his cage always throws a crying/barking/whining fit!

 

[neatfreak]

I think they are missing a key piece here. What happened when they had the dog by itself and didn''t give it a treat? Many dogs would stop playing at that point regardless of what another dog was doing...

Interesting, but this one study doesn''t convince me that they know what''s fair and what''s not.

 

[Sabine]

That''s really interesting!