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Thursday, July 4, 2013

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home











The Unexplained Powers Of Animals

The psychic powers of animals is explored and its implication for human consciousness is considered by Rupert Sheldrake.




Psychic powers in animals? What does it tell us about ourselves?

For many years animal trainers, pet owners and naturalists have reported various kinds of perceptiveness in animals that suggest the existence of psychic powers. Surprisingly little research has been done on these phenomena. Biologists have been inhibited by the taboo against ‘the paranormal’, and psychical researchers and parapsychologists have with few exceptions confined their attention to human beings.

According to recent random household surveys in England and the USA, many pet owners believe their animals are sometimes telepathic with them. An average of 48 per cent of dog owners and 33 per cent of cat owners said that their pets responded to their thoughts or silent commands. Many horse trainers and riders believe their horse can pick up their intentions telepathically.

 Some companion animals even seem able to tell when a particular person is on the telephone before the receiver has been picked up. For example, when the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line because Whiskins, their silver tabby cat, rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. “Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative meows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end”, she says. “If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice.”

For several years, with the help of hundreds of animal trainers, shepherds, blind people with guide dogs, veterinarians and pet owners, I have investigated some of these unexplained powers of animals. There are three major categories of seemingly mysterious perceptiveness: telepathy, the sense of direction and premonition.

Animal telepathy

The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone is answered.

As skeptics rightly point out, some of these responses could be explained as routine expectations, subtle sensory cues, chance coincidence and selective memory, or put down to the imaginations of doting pet owners. These are reasonable hypotheses, but they should not be accepted in the absence of evidence.

My colleagues and I have concentrated on the phenomenon of dogs that know when their owners are coming home. Many pet owners have observed that their animals seem to anticipate the arrival of a member of the household, often 10 minutes or more in advance. The pets typically wait at a door, window or gate. In random household surveys in Britain and America, an average of 51 per cent of dog owners and 30 per cent of cat owners said they had noticed such anticipatory behaviour.

The dog I have investigated in most detail is a terrier called Jaytee, who belongs to Pam Smart, in Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester. Pam adopted Jaytee from Manchester Dogs’ Home in 1989 when he was still a puppy, and soon formed a close bond with him.

In 1991, when Pam was working as a secretary at a school in Manchester, she left Jaytee with her parents, who noticed that the dog went to the French window almost every weekday at about 4.30 pm, around the time she set off, and waited there until she arrived some 45 minutes later. She worked routine office hours, so the family assumed that Jaytee’s behaviour depended on some kind of time sense.

Pam was made redundant in 1993 and was no longer tied to any regular pattern of activity. Her parents did not usually know when she would be coming home, but Jaytee still anticipated her return.

 In 1994 Pam read an article about my research and volunteered to take part. In more than 100 experiments, we videotaped the area by the window where Jaytee waited during Pam’s absences, providing a continuous, time-coded record of his behaviour which was scored ‘blind’ by a third party who did not know the details of the experiments. To check that Jaytee was not reacting to the sound of Pam’s car or other familiar vehicles, we investigated whether he still anticipated her arrival when she travelled by unusual means: by bicycle, by train and by taxi. He did.

We also carried out experiments in which Pam set off at times selected at random after she had left home, communicated to her by means of a telephone pager. In these experiments, Jaytee still started waiting at the window around the time Pam set off, even though no one at home knew when she would be coming. The odds against this being a chance effect were more than 100,000 to one. Jaytee behaved in a very similar way when he was tested repeatedly by sceptics anxious to debunk his abilities.

 The evidence indicates that Jaytee was reacting to Pam’s intention to come home even when she was many miles away. Telepathy seems the only hypothesis that can account for the facts.

Another example is the apparent ability of dogs to know when they are going to be taken for walks. In these experiments the dogs are kept in a separate room or outbuilding and videotaped continuously. Meanwhile their owner, at a randomly selected time, thinks about taking them for a walk and then five minutes later does so. Our experiments have shown dogs exhibiting obvious excitement when their owner is thinking about taking them out, although they could not have known this by normal sensory means. They did not manifest such excitement at other times.

 If domestic animals are telepathic with their human owners, then it seems likely that animals are telepathic with each other, and that this may play an important part in the wild. Some naturalists have already suggested that the coordination of flocks of birds and herds of animals may involve something like telepathy, as may communication between members of a wolfpack.

The sense of direction

Homing pigeons can find their way back to their loft over hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Migrating European swallows travel thousands of miles to their feeding grounds in Africa, and in the spring return to their native place. Some dogs, cats, horses and other domesticated animals also have a good sense of direction and can make their way home from unfamiliar places many miles away.

Most research on animal navigation has been carried out with homing pigeons, and this research over many decades has served only to deepen the problem of understanding their direction-finding ability. Navigation is goal-directed, and implies that the animals know where their home is even when they are in an unfamiliar place, and have to cross unfamiliar terrain.

Pigeons do not know their way home by remembering the twists and turns of the outward journey, because birds taken in closed vans by devious routes find their way home perfectly well, as do birds that have been anaesthetized on the outward journey, or transported in rotating drums. They do not navigate by the sun, because pigeons can home on cloudy days and can even be trained to navigate at night. However, they may use the sun as a simple compass to keep their bearings. Although they use landmarks in familiar terrain, they can home from unfamiliar places hundreds of kilometres from their home, with no familiar landmarks. They cannot smell their home from hundreds of miles away, especially when it is downwind, although smell may play a part in their homing ability when they are close to familiar territory.

 Some biologists hope that the homing of pigeons might turn out to be explicable in terms of a magnetic sense. But even if pigeons have a compass-sense (which is not proven), this could not explain their ability to navigate. If you were taken blindfold to an unknown destination and given a compass, you would know where north was, but not the direction of your home.

The failure of conventional attempts to explain pigeon homing and many other kinds of animal navigation implies the existence of a sense of direction as yet unrecognized by institutional science. This could have major implications for the understanding of animal migrations, and would shed light on the human sense of direction, much better developed in traditional peoples, such as the bushmen of the Kalahari or Polynesian navigators, than in modern urban people.

Premonitions

Very little research has been done on animal premonitions, even in the case of earthquakes where such warnings could prove very useful.

Some forewarnings might be explicable in terms of physical clues, such as electrical changes before earthquakes and storms. Other premonitions are more mysterious, as in the case of animals that anticipated air raids during the Second World War long before they could have heard enemy planes approaching, or animals that become agitated before unforeseeable accidents. Here precognition or presentiment may be involved, implying either an influence passing backwards in time, or a blurring of the distinction between future, present and past.

All three types of perceptiveness—telepathy, the sense of direction and premonitions—seem better developed in non-human species like dogs than they are in people. Nevertheless they occur in the human realm too, but they seem to be better developed in traditional cultures than in the modern industrial world. Maybe we have lost some of these abilities because we no longer need them: telephones and television have superseded telepathy; maps and global positioning systems have replaced the sense of direction. And perceptiveness is not cultivated in our educational system. Indeed the existence of unexplained powers is not only ignored but often denied.

Nevertheless, human ‘sixth senses’ have not gone away. They look more natural, more biological, when they are seen in the light of animal behaviour. Much that appears ‘paranormal’ at present looks normal when we expand our ideas of normality. But we need to expand our view of physics as well as of biology if these phenomena are to be explained at a more fundamental level.

 Telepathy from people to animals usually occurs only when there are close emotional bonds. This may well be an important factor in human telepathy too. My hypothesis is that these bonds depend on fields that link together members of a social group, called social fields. These are one type of a more general class of fields called morphic fields (described in detail in my book The Presence of the Past). These bonds continue to link members of the social group together even when they are far apart, beyond the range of sensory communication, and can serve as a medium through which telepathic communications can pass.

Morphic fields may also underlie the sense of direction. Animals are not only linked to members of their social group by morphic fields, but also to significant places, such as their home. These fields continue to connect them to their home even when they are far away, rather like invisible elastic bands. These bonds can consequently give directional information, “pulling” the animal in a homewards direction.

We have much to learn from our companion animals about animal nature, and about our own.
Dr Rupert Sheldrake was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society in biochemistry. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, and lives in London. His book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals is published in paperback by Three Rivers Press at $14. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

This article was printed in New Renaissance, Vol. 11, No. 4, issue 39, Spring, 2003  Copyright © 2003 by Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved.  Posted on the web on March 22,  2003.

Family Dog Project: New scientific insights into the evolutionary and ethological foundations of dog-human relationship


Family Dog Project

hun
Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Ethology
    Budapest, Hungary
Dog Behaviour Research

 

The science behind a friendship


The Family Dog Project was established in 1994 as the first research group dedicated to investigate the evolutionary and ethological foundations of dog-human relationship.
        
The project was initiated by Professor Emeritus Vilmos Csányi together with Antal Dóka, Ádám Miklósi, and József Topál at the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.

          We hypothesised that dogs have evolved to survive in the anthropogenic environment, and our investigations aim at revealing the contribution of humans and dogs to this long-standing partnership. Thus we are not interested solely in the mental abilities of dogs but in all aspects of human and dog behaviour that have strengthened this bond, and may even expand it further. Surprisingly, in our experience this research does not only reveal important insights on dogs but also on us, people.

New scientific insights are fed into practical applications through our Dogs for Humans charity, which educates dogs for the disabled and dog assisted therapy.

The Family Dog Project

Why the dog?

