Dogs (Page 5)

People are like dogs, and dogs are like people. Although you wouldn’t want a dog to balance your checkbook, dogs can count. A leading dog researcher thinks that dogs’ mental abilities are close to those of a human child of around 2 years old.

They can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats. Canine researcher Stanley Coren says, “We all want insight into how our furry companions think, and we want to understand the silly, quirky and apparently irrational behaviors [that] Lassie or Rover demonstrate. Their stunning flashes of brilliance and creativity are reminders that they may not be Einsteins but are sure closer to humans than we thought.”
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And cats control us with their purrs – The only reason we notice that dogs bark is because domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to their 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps.
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Researchers claim to have found a basic form of jealousy in dogs (but do you know how to interpret your dog’s tail wags so you can figure out if YOUR dog has this problem?) Before this, they thought that only primates (that’s us!) were able to feel that emotion.

The researchers came to this conclusion because they discovered that a dog will stop doing a simple trick (in this case, extending his paw to “shake hands”) when he’s not rewarded if he sees another dog being rewarded for doing the same task.

BBC News quotes neurobiologist Frederike Range as saying, “[If] the only difference is one gets food and the other doesn’t, they are responding to being unequally rewarded.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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