Yesterday, at the Wandegeya traffic lights crossing, I noticed a stray dog beside me. I was amused at the way it stopped patiently with the rest of the pedestrians and crossed the road together with them at the right time.That left me thinking, ‘Was the dog just copying what the pedestrians were doing or was it aware of the dangers of crossing the road while vehicles were still moving?’
According to research by Friederike Range and Ludwig Huber, of the University of Vienna, and Zsofia Viranyi, of the Eötvös University in Budapest, dogs like human infants, do not simply copy an action they observe, but adjust the extent to which they imitate to the circumstances of the action.
Normally, dogs prefer to use the mouth when faced with a task of opening a container by pulling a rod. However, in the study, a female dog was trained to open the box with her paw. When the other dogs observed the female's action, they imitated it in order to get the food. However, the dogs imitated selectively. They used their mouths instead of their paws for manipulating the rod when they had seen the demonstrating dog using her paw while holding a ball in her mouth. However, when the demonstrating dog's mouth was free, the dogs imitated her action completely and used the paw themselves.
The dogs sensed that the female dog was unable to use her mouth because she had a ball in it so they chose the easier, more preferred way to achieve the goal. But when the mouth was free, there seemed to be a reason for the demonstrating dog not to use her mouth, and so the dogs imitate the action.
Do you have anything to share about what dogs can do?
I saw a documentary yesterday on NTV on many amazing things about dogs especially their sense of smell. I remember my late father narrating to my mother and I a story he had heard on BBC about this dog that kept sniffing, snuffling and becoming agitated whenever he sat at his master’s leg or something. Indeed, when she checked with her doctor, it turned out she had cancer.
ScienceDaily 27 April 2007. 22 May 2008 http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/04/070426145103.htm
Photo by www.petplanet.co.uk/.../news_story13_old2.htm