A unique process: domestication for social competence
Due to their domestication the dog became one of the most successful mammals in the last 20-40.000 years of biological evolution. Compared to its living ancestor the wolf, dogs are now more wide-spread on the Earth and live in far greater number. This achievement can be very likely attributed to the fact that the dog has joined to live in the human niche which allowed him access to new resources of food and protection. However this change in the evolution of the dog could have not been achieved without changes in the behaviour that made it able to adapt to the human social environment. Sharing their environment dogs interact with the humans in many ways and living in such a complex social environment is cognitively challenging. It is widely accepted that the adaptational demands of the highly organized social life have led to special socio-cognitive abilities in dogs.
 
Many assume that studying dog-human communication offers a unique opportunity for our understanding the evolution of human communicational skills. This claim is based on the view that the dog can be regarded as unique among domesticates. In fact dogs were not only the firstly domesticated animal, but had from very early on a “special” relationship with humans. The transition from the wild state to the domesticated one changed the selective forces radically leading to the adaptive specialization of dogs to the human environment. It is increasingly assumed that many aspects of dog behaviour can be functionally analogue to the corresponding human trait. Since human environment is challenging for dogs by virtue of its complex social and cognitive nature, dogs had to develop human-compatible social behaviour traits including functional analogues of human communicational skills.
                   

Further reading

                    
Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Gácsi, M., Dóka, A., Pongrácz, P., Kubinyi, E., Virányi Zs., Csányi, V. 2009. The dog as a model for understanding human social behavior. Advances in the study of animal behaviour, 39: 71-116.
 
Research Projects

Wolf-dog comparisons

Differences between hand-raised wolves and dogs indicate that social attraction, synchronizing behaviour and communicative abilities of dogs changed markedly during the process of domestication.
More...



Dog-human attachment

Attachment between dog and owner is analogous to that of a human infant and his/her caregiver. The development of attachment is not restricted to a “sensitive period”.
More...


 

Social learning

Dogs are able to learn through observation both from humans and other dogs, also in cases when the goal of the activity is not evident.
More...



Social cognition

Dogs are very sensitive to human social cues which often mediate their learning about the environment.
More...



Physical cognition
In order to find food, catch a prey, defend a territory or make a burrow wolves and dogs need to know something about the physical lows of their environment. Often such skills are also referred to as ecological cognition because they may differ among species.
More...


Visual communication

Dogs are able to utilize a wide range of human communicative gestures.
More...




Acoustic communication
Various acustic parameters of barks correlate with assumed emotional content.
More...



Personality

At the behavioural level dogs share many aspects of human personality traits. Some of these are associated with highly polymorphic genes.
More...



Artificial companions
Ethology, in particular the study of dog behaviour, could provide important insights in the development of synthetic companions or embodied robots.
More...


a lap tetejére





Acoustic communication

 
 
Although it is one of the most conspicuous features of dog behavior, barking has received very little attention from animal behaviorists, ethologists or from an applied perspective. Emerging new research has indicated that in the repertoire of dog vocalizations barking has unique features by showing wide ranges of acoustic parameters like frequency, tonality and rhythmicity. According to the new experimental data, barking is strongly context dependent, and is informative at least for humans. At the same time, there are still only a few indications for intra-specific communication with barking in the dog.

We assume that dog barking emerged through selective processes in which human preference for certain acoustic aspects of the vocalization might have been of paramount importance. We call for a more experiment-oriented approach in the study of dog vocalization that could shed light on the possible communicative function of these acoustic signals.

Dogs, just like their wild relatives, have a rich vocal repertoire, including not only barking, but also other types of vocalizations. We have recently started to investigate the role of growls in dog-dog communication, especially in respect of the possible referential content of these signals.

Referentiality means that a signal contains information about not only the signaller’s inner state, but some part of the outer environment too. Growls are suitable subjects for this kind of research, because dogs emit them in various social contexts, both in agonistic and non-agonistic situations. The acoustic communication of animals can be also interesting from the aspect of researching the unique features of human language. In a new series of playback experiments we use artificially constructed sequences of dog barks, for testing the sensitivity of dogs to particular language-features, like recursivity.

Further reading

Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Molnár, Cs., Csányi, V. 2005. Human listeners are able to classify dog barks recorded in different situations. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119: 136-144. (pdf)
Pongrácz, P., Molnár, Cs., Miklósi, Á. 2006. Acoustic parameters of dog barks carry emotional information for humans. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 100: 228-240. (pdf)
Molnár, Cs., Pongrácz, P., Dóka, A., Miklósi, Á. 2006. Can humans discriminate between dogs on the base of the acoustic parameters of barks? Behavioural Processes, 73: 76-83. (pdf)
Molnár, Cs., Kaplan, F., Roy, P., Pachet, F., Pongrácz, P., Dóka, A., Miklósi, Á. 2008. Classification of dog barks: a machine learning approach. Animal Cognition, 11: 389–400. (pdf)
Maros, K., Pongrácz, P., Bárdos, Gy., Molnár, Cs., Faragó, T., Miklósi, Á. 2008. Dogs can discriminate barks from different situations. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 114: 159–167. (pdf)


 

Artificial companions


Ethology, in particular the study of dog behaviour, could provide important insights in the development of synthetic companions or embodied robots. Although Reto U. Schneider listed our work with AIBO robot among the maddest experiments in science, those observations have clearly established the limitation of that robotic pet when it comes to interactions with conspecifics (Kubinyi et al 2004). Interestingly, both dogs and AIBO can be taught by clicker training (Kaplan et al 2002), however, both adults and children seem to find the AIBO less interesting as they disrupt playing with this toy earlier in comparison to a dog puppy (Kerepesi et al 2005). Actually, building robotic pets that mimic real animals may not be the way forward.

We aim to develop a new interdisciplinary science, ethorobotics, that is interested in whether and how the control and dynamics of animal behaviour can be utilized to build better robots which however are not copycats of real animals. We hope that detailed modelling of the social behaviour of the dog could advance also the field of robotics. But we do not want to replace pet dogs by building robots, these two creatures should play different functions in our lives. 

Further reading

Kaplan, F., Oudeyer, P.-Y., Kubinyi, E., Miklósi, Á. 2002. Robotic clicker training. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 38: 197-206. (pdf)
Kubinyi, E., Miklósi, Á., Kaplan, F., Gácsi, M., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2004. Social behaviour of dogs encountering AIBO, an animal-like robot in a neutral and in a feeding situation. Behavioural Processes, 65: 231-239. (pdf)
Kerepesi, A., Kubinyi, E., Jonsson, G.K., Magnusson, M.S., Miklósi, Á. 2006. Behavioural comparison of human-animal (dog) and human-robot (AIBO) interactions. Behavioural Processes, 73: 92-99. (pdf)


 

Dog-human attachment

 
Attachment is a very important concept for animals that live in closed groups since group activities depend on the actual relationships among the members. Some forms of social learning or cooperation take place only if there is a close relationship between two animals.

Psychologists have found that there is a special bond between the mother and her infant, and not only the quality of this relationship varies from one individual mother to the next but later children's performance in the school, for example cooperative willingness etc, seems to depend on the quality of this relationship.

The most striking feature of the social life of dogs is that they seem to prefer joining human groups. The dog-human relationship has a long evolutionary history and this could be based both on dogs’ evolutionary heritage, being the descendants of wolves, and on changes which took place during their adaptation to living with humans. However, the notion that the dog is just a tamed version of the wolf and the affiliative behaviour of dogs towards human is simply the manifestation of a wolf-like behaviour in an interspecific context is not really supported by current knowledge. Recent evidence suggests that domestication led to significant changes in the social-affiliative behaviour system of dogs and these changes served as the basis of the evolutionary development of dog-human relationship.         In order to test dog-human attachment we have utilized the experimental developed by Mary Ainsworth (Strange Situation Test, 1969) for studying behavioural criteria of human infant-parent bond. This experimental approach offers direct comparisons between the behavioural manifestation of attachment behaviour in dogs and human children. We have found that dogs (both puppies and adult ones) displayed a specific reaction towards their owners, but not towards a stranger, by looking for them in their absence and making rapid and enduring contact upon their return. They also preferred to play with the owner, and decreased play activity in the absence of the owner.

Follow-up work provided evidence that this pattern of attachment is stable over at least one year and is independent of the peculiarities of the testing location. An important further analogy to the human case has been revealed by observing the emergence of attachment behaviour in shelter dogs. These observations suggest that dogs that have been deprived of human contact (adult shelter dogs) are able and motivated to initiate a new relationship rapidly after a short duration of social contact with humans.

More recent results show, that in contrast to 4-month-old dog pups, grey wolf cubs of the same age did not fulfil the criteria for attachment to human. Despite being hand-raised and socialized to an extreme level (in contact with their owners 20-24h per day for the first 3-4 months of their life), these hand-reared grey wolf pups did not seem to discriminate between their caregiver and a stranger greeting them when left alone in an unfamiliar enclosure. It seems that unlike dogs, the human caregiver does not act as a ‘secure base’ for wolves in stressful situations. These observed differences between wolves and dogs show that the emergence of ‘infant-like’ attachment in dogs is not (only) due to social experience during early exposure to humans.

Attachment has also another interesting effect: The attached individuals seem to develop some kind of dependence toward the attachment figure. This means that in a problem situation their first strategy is to seek the help of the attachment figure before attending the problem itself. This finding is often interpreted (in popular literature) as the 'pet dogs' being 'stupid' but this is not true! In contrast, it means that dogs living in close relationship with their owner prefer to wait for the other to do the job for them, and only if this 'strategy' fails are they willing to solve the problem themselves. In other words dogs are very flexible in using social strategies.

