Dog Behavior Blog

Dogs Can Recognize The Faces Of Other Dogs

When my dog Raja sees a strange dog, he has a very predictable response. His body tenses, he becomes rigid, and he stands very still, looking at the dog. As a puppy, he was abused by other dogs and even now, years later, he still has trust issues with dogs that he doesn’t know.

However, when he sees a dog he knows, even if a year or more has passed, his tail starts to wag and he confidently goes up to the other dog as they happily start on dog-greeting protocols.

I have often wondered how he recognizes and remembers the dogs he knows. Is it their smell? Is it their general size and shape? Is it the color of their coat?

While all of these factors probably play a role, a new study shows that dogs can recognize the faces of other dogs (Racca, A. et al. 2009. Discrimination of human and dog faces and inversion responses in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Animal Cognition, DOI 10.1007/s10071-009-0303-3).

The authors of the study used a technique called Visual Paired Comparison. In this technique, an animal is shown two images projected on screens, one to the right of the animal and the other to the left. Experimenters measure the amount of time that the animal spends looking at each image. If the animal has no preference, she would spend an equal amount of time looking at either image. However, if the animal has a distinct preference for one image over another, she would spend more time looking at that image.

In the dog face study, the experimenters showed 7 adult dogs (1 miniature Dachshund, 2 Lurchers, and 4 mixed-breeds) paired pictures of an unfamiliar dog face and a familiar one.

The dogs spent significantly more time looking at the familiar dog face. This means that dogs not only recognize individual dog faces, but also prefer to look at familiar faces rather than strange ones.

In this respect, dogs are not alone. Increasingly, studies are finding that lots of other animals can recognize individual faces within their own species. So far, this list includes animals as diverse as chimpanzees, monkeys, sheep, cows, budgerigars, and paper wasps.

We humans often like to look at a friendly face. It seems that other animals like to do that too.

--Con Slobodchikoff

People Can Signal Playfulness to Dogs

A study by Rooney, Bradshaw and Robinson (2001. Do dogs respond to play signals given by humans? Animal Behaviour, 61:715-722.) investigated dogs’ responses to human play signals. These researchers found that humans do communicate a playful intent to their dogs and that their various behaviors when doing so can be considered interspecific play signals.

Additionally, they found that the success of human signals at instigating play was unrelated to the frequency of use. For example, patting the floor as well as whispering were both often used by people attempting to initiate play with their dogs, but dogs showed a low rate of playful responses to these signals.

In contrast, running towards or away from the dog as well as tapping their own chest were two human signals that were highly effective at initiating play with dogs but neither was used frequently by participants in the study.

The least effective human behaviors in their study for eliciting play in dogs were kissing the dog, picking up the dog, and barking at the dog, none of which ever resulted in play. Stamping their feet and pulling the dog’s tail had very low rates of playful responses by the dogs.

The human signals that most frequently elicited play were the forward lunge (the person makes a sudden quick movement toward the dog), the vertical bow (the person bends at the waist until the torso is horizontal), chasing the dog or running away from the dog, the play bow, and grabbing the dog’s paws.

Part of their study involved looking at the effects of vocalizations on play solicitation by humans of dogs. They used two composite play signals and asked whether they were more effective at soliciting play with or without vocalizations. The two composite signals were a play bow combined with patting the floor with their hands and foot shuffling combined with a forward lunge in the vertical bow position. The vocalization was saying “come on” in a whisper followed by “come on little dog” in a high-pitched voice.

The two composite signals used to initiate play with their dogs were more successful at eliciting play when accompanied by play vocalizations.  It could be that the more components a play signal has, the more effective the signal is.

Interestingly, their data suggest that different play signals may invite different kinds of play. The composite bow signal with or without vocalization increased physical contact between the person and the dog and resulted in more licks of the person by the dog, but the composite lunge signal did not, either with or without vocalizations. Perhaps the bow acts as an invitation to approach and make contact, but the composite lunge signal does not. Perhaps one signal acts to solicit close contact play but the other instigates chase games.

Their study, though it was published eight years ago and is widely known in academic circles, does not yet seem to have reached wide audiences in the dog world. This is a shame because people and dogs could benefit from its findings. This study indicates that we should pay attention to whether or not the way we try to entice our dogs to play is effective, what the effects are in terms of the type of play our dogs’ do, and that we should consider adding vocalizations to our visual play signals.

--Karen London

Babies Can Tell The Difference Between Friendly Barks And Aggressive Ones

Parents, including me, tend to find their own babies’ accomplishments amazing, no matter how mundane the tales may seem to everybody else. Now, a new scientific study in the July 2009 issue of the journal Developmental Psychology confirms what parents often say: Babies can understand a lot more than we give them credit for.

According to this study, babies can tell the difference between friendly dog barks and threatening dog barks, and they can do this from as early as six months of age. The babies in the study were presented with two pictures of the same dog. In one picture the dog was in a friendly stance with a relaxed facial expression and in the other the dog was in an aggressive posture with a threatening facial expression. The researchers then played a two-second clip of a dog barking. If the bark was a friendly one, the babies directed their attention to the friendly photo but if it was the aggressive bark that they heard, they looked at the aggressive photo.