In sum our findings on the attachment behaviour point to a characteristic selective responsiveness to the human caregiver (owner) in dogs, and this supports the view that attachment is a functionally distinct component of the social behaviour of the dog showing striking functional behavioural similarities to that of described in human infants.

Further reading

Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 1997. Dog-human relationship affects problem solving behavior in the dog. Anthrozoös, 10: 214-224. (pdf)
Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 1998. Attachment behaviour in dogs: a new application of Ainsworth's (1969) Strange Situation Test. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112: 219-229. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Dóka, A., Csányi, V. 2001. Attachment behaviour of adult dogs (Canis familiaris) living at rescue centres: Forming new bonds. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 423-431. (pdf)
Naderi, Sz., Miklósi, Á., Dóka, A., Csányi, V. 2002. Does dog-human attachment affect their inter-specific cooperation? Acta Biologica Hungarica, 53: 537-550.
Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Csányi, V. 2005. Attachment to humans: a comparative study on hand-reared wolves and differently socialized dog puppies. Animal Behaviour, 70: 1367-1375. (pdf)


Personality

 
 
Personality is often defined as an individual's distinctive pattern of behaviour (besides feeling and thinking) that is consistent across time and situations. Personality studies in dogs have become very popular in the last decade. Dog personality is a matter of great public concern, and besides theoretical interest, it has a wide range of practical applications, including significant influence on the dog-human bond.
 
Despite the increased interest, at present there is neither standard methodology nor standard terminology in dog personality studies, therefore we had to work out our own methodology. In the following we present our dog personality studies based on questionnaires and behaviour tests.
 
1. Dog and owner demographic characteristics and dog personality trait associations The aim of this study was to analyze the relationships between four personality traits of dogs (calmness, trainability, dog sociability and boldness) and dog and owner demographics on a large sample size with 14,004 individuals. German speaking dog owners filled in an online questionnaire in German which was advertised in the “Dogs” magazine (www.dogs-magazin.de). We found multiple associations between four traits (calmness/emotinal stability, trainability/openness, dog sociality and boldness) and demographic variables such as age, sex, neutered status or the gender of the owners.
 
2. Cross-Cultural Comparisons Cross-cultural comparisons of dog behavior are limited. We compared the questionnaire responses of German shepherd owners in Hungary and the United States (Wan, 2009, in press). We found for example, that American owners were more likely to keep their dogs indoors during the day and at night, to report that their dogs were kept as pets, and to engage their dogs in a greater number of training types (e.g. conformation training, agility training). Concerning the behavior, American owners reported higher scores than Hungarian owners on the confidence and aggressiveness scales of our survey (diffrent from the above one).
 
3. Personality trait and gene polymorphism associations At the behavioural level dogs share many aspects of human personality traits. Some of these are associated with highly polymorphic genes. Studies suggest that the dog could be a very valuable natural model for behaviour-gene associations in humans. In recent years molecular genetics has begun to identify certain neurotransmitter-associated genes, called candidate genes, for quantitative behavioural traits. According to this model, complex behavioural traits such as activity, impulsivity, and aggression are determined by various genes which interact additively or nonadditively. Recent research has revealed a number of allele polimorphism in candidate gene in dogs. Based on the human parallels intensive search for behavioural correlates has been started. Dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene polymorphism was found to be significantly associated with the “activity” and "social impulsivity" trait in the dog in a population of German shepherds. Subsequent analysis in in vitro assays showed that alleles differ in functional properties.
 
This was revealed both by questionnaire-based evaluations and behavioural tests. Behavioural tests are independent largely from the perception biases of the observer, and provide the behavioural elements that are necessary for the implementation of dogs' behaviour in robots. We developed a test battery with 14 subtests, named Family Dog Test, for measuring individual variability in dogs. We found that the Liveliness trait obtaind by the test battery is associated with the tyrozine-hydroxilase intron 4 polymorphism in German shepherds.
 
4. Environmental effects on the personality of dog Laboratory dogs are frequently used in scientific studies. The contrast between the quality of life of laboratory and family dogs is salient. Laboratory dogs are kept in a highly restricted environment, in a limited area (4 nm2 for 1-2 dogs). Usually they do not have human contact except with their caretakers, once a day in feeding and cleaning time. We tested laboratory beagles and family begales in the Family Dog Test (see above), and compared their behaviour. We found that there was no difference in the Liveliness of the two populations, but Playfulness, Sociality, and Neuroticism significantly differed.

 

Further reading

 
Héjjas, K., Vas, J., Topál, J., Szántai, E., Rónai, Zs., Székely, A., Kubinyi, E., Horváth, Zs., Sasvári-Székely, M., Miklósi, Á. 2007. Association of polymorphisms in the dopamine D4 receptor gene and the activity-impulsivity endophenotype in dogs. Animal Genetics, 38: 629–633. (pdf)
Héjjas, K., Vas, J., Kubinyi, E., Sasvári-Székely, M., Miklósi, Á., Rónai, Z. 2007. Novel repeat polymorphisms of the dopaminergic neurotransmitter genes among dogs and wolves. Mammalian Genome, 18: 871-879. (pdf)
Héjjas, K., Kubinyi, E., Rónai, Zs., Székely, A., Vas, J., Miklósi, Á., Sasvári-Székely, M., Kereszturi, E. 2009. Molecular and behavioral analysis of the intron 2 repeat polymorphism in canine dopamine D4 receptor gene. Genes, Brain, Behaviour, 8: 330-336. (pdf)
Kubinyi, E., Turcsán, B., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Dog and owner demographic characteristics and dog personality trait associations. Behavioural Processes, 81: 392-401. (pdf)


 

Social cognition

 
Some argue that dogs’ complex social skills have been selected for during their co-habitation with humans. Indeed, dogs may have to rely on sophisticated social abilities in order to get along in their relationships. However, instead of reporting a list of anecdotes researchers need to find well controlled methods to reveal the cognitive mechanisms that may operate in the dogs’ mind. We have not yet convincing evidence to say that dogs are able to read our minds but nevertheless they seem to be very skilful readers of our behaviour. In most cases this “trick” also does the job.
The attention of humans (the direction of looking – head orientation) has an important effect on the dogs’ behaviour. Dogs take human attention into account when they retrieve objects or respond to commands. In the latter, they can also figure out whether a command was intended to them or somebody else.

Dogs are also very good in displaying rituals and following simple rules. Not surprisingly they seem to get engaged easily a “hide & search” game, and will look for the object if actually nothing was hidden. Human behaviour often becomes a sample to which dogs match their behaviour. Thus sometimes a pointless short detour by the owner during the daily walk gets also included in the routine of the dog.


In particular situations dogs can take into account what the their owner know or does not know, however they observe some minute visible differences in the owners’ behaviour rather than being able to think about thoughts of the person. Our results show for example, that adult pet dogs, similarly to 3-year-old children, were able to complement information that was missing in the human. However whether dogs (and apes/children) used ‘mindreading’ or solved the task by some ‘insightful’ learning about observable behavioural cues of the human (behaviour-reading) is not clear. These results support the claim that dogs are able to provide humans with information that helps them in obtaining a goal; or, alternatively, dogs can rely on human behavioural cues indicating the lack of certain ‘knowledge’.

Further reading

 
Watson, J.S., Gergely, G., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Sárközi, Zs., Csányi, V. 2001. Distinguishing logic from association in the solution of an invisible displacement task by children and dogs: Using negation of disjunction. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 219-226. (pdf)
Kubinyi, E., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2003. Social mimetic behaviour and social anticipation in dogs: preliminary results. Animal Cognition, 6: 57-63. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Varga, O., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2004. Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human's attention. Animal Cognition, 7: 144-153. (pdf)
Virányi, Zs., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2004. Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans’ attentional focus. Behavioural Processes, 66: 161-172. (pdf)
Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2004. Comparative social cognition: What can dogs teach us? Animal Behaviour, 67: 995-1004. (pdf)
Topál, J., Kubinyi, E., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á. 2005. Obeying social rules: A comparative study on dogs and humans. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 3: 213-239. (pdf)
Virányi, Zs., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2006. A nonverbal test of knowledge attribution: a comparative study on dogs and children. Animal Cognition, 9: 13-26. (pdf)
Topál, J., Erdőhegyi, Á., Mányik R., Miklósi Á. 2006. Mindreading in a dog: an adaptation of a primate ‘mental attribution’ study. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy,6: 365-379. (pdf)
Erdőhegyi, Á., Topál, J., Virányi, Zs., Miklósi Á. 2007. Dog-logic: inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use. Animal Behaviour, 74: 725-737. (pdf)


 

Physical cognition

 
In order to find food, catch a prey, defend a territory or make a burrow wolves and dogs need to know something about the physical lows of their environment. Often such skills are also referred to as ecological cognition because they may differ among species.

Dogs are able to trace and follow objects both visually and on the basis of smell. The former ability is often referred to in cognitive terms as “object permanence” because it is assumed that such tasks can only be accomplished if the dog is able to build a “mental image” of the object. Such skills could be useful both for the wolf and the dog when they hunt for rapidly moving prey on a complex terrain.
Many other experiments are aimed to find out about the navigation skills of dogs and wolves. There are many interesting anecdotes how wolves find their way around on their territory, how they optimise seemingly their way of approaching the prey, and make short cuts or detours depending on the obstacles they face. It is however more difficult to find the cognitive basis for such skills in the laboratory or at least under controlled condition.

Pet dogs living in the city seem not to be very professional, for example, in relatively simple detour tasks. They need about 5-6 trials to learn how to get a piece of food from behind a 3 m long fence. They seem to have also problems with transferring their knowledge about the detours to other similar situations and it is also not clear how early (“puppyhood”) or general experience may enhance the skills of dogs getting around.

Recent work has also shown that humans’ social and communicative influence also modifies the ability of dogs to process environmental cues. It seems that the selection for enhanced preference for humans and human actions may inhibit the dogs to react optimally to challenges in the environment if manipulated by humans.

Further Reading

Watson, J.S., Gergely, G., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Sárközi, Zs., Csányi, V. 2001. Distinguishing logic from association in the solution of an invisible displacement task by children and dogs: Using negation of disjunction. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 219-226. (pdf)
Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Gurobi, K., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2001. Social learning in dogs: The effect of a human demonstrator on the performance of dogs (Canis familiaris) in a detour task. Animal Behaviour, 62: 1109-1117. (pdf)
Erdőhegyi, Á., Topál, J., Virányi, Zs., Miklósi Á. 2007. Dog-logic: inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use. Animal Behaviour, 74: 725-737. (pdf)

 

Social learning

 
 
There are many cases and definitions for social learning – in general we consider an act social learning, when there is a demonstrator, who does something, while at least one observer witnesses this action, and later the observer will do something similar to the demonstrator’s action, while without demonstration this similarity would be less likely.

Dogs are excellent subjects for examining both interspecific and within-species social learning. As dogs form well-working social units with humans, it is easy to use human demonstrators in particular tasks, where dogs should learn by observation from the humans’ actions. At the same time trained dog demonstrators can be used also for tasks, where we expect dogs to learn from each others exemplar.

In several experiments we found that dogs learn easily from humans in many tasks, like detouring a V-shaped fence, opening a problem box, or operating a two-action device. Dogs follow human actions also in the ‘Do as I do’ paradigm, where they show ability for generalization.

We have demonstrated that dogs are able to use social information provided by humans in problem solving situations. Naive dogs learn a detour task faster if they can observe a demonstrator making the detour. Moreover they can use socially provided information to overcome previously learned but now maladaptive behavioural routines. The results show that other factors, like social rank can influence the dogs’ performance in social learning tasks: high ranked (dominant) dogs learned more easily from a human demonstrator, while subordinate dogs learned much more effective from a dog demonstrator.

Finally, it seems that dogs have special kind of receptivity to behaviour cues of human „teaching” which process ensures efficient transfer of information, even when its content is cognitively ’non-transparent’, arbitrary and actually does not have any perceivable adaptive value at all.

Further reading

 
 
Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2003. Interaction between individual experience and social learning in dogs. Animal Behaviour, 65: 595-603. (pdf)
Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Timár-Geng, K., Csányi, V. 2003. Preference for copying unambiguous demonstrations in dogs. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117: 337-343. (pdf)
Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Gurobi, K., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2001. Social learning in dogs: The effect of a human demonstrator on the performance of dogs (Canis familiaris) in a detour task. Animal Behaviour, 62: 1109-1117. (pdf)
Topál, J., Byrne, R.W., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2006. Reproducing human actions and action sequences: “Do as I Do!” in a dog. Animal Cognition, 9: 355-367. (pdf)
Kubinyi, E., Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Dog as a model for studying con- and heterospecific social learning. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 4: 31-41. (pdf)


Visual communication

 
 
In humans the pointing gesture can take many forms in everyday life. Many independent studies have established that dogs comprehend the human pointing gesture and we showed that dogs are able to rely on more subtle human visual cues like head turning, nodding or bowing. Moreover they can generalize to a certain degree from familiar pointing gestures to unfamiliar ones, and thereby they can use also novel pointing gestures as a cue. In some cases dogs seem to regard the pointing gesture indeed as being a communicative act, as in the experimental setting they tended to choose the bowl pointed at by the human even when it was contradicted by direct olfactory or visual information.

We showed that the comprehension of the human pointing in dogs may require only very limited and rapid early learning to fully develop.         In a more recent study we found that although dogs perform well in the case of many different pointing gestures they perform poorly in the case of the gestures in which from the observer’s point of view the pointing arm and hand stays within the silhouette of the body. This result made us to conclude that for the dogs the protrusion of a body part of the body torso provides the key feature of the signal. Examining this question more closely in a very recent study we found that making the gesture visually more conspicuous could have an enhancing effect in cases where the gesture does not stick out from the body torso. On the basis of these results it seems that the most informative sign for the dogs is not even the line of the pointing arm but a clearly visible patch, which appears conspicuously and asymmetrically at one side of the body torso.         We have provided evidence that during the domestication process, selection for two factors under genetic influence (visual cooperation and focused attention) have led independently to increased comprehension of human communicational cues in dogs.                 In a comparative study we revealed that 3-year-old children are able to rely on the direction of the index finger, and show the strongest ability to generalize to unfamiliar gestures. Although some capacity to generalize is also evident in younger children and dogs, especially the latter appear biased in the use of protruding body parts as directional signals.                 There are also some indications that dogs have a strong propensity to initialize communicative interactions with humans by using visual and sometimes also acoustic signals functionally similar to the ones used by humans. Several studies have demonstrated that also dogs “point” to humans, e.g. when dogs when facing an unsolvable situation use attention-getting behaviour. For example, after looking at the owner, dogs display gaze alternation between the location of the target object and the owner. A similar phenomenon was observed in a separate experiment, in which dogs, after having learnt how to solve a task, were prevented to get the target object the same way. Characteristically, after a few attempts most dogs stopped trying and looked at their owner. According to the results of these studies gaze alternation is a typical sign of dogs’ “pointing behaviour”, and it proved to be also very effective in the sense that humans can extract the information of it about the actual location of something that the dog wants to obtain.

Further reading

 
 
Miklósi, Á., Polgárdi, R., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 1998. Use of experimenter-given cues in dogs. Animal Cognition, 1: 113-121. (pdf)
Soproni, K., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2001. Comprehension of human communicative signs in pet dogs. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 122-126. (pdf)
Szetei, V., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., Csányi V. 2003. When dogs seem to lose their nose: an investigation on the use of visual and olfactory cues in communicative context between dog and owner. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 83: 141-152. (pdf)
Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi E., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Virányi, Zs., Csányi, V. 2003. A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans but dogs do. Current Biology, 13: 763-766. (pdf)
Virányi, Zs., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 2004. Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans’ attentional focus. Behavioural Processes, 66: 161-172. (pdf)
Miklósi, Á., Soproni, K. 2006. A comparative analysis of animals' understanding of the human pointing gesture. Animal Cognition, 9: 81-93. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Kara, E., Belényi, B., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á. 2009 The effect of development and individual differences in pointing comprehension of dogs. Animal Cognition, 12: 471-479. (pdf)
Lakatos, G., Soproni, K., Dóka, A., Miklósi, Á. 2009. A comparative approach to dogs’ (Canis familiaris) and human infants’ comprehension of various forms of pointing gestures. Animal Cognition, 12: 621-631. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., McGreevy, P., Kara, E., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 5: 31. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Győri, B., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Range, F., Belényi, B., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills. PLoS ONE 4 (8): e6584. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone. 0006584.


Wolf-dog comparisons

 
 
Differences between hand-raised wolves and dogs indicate that social attraction, synchronizing behaviour and communicative abilities of dogs changed markedly during the process of domestication.

Raising wolf cubs and dog puppies in an identical way re¬vealed many specific social behavioural differences between the two species, especially with regard to their interactions with humans. Even at an early age (3-5 weeks), dogs dis¬played more communicative signals (e.g. vocalization, tail wagging, gazing at the human’s face) and were less aggres¬sive and avoidant than wolves, although the general activity level did not differ between the two species.

Due to human fostering, 5-week-old wolves showed a clear preference for their caregiver in a preference test, if the other stimulus was another human. However, in contrast to dogs, wolves’ preferences for the caregiver did not develop into a behavioural pattern that could be categorized as attachment. In contrast to hand-reared dogs and pet dogs, individually socialized, hand-reared wolves did not show highly different responsive¬ness to their caregiver compared to an unfamiliar human. While wolves did not display characteristic patterns of attachment toward their caregiver, their preference for her remained strong at the age of 1 or 2 years.          Our young hand–reared dogs, but not wolves, were able to use more difficult human pointing gestures (e.g., momentary distal pointing) spon­taneously. Young wolves needed massive training to reach the same level of success that dogs reached instantly. The reason for this difference might be that in contrast to dogs it was very difficult to establish gaze-to-gaze contact with the wolves; therefore, wolves were less able to attend to an experimenter’s gestures for an extended duration. Dogs are inclined to look at our faces, and this inclination provides them with a broadened opportunity for learning about hu­man gestures. However, socialized adult wolves can utilize human communicative signals. Thus the dog-wolf difference should be interpreted as a developmental change in the timing of some social behaviours rather than an overall difference in the ability.
 

Further reading

 
Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi E., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Virányi, Zs., Csányi, V. 2003. A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans but dogs do. Current Biology, 13: 763-766. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Győri, B., Miklósi, Á., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Csányi, V. 2005. Species-specific differences and similarities in the behavior of hand-raised dog and wolf pups in social situations with humans. Developmental Psychobiology, 47: 111-122. (pdf)
Kubinyi, E., Virányi, Zs., Miklósi, Á. 2007. Comparative social cognition: From wolf and dog to humans. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2: 26-46. (pdf)
Virányi, Zs., Gácsi, M., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Belényi, B., Ujfalussy, D., Miklósi, Á. 2008. Comprehension of human pointing gestures in young human-reared wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris). Animal Cognition, 11: 373-387. (pdf)
Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Csányi, V. 2005. Attachment to humans: a comparative study on hand-reared wolves and differently socialized dog puppies. Animal Behaviour, 70: 1367-1375. (pdf)
Gácsi, M., Győri, B., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Range, F., Belényi, B., Miklósi, Á. 2009. Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills. PLoS ONE 4 (8): e6584. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone. 0006584.