It’s not clear whether the babies are able to figure out which sorts of dogs—those exhibiting friendly signs or those sending off aggressive cues—would make the best possible playmates and which should be avoided. This study simply provides evidence that babies can make links between auditory cues from dogs and visual information from them and figure out which sounds go with which visual images.

The results suggest that babies can understand emotions before they can talk, and they can understand those emotions in another species, even if they have had little or no prior experience with dogs. For those of us who feel as though we have been able to understand dogs since before our earliest memories, there’s now scientific backup for those claims!

 --Karen B. London

Dogs Can Understand Photographs

Even though dogs have been around people for a long time, we still know surprisingly little about their abilities.

We have very little idea of what goes through a dog’s mind when we try to communicate with her. She might turn her head in an endearing fashion when we talk to her, but what does she really understand? Mostly, we have no clue.

Now some recent experiments are starting to untangle the abilities of dogs to form mental concepts when we try to communicate with them.

A recent article looked at whether dogs can understand iconic images (Kaminski, J., S. Templemann, J. Call and M. Tomasello. 2009. Domestic dogs comprehend human communication with iconic signs, Developmental Science 12: 831-837).

Iconic images are things like photographs or things that look like the real object. For example, a photograph of a hamburger is an iconic image of a real hamburger. Similarly, a rubber toy hamburger is also an iconic representation of a real hamburger.

In this article, the authors worked with 5 border collies.  Three of the collies knew the names of a variety of objects, and two of the collies had no experience with names. Each collie was presented with either a small rubber toy that looked identical to a larger one that was hidden in another room among a variety of other toys, or was shown a photograph of a toy.

After being shown either the small toy or a photograph, the dogs were asked to go and fetch the large toy.

All of the dogs did remarkably well at retrieving the larger toy when shown the small toy, even though there were other toys in the adjacent room. Also, at least some of the dogs could generalize from looking at a photograph of a toy and go into the next room and bring back the toy that was shown in the photograph.

While it is not particularly surprising that the dogs were able to look at a small toy and bring back an identical larger toy, it is surprising that the dogs could generalize from a two-dimensional photograph to a three-dimensional object.  This suggests that dogs can form mental concepts from the information that we give them.

Another study suggesting that dogs can form mental concepts was reported in 2007 in the journal Animal Cognition (Adachi, I. et al. 2007. Dogs recall their owner’s face from hearing their owner’s voice. Animal Cognition 10: 17-21).

In that study, the authors used a variety of different dogs to see if the dogs could form a mental concept of their owner from the sound of the owner’s voice.  They first played the sound of the owner’s voice to the dog, and then projected either the owner’s face or the face of a stranger on a nearby LCD screen.  Using video cameras, the authors measured the length of time that the dogs spent looking at the screen when they saw their owner vs. when they saw the face of a stranger.

The dogs spent less time looking at the face of their owner after hearing their owner’s voice.  When they saw the face of a stranger after hearing their owner’s voice, the dogs spent more time looking at the screen.

This suggests that upon hearing the voice of their owner, the dogs formed a mental concept of their owner and expected to see him or her, but were puzzled or confused when they saw the face of someone else. They spent more time looking to figure out why there was a mismatch between what they heard and what they saw.

So when your dog turns her head to the side when you are talking to her, perhaps she really is trying to understand what you are saying.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Are Dogs Smarter Than Cats?

In my animal behavior class, I sometimes ask my 100 or so university students, who is smarter, dogs or cats?  Usually about 75 people raise their hands for dogs, and about 25 raise their hands for cats.

Now there seems to be a little bit of scientific confirmation for this position. A recent article in the journal Animal Cognition (Whitt et al. Domestic cats (Felis catus) do not show causal understanding in a string-pulling task, DOI 10.1007/s10071-009-0228-x), shows that cats don’t do very well in pulling baited strings toward them. When there is one string with a tasty morsel on the end, the cats do pretty well. But when there are two stings, with only one of them attached to the tasty morsel, or when the strings are intertwined, the cats can’t seem to figure it out and pull strings at random, even when they can see each of the strings and see which one is baited.

This study follows on the heels of another that was published in 2005 in Animal Cognition (Osthaus et al. 2005. Dogs (Canis familiaris) fail to show understanding of means-end connections in a string-pulling task, Animal Cognition  8: 37-47) That study showed that dogs can do marginally better at string pulling. When there were two parallel strings, one of which was baited with a tasty morsel, and the dogs could see the strings, most of them could figure out which string to pull. However, when the strings were crossed, so that the dog had to pull the string that was opposite to the location of the tasty morsel, the dogs couldn’t figure it out and pulled strings at random.

So does this mean that dogs are smarter than cats? In my animal behavior class, I talk about the leash and food experiment. It goes something like this. Tie a dog’s leash down to a stake, and then loop it over another stake in a V fashion. Then offer the dog a bowl of food in front of the dog. The catch is that the leash is not long enough for the dog to go straight to the food. To get there, the dog has to back up away from the food, go around the stake at the point of the V, and then go to the food. Fewer than 10 percent of dogs can figure it out. Most keep pulling on the leash, trying to go forward to get to the food. And how about cats? Almost any cat can solve this problem.