 
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Dogs Decoded



NOVA beta

Dogs Decoded

How smart are dogs, and what makes them such ideal companions? Airing July 3, 2013 at 9 pm on PBS Aired July 3, 2013 on PBS

Originally aired 11.12.11


Program Description

This program will be available for streaming July 4–July 11, 2013. "Dogs Decoded" reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs—with surprising implications for the evolution of human culture. Other research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?

Transcript

Dogs Decoded

PBS Airdate: November 9, 2010
NARRATOR: We are inseparable.
WOMAN 1 (Chocolate Lab Owner): We're best friends.
DR. BRIAN HARE (Duke University): Anywhere you find humans you will almost certainly find dogs.
NARRATOR: And they are smarter than we ever imagined. Astonishing new research is revealing that dogs are far more than merely tamed wild animals.
PROFESSOR DANIEL MILLS (University of Lincoln, England): What makes our relationships so special is the dog's ability to be able to read our emotions so effectively.
NARRATOR: Have they evolved a new kind of intelligence?
DR. JULIANE KAMINSKI (Max Planck Institute, Germany): Suddenly, there were dogs doing something that not even chimps could do.
NARRATOR: Have dogs developed a language to communicate complex emotions?
DOGS BARKING: Bark , bark, ruff, ruff.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Anger, fear, happiness, despair.
MAN 3 (Pug Owner): You can almost understand what they're thinking.
NARRATOR: Why do we love an animal that was once a fearsome predator?
How did dogs go from this to this? Is it in the genes or the way we treat them? And when did it all begin?
The bones tell one story.
Peter Rowley-Conwy (Durham University, England): We start seeing the first things 12,- or 13,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: The genes tell another.
Greger Larson (Durham University, England): One-hundred-thousand years or more.
NARRATOR: The answer is more important than you might think.
Greger Larson: Without dog domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.
NARRATOR: Dogs Decoded, right now, on NOVA.
MAN 1 (Irish Wolfhound Owner): Corrie! Come here.
NARRATOR: There are more dogs than babies worldwide, nearly half a billion.
MAN 1 (Dog Owner): Good boy. Sit.
NARRATOR: We treat them as if they are fellow human beings, with all the thoughts, feelings and emotions of a family member.
MAN 2 (Dog Owner): (Dog Owner): Good girl.
NARRATOR: It's an incredibly close relationship. We share our lives, our homes, even our beds with them.
WOMAN 1: We're very close. We're best friends.
WOMAN 2 (Dog Owner): Pippin sleeps with us. He loves being in the bed with his head on the pillow.
MAN 1 : He just seems to fit in.
MAN 2: She's there with my slippers, first thing in the morning. She's part of the family; she is the family.
NARRATOR: For decades, science has dismissed dogs as being unworthy of legitimate study, But all that has changed. Scientists are now attempting to understand dogs like never before.
What kind of bond do we really have with our dogs? Can we read each other's emotions? Are they smarter than we think? And how and when did this unique relationship develop?
DR. BRIAN HARE: Dogs are all over the world; they're everywhere. Anywhere you find humans, you will almost certainly find dogs.
DANIEL MILLS: We're now beginning to realize that we can answer certain questions in dogs that we can't really answer in any other species.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: There's been this explosion in dog research, I think, really, because they are specially tuned in to humans, and this makes dogs extremely interesting as a model.
NARRATOR: Here at England's University of Lincoln, Professor Daniel Mills specializes in veterinary behavioral medicine. He is using eye tracking technology, to probe how close our relationship really is.
DANIEL MILLS: What we're trying to do here is see the world from a dog's perspective, rather than just impose our own views as to how we think the dog sees the world.
NARRATOR: He's attempting to discover if dogs are as good at reading our emotions as their owners claim.
WOMAN 1: He'll know what I'm thinking even before it's turned into a thought bubble.
WOMAN 3 (King Charles Spaniel Owner): He is clearly an animal; I accept that he is totally an animal. I am not under any illusions that he isn't, but he's more knowing than I would expect an animal to be.
WOMAN 4 (Dog Owner): He will look at me with sorrowful eyes and then give me one big lick on the hand, as if to say, "It's alright."
MAN 2: It's this sixth sense that dogs have.
DANIEL MILLS: One of the things that a lot of people comment on is that dogs seem to be naturally attuned to them and be able to sense their moods and whatever. And part of our work here is actually to look into the scientific basis of that.
NARRATOR: The key to a dog's ability to read our emotions might lie in something we all do without knowing it.
DANIEL MILLS: When we express our emotions in our faces, we don't do it symmetrically. It's been shown that, if you take somebody's face when they're expressing some emotion like happiness or anger or something like that, there is a difference between the left and right side.
NARRATOR: Composite faces consisting of two right or two left sides look very different.
DANIEL MILLS: One of the theories is that maybe our emotions are more faithfully presented in the right side of our face, and that's the side that we tune in to.
And when we look at a face, we have what's known as a natural left-gaze bias, so you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side, of somebody's face.
NARRATOR: Eye-tracking software demonstrates that, when presented with a human face, we nearly always look left first. Daniel Mills wants to find out if dogs use the same trick to read human faces.
DANIEL MILLS: Shifting the direction of your gaze, we thought, was fairly unique to people, until we started looking at dogs.
ANAÏS RACCA (University of Lincoln, England): Taz! Tazy!
NARRATOR: To test the theory, his team recreates this experiment with dogs.
ANAÏS RACCA: Moose, what's that?
NARRATOR: They present a series of images showing human faces, dog faces and inanimate objects and record the direction of a dog's gaze with a video camera.
ANAÏS RACCA: We found that dogs, when they are looking at pictures of dog faces or objects, they will look randomly on the left or the right.
NARRATOR: But, when it comes to human faces, they make a remarkable discovery.
ANAÏS RACCA: So now we have Taz looking at a human face. So, first she's looking in the middle of the screen, and here is the first eye movements on the left. She's in the middle and she's going on the left.
So, now, this is Moose, and then we can see really well that this is a left gaze; from here to here. We can see the white here. She's even moving her head.
NARRATOR: Does this mean dogs can read human emotions? As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. And dogs don't do this with each other. This suggests that dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level.
DANIEL MILLS: Being able to detect when somebody is angry or potentially going to be harmful to them, you could understand that there may be a biological advantage in being able to read people's emotions and, equally, that it makes sense for a dog to approach somebody when they're smiling.
If dogs can read human emotion, and increasingly the scientific evidence is beginning to point in that direction, that's going to form the basis of a very powerful bond between human and dog.
NARRATOR: Evidence like this appears to underpin our conviction that dogs understand us in a way that other animals cannot.
But for many dog owners, this unique relationship is much more than a one-way street.
WOMAN 2: Well, I like to think we can understand him.
YOUNG GIRL 1: Yes, but he woofs and we talk.
WOMAN 2: That's because he wants to be part of the conversation.
WOMAN 4: If he's bored, he'll take a deep sigh and go, (imitates dog).
WOMAN 2: I think he's got a bark when he wants to go out, and I think he's got a bark when he hears strange noises.
WOMAN 4: Sometimes, when he tells the kittens off, he goes, (imitates dog), like that.
MAN 3 (Pug Owner): If you're in a certain mindset, you can almost understand what they're thinking.
NARRATOR: The idea that we can understand barking, almost like a language, has always been dismissed by scientists.
But, in Hungary, an experiment is underway, looking for evidence to back up the claims made by dog owners. Here in Budapest is one of the world's first research facilities dedicated to investigating the human/dog relationship. Dr ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI wants to see if humans really can understand dogs' barks.
Today, he's out on a field expedition, collecting recordings.
DR. ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary): Scientists used to think that barking is a random noise without any specific information or content. However, we have a different idea. Dogs might tell us something about anger, fear, happiness, despair. So these are basic emotions which I think humans might be able to recognize in the barking sound.
NARRATOR: To test this idea, Adam and his team act out a number of scenarios, provoking dogs to bark in different ways.
When other people listen to these recordings, will they be able to match the bark to the emotion?
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Alone bark.
MAN 2: That sounds like a dog asking for attention.
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 1: It's anxious.
WOMAN 3: It's sad; distressed.
MAN 4: Wants to be let off a chain or something like that.
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 2: I think that one's playful.
WOMAN 2: Excitement.
MAN 2: It seems as though they're actually asking their owner for something.
WOMAN 4: It sounds as if it may want a ball or a toy or something. She could be playing with it.
YOUNG GIRL 1: Angry.
WOMAN 4: This is a sound that she would make if she saw somebody behind the fence walking along.
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 1: It's a stranger, I think. It's a stranger encroaching on her territory.
NARRATOR: The results of Miklósi's research are remarkable. It demonstrates a strong agreement between people about the meaning of different barks.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Overall, in the study, you could see that people can discriminate six barks, and most of them were quite successful in this.
NARRATOR: Dr. Miklósi has created a system to analyze the barks. It's helping him decode how dogs communicate meaning.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: I measured the three features of this sound. One was the frequency, the other was the tonality, and the third was the interval between the barking sounds. And, probably, this is also what the judgment of people is based on when they are describing the bark in terms of emotional content.
NARRATOR: But what's more surprising is not our ability to interpret the barks, but what the barks reveal about dogs.
In the natural world, dogs' wild relatives, wolves, only bark as a warning. Amazingly, during the course of domestication, dogs may have evolved their elaborate vocal repertoire especially to communicate with us.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: At the basic level, everyone can do it, and there is a good chance that barking is a very good means to communicate with humans.
NARRATOR: The evidence from these recent experiments seems to confirm what dog owners have asserted all along, that dogs and people are incredibly attuned to each other, in a way that no other two species are.
And new research techniques now allow us to study, more precisely, the nature of this bond.
Some scientists believe that our interaction has a biochemical signature that may be similar to what happens between a mother and baby.
MOTHER OF NEWBORN: It's really hard to describe. It's just an amazing feeling.
NARRATOR: In Sweden, Professor Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg has been studying the role of the hormone oxytocin in creating the bond between mothers and their newborns.
KERSTIN UVNÄS-MOBERG (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden): Oxytocin is a little, little peptide hormone. It's just nine amino acids. It's produced in a very old part of the brain, called the hypothalamus. And oxytocin helps the mother quickly establish the positive feelings and the bond to the baby.
NARRATOR: Each time a mother breastfeeds, she has a new release of oxytocin which may reinforce the bond.
KERSTIN UVNÄS-MOBERG: It's sort of, in a way, difficult to understand how you can be familiar with somebody who is actually a stranger so quickly, don't you think?
MOTHER OF NEWBORN: Yes.
NARRATOR: Professor Uvnäs-Moberg believes oxytocin plays a similar role in the bond between dogs and their owners.
To test the theory, blood samples are taken from dogs and their owners before and during a petting session.
KERSTIN UVNÄS-MOBERG: We had a basal blood sample, and there was nothing, and then we had the sample taken at one minute and three minutes, and you could see this beautiful peak of oxytocin. The fascinating thing is, actually, that the peak of oxytocin is similar to the one we see in breastfeeding mothers.
NARRATOR: Surprisingly, it's not just the owners who are affected. Blood samples taken from dogs reveal a similar burst of oxytocin.
KERSTIN UVNÄS-MOBERG: It is a mutual kind of interaction, you know. The owner touches with her hands, and they both smell, hear and see each other. That is a very nice way of triggering oxytocin release in the two of them.
NARRATOR: Oxytocin has a powerful physiological effect. It can lower the heart rate and blood pressure and may lead to reduced levels of stress. Research indicates that owning a dog could even extend your life.
KERSTIN UVNÄS-MOBERG: If you have a dog, you are much less likely to have a heart attack, and if you have a heart attack, you are three to four times more likely to survive it if you have a dog than if you don't.
NARRATOR: Our relationship with dogs goes back thousands of years. So how did it begin? Where did the first dog come from?
Darwin recognized our unique relationship with dogs, but even he couldn't say for sure which animal was the true ancestor of today's dogs.
It's a complex puzzle that both archaeologists and geneticists are working to solve.
Peter Rowley-Conwy: There's a huge amount of variation in present day dogs. Consider the difference between a Pekingese and a Great Dane. Could they really all be descended from one wild ancestor?
Greger Larson: It could have been a coyote that might have introgressed with a wolf, and then that may have been slightly selected upon to create one particular breed of dog, or jackals or African wild dogs. Any number of these other dog-like species that are out there must have somehow come together, and that's where that variation must have come.
NARRATOR: Until the advent of genetics, archaeology had few firm answers.
GREGER LARSON: All you have to play with are the bones. And so, when you look at the bones, if you don't have a very small flat-faced, round-headed pug in the archaeological record, you don't know where that came from.
Those are questions that, before genetics, you really couldn't answer.
NARRATOR: To unravel the evolutionary origins of dogs, geneticists compare D.N.A. from dogs with that of their wild relatives. Specifically, they look at mitochondrial D.N.A. sequences which pass, unchanged, down the maternal line. Since mitochondrial D.N.A. changes little over time, it can act as a kind of signature left by an animal's ancestors.
GREGER LARSON: Those markers, in domestic dogs, show them to be much more closely related to grey wolves than they are to any other species. There's no admixture, so we never see a mitochondrial signature of, say, an African wild dog or jackal or coyote in a domestic dog. And of the thousands upon thousands of mitochondrial D.N.A. that has been extracted from domestic dogs, every single one of them just looks just like a grey wolf.
NARRATOR: This controversy is settled; dogs are domesticated wolves. But a mystery remains: when and how did this change take place?
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: What is clearly a dog? Clearly, a dog is something which is clearly not a wolf.
Well, here's a wolf skull, and, as you can see, it's a long quite low skull with a relatively flat top. The teeth are quite large and the thing is quite narrow.
Compare that with a domestic dog. This is a cairn terrier, and, as you can see, the process of domestication has gone really quite a long way. The whole face is very much shorter; it's been contracted towards the brain case. The brain case itself has a much steeper front and a much more bowed upper surface, so if you found that, you would be in no doubt you were dealing with a domestic dog.
But this is a domestic Alsatian, and telling these apart, really, would be substantially difficult.
NARRATOR: And since early dogs were probably very wolf-like, it's hard to pinpoint when domestication happened, by looking at the shape of the bones.
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: The best I can give you is around 12-, or 13,000 years ago. We start seeing the first things that everybody would accept as being domestic dogs.
NARRATOR: But mitochondrial DNA offers a different set of clues.
GREGER LARSON: The original genetic dates that were coming out seemed to suggest that domestication was happening on a far earlier timescale than was suggested by anything in the archaeological record. The first dates that were coming out were on the order of a hundred-thousand years or more, which a lot of archaeologists raised their eyebrows at.
NARRATOR: It's hotly debated exactly when dogs were domesticated, but geneticists and archeologists agree on one thing: our relationship with dogs goes back thousands of years further than with any other pet.
It was a time when we were still hunter-gatherers.
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: Dogs were certainly the first animal to be domesticated, and they fit into hunting and gathering societies probably better than any other species out there.
GREGER LARSON: At this stage, when we're hunting and gathering and killing wild animals, after you finish with them, you're creating a relatively large pile of bone and leftover meat, things that these wolves would have been very attracted to. Those wolves that were able to take advantage of that resource and were a little bit less afraid and could approach the human camp were then setting themselves up into a closer relationship with humans.
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: We are carnivores; we are social carnivores. We hunt in groups, and we hunt in daylight. There are not many other species that do that. The wolf is a social carnivore that hunts by daylight, and, therefore, I think there's natural potential for teamwork between those two species.
GREGER LARSON: We became much better hunters with dogs. We are more successfully taking down large game, which means we have more food to eat, which means we can have more offspring, which means the overall populations of humans grow.
NARRATOR: Dog domestication may have helped pave the way for a fundamental change in human lifestyle.
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: It's hard to see how early herders would have moved and protected and guarded their flocks without domestic dogs being in place. And one has to wonder whether agriculture would ever really have made it as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering.
NARRATOR: Some believe that the influence of dogs on our development was not just important but pivotal.
GREGER LARSON: Dogs absolutely turn the tables. Without dogs, humans would still be hunter gatherers, and without that initial starting phase of dog domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.
NARRATOR: We look at our dogs and we see an intelligence, an ability to interact with us, unlike any other domesticated animal. But are dogs really that clever, or are they just dumb animals taught to perform tricks that mimic human behavior?
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 1 (Mutt Owner): I think she is very smart. She learns tricks fairly quickly.
MAN 3: If I am packing a suitcase they will go and sit in the suitcase because they know that suitcase is going to go somewhere.
WOMAN 4: When I'm talking to him, most of the time, his little head usually jilts to the side, as if he knows what I'm saying.
MAN 2: I do talk to her, and she picks up on what I say to her. I know it sounds stupid, but I do actually have a conversation with my dog.
NARRATOR: So how does the intelligence of a dog compare in the animal kingdom? New research is discovering that, in certain ways, dogs may actually think more like us than any other animal, including our nearest relative, the chimpanzee.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: Of all the questions around the evolution of human cognition, of course people would focus in on chimps, quite naturally, and suddenly there were dogs doing something that not even chimps could do.
NARRATOR: Cognitive psychologist Juliane Kaminski compares chimps with dogs, in a series of revealing experiments. At Leipzig Zoo, Kaminski is testing chimps to see if they can understand human gestures, like pointing, to find a hidden treat.
As simple as it seems to us, even our nearest primate relatives fail the task miserably.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: She's not really focusing on me, and she's simply making her own choice. Most of the time, you can see that she makes a decision, long before I give my gesture. She doesn't even wait for my information.
It's such an uncooperative interaction, so it's like really I'm providing information for her to find food, which is just simply something which would never happen in a chimp group, really. I mean a chimp wouldn't go, like, "Oh, look, there's the banana." And then another chimp could go and get it.
NARRATOR: Since we're the only species that makes this gesture, it would be remarkable if any animal could understand it. But dog owners take it for granted that their dogs respond to pointing.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: Good boy!
NARRATOR: For Kaminski, it's proof of their extraordinary social intelligence.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: If you really look at that gesture, it's an informative gesture. So it's, in its essence, a very cooperative interaction, so, I'm really helping you to find something. And for dogs, following, pointing seems to be very natural, and it makes dogs extremely interesting.
NARRATOR: In fact, dogs are so tuned in to our social cues, they can even pick up on something as subtle as the direction of our gaze.
Humans have unique almond-shaped eyes with exposed white sclera visible on each side.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: One hypothesis is that we have evolved those eyes because we use it for communication. So, really, with human eyes, you can really tell easily which direction I'm looking.
NARRATOR: But these aren't skills that dogs use with each other. They are abilities dogs only use with us.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: I think it's very, very easy to imagine that they develop special skills in interacting with humans, because that's their new social partner, so they, kind of, learn to interpret human communication which is different from dog communication. So they, kind of, learn a second language. So you could probably say they are bilingual, yes.
NARRATOR: Even puppies as young as six weeks old seem to respond human gestures.
At least some of the time!
JULIANE KAMINSKI: If they learn it, they learn it very quickly, and it's obviously that they are ready to do it, so from the very beginning, they are ready to receive human communication.
NARRATOR: Dogs are primed to communicate with us, but just how smart are they? New research reveals their abilities extend way beyond what anyone thought.
Professor Kaminski has discovered a remarkable border collie, living in Austria, just outside Vienna. She's conducted a series of experiments and is amazed at the dog's intelligence.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: She can distinguish objects by name, which is really amazing. And she has, like, many, many words.
BETSY'S OWNER: Käse, das zebra…
NARRATOR: With a vocabulary of over 340 words, Betsy is pushing the boundaries of what we think dogs are capable of.
B BETSY'S OWNER: carotte, sandwich.
NARRATOR: Betsy's owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, explains how this all started.
BETSY'S OWNER: I think it was when she was four or five months old, when she spontaneously started to connect human words to items. When we were discussing shall we play with the rope or with the ball, she immediately started to bring those items. So it was actually her idea, and, from this time on, we started to really train her on different words. It was maybe one toy per week, and it worked.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: I think, on average, a well-trained dog maybe knows like fifteen commands or something. There are just a very few individuals who can do what she does.
I can tell that I can try it with my own dog and it doesn't work at all. So he could maybe distinguish two objects; she is able to use it easily, more than 300 objects. That's pretty amazing.
NARRATOR: Betsy's understanding of vocabulary rivals that of a two-year-old, so Kaminski wants to test her comprehension on other skills, as well.
WOMAN 5 (Teacher of Two-Year-Olds): Can you go find me one of them, over there? Yeah?
NARRATOR: Two-year-olds are just beginning to understand how to use symbols, such as scale models, in communication. Though it looks easy, it requires abstract thinking way beyond the capability of almost all animals.
But would Betsy be able to do this, too?
BETSY'S OWNER: Ja. Ist gut.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: This was something the owners had never tried before, so when I came and I said I want to do this, they were really like, "Oh, no way, that's not going to work." I was the first one doing that with her, and she had no problem doing it, right from the beginning.
This is surprising, because, in its essence, if I hold out an object, she turns it into something communicative, and that's so interesting.
NARRATOR: Children also begin to grasp that a drawing or photograph can depict a real object.
WOMAN 5: Thank you very much. Well done.
JULIANE KAMINSKI: In essence, the picture is something very different, as the object. So it's a, it's a piece of paper but…and it's two dimensional…but it's representing something, so she obviously interprets that as representing an object, a three-dimensional object, and that's so interesting that she does this. "I know exactly what you want. This is the one you want, and I'm going to go and get it for you."
BETSY'S OWNER: Ja gut. Super braves, Madchen, gut gemacht, super.
NARRATOR: Kaminski is unsure how many dogs might have similar abilities, but Betsy has shown that certain dogs may have the potential to be more intelligent than we ever thought possible.
So how did dogs acquire these unique abilities? Did these evolve over thousands of years, or is it, rather, the way dogs have been raised in a human environment?
Dogs and wolves are still the same species today. They can easily interbreed. Overall, wolves and dogs are 99.8 percent genetically identical. Given that they're biologically so similar, is it the way we raise them in our homes that makes a dog?
Researchers in Hungary set out to answer this question.
DR. KUBINYI ENIKÖ (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary): We wanted to see whether the special relationships between humans and dogs are due to nature or nurture. So, we wanted to see what happens if a wolf is raised in a human environment, in a home, whether it would act like, like a dog or not.
NARRATOR: A litter of five-day-old cubs is taken from a wolf sanctuary outside Budapest. A group of young researchers are their adoptive parents, caring for them 24 hours a day.
As a control for the experiment, they already raised puppies. Now they aim to raise the wolf cubs in the same way.
KUBINYI ENIKÖ: So we were especially nice with, with our cubs, because we wanted to maintain a very good relationship with them. They were really cute, so it was not very difficult to carry them everywhere we were going. And we also slept together with, with the cubs.
So the bonding, it was good. I really liked my cubs, and there was a strong, really strong relationship between us.
NARRATOR: Then something changed. Despite raising the cubs in the same way as the puppies, at eight weeks, differences start showing up.
KUBINYI ENIKÖ: Dog puppies were always interested in what, what I was doing. There is a very strong cooperative tendency in dogs, and this was missing in, in wolves. They had their own ideas; they were not much interested in my activities.
NARRATOR: The researchers want to find out exactly what is going on and decide to run a series of tests comparing the wolf cubs with puppies of the same age. The puppies engage. The wolves don't.
Unlike dogs, the wolf cubs do not respond to pointing. In fact, they hardly make eye contact with humans at all. The cubs behave the same as they would in the wild.
KUBINYI ENIKÖ: She was really possessive. If she wanted to grab an object, it was really difficult to get it back. And if we wanted to open the refrigerator and have breakfast, the pup was immediately in the middle of the refrigerator and grabbed something. It is not like with a dog that you say, "No, you shouldn't." It just didn't care.
NARRATOR: The battles worsened.
KUBINYI ENIKÖ: After the second month, we started to have more and more conflicts, and the wolves wanted to destroy everything.
And of course, when the cub is a small cub, it's nothing, but when they reach 40 or 50 kilograms, you know, it starts to be really dangerous. We just could not keep them in the house anymore.
NARRATOR: After four months, the cubs had to be returned to the reserve. The experiment shows that upbringing has little impact. It's impossible to turn a wolf into a dog, no matter how much it is loved and nurtured.
KUBINYI ENIKÖ: So according to our experiences, the dog is not a socialized wolf at all. These differences we experienced in the communicative ability and in the social behavior of dogs, this is the effect of domestication.
NARRATOR: The differences must lie in the way dogs have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Their unique abilities are now part of their nature.
But how did dogs evolve these innate attributes? Can we figure out what made them tame? A remarkable experiment in Siberia may hold the key to understanding how wolves evolved into domesticated dogs.
Half a century ago, Soviet scientists set up a breeding program to see if they could domesticate silver foxes. Foxes are closely related to wolves. The project, which has attracted the attention of scientists across the world, is opening a remarkable window on the process of domestication.
Here on a farm, outside the city of Novosibirsk, the experiment still continues today, overseen by Dr Lyudmila Trut.
The breeding program began in 1959, when the first foxes were selected from local fur farms.
DR. LYUDMILA TRUT (Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Russia) [Dubbed]: We approached the animals in the cages and recorded their reaction to us. We could see that some of the foxes showed aggressive behavior, others were frightened; but only one percent of them showed neither signs of fear or aggression.
NARRATOR: This one percent is selected to become the founding generation of a new population of foxes. At every generation, the selection process is repeated, only the tamest foxes are allowed to breed. Within just three generations, the aggressive behavior begins to disappear.
LYUDMILA TRUT [Dubbed]: The radical changes came through in the eighth generation, when foxes started to seek contact with humans and show affection to them. The amazing thing was that cubs who had just started to crawl opened their eyes and started showing affection to humans by breathing heavily, wagging their tails and howling.
This kind of response was a big surprise to us.
NARRATOR: Half a century and nearly fifty generations later, the foxes are tamer than ever. It's an accelerated model of how dogs might have been domesticated from wolves.
In order to understand the role that genetics plays in the taming process, the scientists also bred a group of foxes to be more aggressive.
LYUDMILA TRUT [Dubbed]: It just bit my hand. I didn't even open the cage. I just put my hand out and it managed to bite me through the bars. This isn't a fox, it's a dragon.
NARRATOR: This experiment allows researchers to make unique comparisons between tame and aggressive foxes.
LYUDMILA TRUT [Dubbed]: We did an experiment with cross-fostering, where we gave aggressive cubs to tame mothers and vice versa. We found out that the mother's behavior does not influence that of the cub. This cub was brought up by a tame mother.
NARRATOR: The results are clear. The difference between tame and aggressive foxes is almost entirely genetic.
LYUDMILA TRUT [Dubbed]: We even took the experiment one stage further and transplanted embryos from aggressive mothers into tame mothers, but the results were the same. It proved that you can't change the gene of aggressiveness, and it will be kept and preserved for the next generation.
NARRATOR: Geneticists have already located several regions on the fox genome responsible for tameness. They're now taking blood samples from tame and aggressive foxes in an attempt to pinpoint the specific genes.
Dr. Anna Kukekova, the scientist leading this research team, makes the 5,000 mile journey to Siberia, to study the foxes.
DR. ANNA KUKEKOVA (Cornell University): Behavior is complex. We're pretty sure there will be not a single gene, but definitely the orchestra of genes which is responsible for this behavior.
NARRATOR: One fascinating result to come out of this experiment is the fact that tamer foxes are producing less adrenaline. With lower adrenaline levels, the foxes experience less fear and are less aggressive.
ANNA KUKEKOVA: He is like a doggy, you know, like the puppy who's very happy when somebody picks him up from the floor. It's unbelievable how they trust, how they trust people. And I just really admire this animal.
LYUDMILA TRUT [Dubbed]: So, within 50 years of our intensive selection process, this fire-breathing dragon has turned into a human friend.
If foxes were brought up in a domestic environment, interacting with other animals and humans, they would make fantastic pets. They are as independent as cats, but, at the same time, as devoted as any dog could be.
NARRATOR: One surprising result of this experiment is that, as the foxes' behavior changes, so does their physical appearance.
Just a few generations into the experiment, scientists noticed a curious phenomenon. The normal pattern and silver color of the coat changed dramatically in some of the tame foxes. Their tails often became curly instead of straight. Some young foxes kept their floppy ears for much longer than usual, and their limbs and tails generally became shorter than their wild counterparts'.
In effect, the tame silver foxes were beginning to look more like dogs.
BRIAN HARE: What this shows is that when you select against aggression, you get almost all the same suite of changes that you see when you compare dogs to wolves.
NARRATOR: Evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare is visiting the breeding program in Siberia. He believes once you select for tameness, changes in appearance will naturally follow.
BRIAN HARE: I think the surprise, when thinking about dog origins, is that there's so many ways that dogs are different from wolves. So is it that you had to select for each of these traits individually?
Well, the answer from the fox work is no. If you just select for behavior, a lot of the morphological and physiological changes that we see between wolves and dogs, they just get dragged along.
You end up with this crazy variance, you know, floppy ears, curly tails, you know? All these other things that are really cute, to talk about, so you get a lot of stuff for free when you select against aggression.
NARRATOR: For Hare, this wide variety of physical traits reveals something fundamental about domestication.
BRIAN HARE: When you're selecting against aggression, what you're doing is you're favoring juvenile traits. Juveniles and infants show much less aggression than adults and, so, basically, you've frozen development at a much earlier stage. And so, you have an animal, as an adult, that looks and behaves much more like a juvenile.
It's amazing that you get all this variance that's hidden under the surface. It starts to express itself, and then, of course, later, people can directly decide, "I really like the one with the curly tail, and I'm going to take two of them, and I'm going to put them together." And then you can end up having dogs that, sort of, shift in ways people want them to go.
NARRATOR: In the past few hundred years, we've taken dogs' infantile features and emphasized them even further through selective breeding.
We've created hundreds of breeds to fulfill different roles, but some of them have been bred purely for their looks.
MORTEN KRINGLEBACH (University of Oxford, England): I think this kind of breeding really tells us a lot about what kind of people we are, what it is that we like about dogs.
YOUNG GIRL 2 (Dog Owner): I want you to describe Laddy in one word.
YOUNG BOY 1 (Dog Owner): Cute. Cute, yeah.
YOUNG GIRL 1: Cute, adorable and funny.
MAN 2: I just look at her and I, I just smile, particularly when she's sleeping. She's very, very cute.
NARRATOR: We all know we find them cute, but what is it exactly that makes us respond to dogs so powerfully?
Psychiatrist Morton Kringlebach has a theory as to why the way dogs look has such a profound impact on us.
MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: The need to nurture, I think, is something that is so deep in us that we find it very difficult to resist.
Dogs, puppies have very infant-like features, and maybe that's one of the reasons why we think they are, you know, so cute, is that they remind us of the infants that we, are, so to speak, programmed to like.
There's something about the way that the facial features are organized that makes us want to care for them, and it's about having a large forehead, it's about having large eyes, big ears. And there's something about that that almost unconsciously we cannot help ourselves but actually like.
How are you feeling in there?
We're just going to go one more scan.
NARRATOR: Dr Kringlebach is exploring how strongly we respond to these infantile features. He uses an extremely powerful machine, called a MEG scanner, that allows him to measure, in real-time, the brain's response to pictures of baby and adult faces.
MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: What we found was that within a seventh of a second, there was activity in the frontal part of the brain, just over the eyebrows, in the orbital frontal of cortex, that was present when you were looking at the infant faces but not when you were looking at the adult faces.
This part of the brain is very much involved in emotional responses, and so, what we think we may have stumbled across here, is really, in many ways, the brain equivalent of the parental instinct. There's almost like a wired-in automatic reaction.
Just as with the infant, when you are looking at dogs, you find it very hard to control your emotions. You find it very hard not to get that need to nurture.
MAN 2: Wow, look at that. What a nice belly.
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 1: Mushu, mushu.
YOUNG GIRL 2: Oh, Boo, you so do, oh, yeah.
NARRATOR: But when we treat dogs as if they were children, do we sometimes allow them to replace our children?
MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: They are, essentially, moving our focus away from having children onto having pets.
PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: I think we can think of little puppies brought home as parasites. They don't do anything useful, they're not perceived as a food source, they're not perceived as a guard dog. They are simply brought home for fun.
The cuckoo is perhaps quite a good analogy because the baby cuckoo, of course, being planted in somebody else's nest, prompts mother bird to look after baby cuckoo, even though there's nothing in it for the mother bird at all.
MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: I think it's safe to say that dogs have, evolutionarily, been very successful. If you compare them to wolves, you will see that wolves are now an endangered species, while dogs, of course, are all around the world.
NARRATOR: Whether they are viewed as parasites or as beloved companions, no one can deny the evolutionary success of the domesticated dog.
In fact, there are over 400 million, worldwide. And humans have created over 400 genetically distinct breeds.
Research on dogs is heading in exciting new directions. Geneticists have already mapped the genome of one breed, the boxer. Studying this genome, scientists now realize that it offers tremendous promise in curing human disease.
Dr. Elinor Karlsson, of the Broad Institute, was part of the team that mapped the boxer genome in 2005.
Elinor Karlsson (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard): If you look in, you know, a population of humans, you'd have quite a lot of genetic variation across them. People would be quite different from one another. But, within a breed, dogs are very similar to each other.
NARRATOR: Dr. Karlsson believes that she can use that similarity to understand the genetics of human disease.
Elinor Karlsson: I think there are hundreds of diseases that are in common between dogs and humans. There is diabetes, there is various cardiac diseases, there is epilepsy, there's a lot of different cancers: bone cancers, breast cancers, brain tumors.
NARRATOR: Today, the team is taking blood samples from boxers, which are susceptible to a fatal heart disease called cardiomyopathy.
The D.N.A. in their blood could hold vital clues to the causes of the disease.
Elinor Karlsson: Once we had the dog genome sequenced, we could design a gene chip which would allow us to compare all of our sick dogs and our healthy dogs and find the genes that are causing diseases.
NARRATOR: Using a genotyping machine, Dr. Karlsson simultaneously analyzes thousands of regions of D.N.A. from boxers, with and without this disease.
Elinor Karlsson: So, what you see when you compare the sick dogs to the healthy dogs and go across the genome from chromosome 1 to chromosome 2 and across, is that most of the points are right near zero, and there's not a lot of differences between the healthy dogs and the sick dogs, until you get to chromosome 17. And there, all of a sudden, you have a huge number of differences. And this is really exciting, because this means that this is the region of the genome that holds the gene that's causing our disease.
NARRATOR: Now, with the mutation's identity known, the team is able to locate the corresponding gene in humans. It's accelerated a process that, without dogs, could have taken decades.
Elinor Karlsson: I think that there's probably a lot of diseases that are so complicated in humans, dogs, basically, give us a huge head start on that.
We can really say that dogs are good for our health.
NARRATOR: For a pet that has been around so long, dog research is a surprising new area of science.
Experiments have shown what dog owners have always suspected: after thousands of years of living together, dogs are attuned to us like no other animal.
MAN 2: It's a very important part of life to actually know a dog, and especially a dog that adores you like this. It's got to be good for yourself.
FEMALE RESEARCH PARTICIPANT 1: It's kind of impossible to have a bad day when you are coming home to a wet nose and a waggy tail, I think. I can't imagine life without her.
WOMAN 3: It's quite strange. We weren't lacking anything before we had him, and yet, now, we would feel we were lacking if he wasn't here.
MAN 1: They just enrich your life. They are the best thing ever. They keep you young.
NARRATOR: New research has taken our understanding of how dogs evolved to a whole new level, getting us closer to what exactly it means to be tame.
DANIEL MILLS: While we can have good relationships with a wide variety of animals, historically, our relationship with dogs seems to have been the longest one with any domestic animal.
GREGER LARSON: I think one reason that there are almost seven billion people on Earth is, in large part, due to the role that dogs have played in our evolutionary existence.
DANIEL MILLS: Personally, I don't think it's any coincidence that the dog is referred to as man's best friend.


Participants

Kubinyi Enikö
Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary familydogproject.elte.hu/kubinyi_cv.html
Brian Hare
Duke University
Juliane Kaminski
Max Planck Institute, Germany www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/staff/kaminski/index.htm
Elinor Karlsson
Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard www.sabetilab.org/profile.php?id=ekarlsson
Morten Kringelbach
University of Oxford, England www.neuroscience.ox.ac.uk/directory/morten-kringelbach
Anna Kukekova
Cornell University
Greger Larson
Durham University, England www.dur.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/?id=5502
Ádám Miklósi
Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary etologia.aitia.ai/main.php?folderID=872&articleID=3864&ctag=articlelist&iid=1
Daniel Mills
University of Lincoln, England www.lincoln.ac.uk/dbs/staff/479.asp
Anaïs Racca
University of Lincoln, England www.lincoln.ac.uk/dbs/staff_profile/a_racca.htm
Peter Rowley-Conwy
Durham University, England www.dur.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/?id=164
Lyudmila Trut
Institute of Cytology & Genetics, Russia www.bionet.nsc.ru/indexEngl_normal.html
Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg
Karolinska Institute, Sweden