The bottom line in the food leash experiment is that dogs and cats have a different ecological and evolutionary history. Dogs evolved on the open plains, where they chased their prey. If they got stuck in a bush, their best option was to push ahead until they got unstuck. Cats evolved in places where they spent part of their time in caves. If they got stuck in a cave, their best option was to back up and go around an obstacle. Pushing ahead inside a cave that gets narrower and narrower is a recipe for death by natural selection.

The interpretation of the string experiments is not as straightforward as it seems. Cats like to play with strings. They also get bored easily. In the string experiment, the cats were given a new string to pull every 10 seconds. My cat would have lost interest in the first 20 seconds. And dogs don’t normally go around pulling strings to get their food (although looking cute, hungry  and appealing around feeding time could be considered pulling strings, heartstrings or guilt as the case may be).

So it may not be fair to conclude that these experiments tested the dogs’ or cats’ intelligence. To be fair to the authors of the studies, they recognize this as well, and list a series of possible confounding factors, including ecological and evolutionary differences between the two species.

The problem really is, how do you measure the intelligence of an animal? It’s not as easy as it seems on first glance.

And to that end, who really is smarter? When you consider that today in developed countries, many dogs and cats live a relative life of luxury, sleeping much of the day and being fed, petted, stroked, played with, talked to, and generally amused by their people, my answer is: they both are pretty smart. Many of us humans have to work to support our dogs and cats.

--Con Slobodchikoff

 

Yawning And Dog Theory Of Mind

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This week we have a guest post by Kristina Gage, CPDT, Ph.D. Candidate in Biopsychology at University at Albany, and at SmartDog Dog Training, www.smartdogschool.com. She is currently conducting a survey on yawning in dogs.

               We engage in social interactions with our dogs every day and they interact with us and with other dogs.  The study of social cognition is the study of the thought processes that underlie these interactions.  Research on social cognition in dogs will give us insight into aspects of their relationships with us and other animals, such as attachment, social learning and aggression.  A better understanding of the development and treatment of these problems will lead to a better quality of life for dogs and their human companions.  This, in turn, would help reduce the amount of dogs surrendered to shelters or euthanized for behavior problems every year.

                Theory of Mind (ToM) is one aspect of social cognition.  It refers to the ability to understand that other individuals have a different mental experience than your own.  For example, I know that I experience the world differently from my friends and that my emotions, memories, political views, etc. are different from theirs.  ToM is also connected to self-awareness.  If an animal is not aware of its own experience, it cannot speculate about the experiences of others.  ToM is also a precursor to empathy.  Animals with ToM can make inferences about how another is feeling and react appropriately, thus showing empathy.  It is likely that ToM abilities exist on a continuum, with some individuals showing stronger ToM skills than others of the same species. 

                We do not yet have enough evidence to say definitively whether or not dogs have any kind of ToM.  However, there is reason to believe they may.  First, dogs evolved from wolves which live in social groups and hunt and raise offspring cooperatively, so they are likely to have developed some kind of social cognition.  Dogs also evolved alongside humans, so they may have been selected for certain types of social intelligence (either intentionally or unintentionally).   Indeed, dogs have shown unique social skills in relation to interacting with humans, such as their ability to follow pointing cues to obtain food – they are actually better at this than our closest relative, the chimpanzee!  There are also many other studies that have provided evidence for some level of social intelligence in dogs – including forming strong social bonds with their owners (similar to those between children and parents) and learning to navigate through obstacles by observing a human doing the same.

                This is an important research topic for a number of reasons. There is evidence that certain mental illnesses in humans, such as autism and schizophrenia, involve ToM deficits.  If dogs do have ToM, it’s possible that different levels of ToM could be related to certain behavioral disorders in dogs, as it appears to be in humans.  For example, dogs that have more difficulty reading body language in humans and other dogs may be more likely to be aggressive because it’s more difficult for them to interpret intentions.  Understanding whether or not dogs have ToM and how it relates to other aspects of their behavior will make professionals better equipped to prevent and treat behavior problems in dogs.  Finally, looking at the function of social cognition across many different species provides a clearer picture of the role it plays in species survival and evolution in general. 

                One way of examining ToM in dogs is by looking at contagious yawning.  Susceptibility to contagious yawning in humans appears to be linked to ToM abilities – individuals that score poorly on ToM tests are less susceptible to contagious yawning.  In addition, children with autism don’t show contagious yawning.  I am conducting a survey that will ask dog owners to observe and report their dog’s yawning behavior to determine if dogs yawn contagiously.  If they do, this could indicate that dogs possess some degree of ToM.  This would provide a jumping off point for additional studies on ToM in dogs and how variations in ToM ability affect different aspects of their behavior.   

                Many dog trainers and behaviorists have observed that dogs appear to yawn when stressed or anxious.  Therefore, this study will also try to determine if dogs that are stressed and anxious in general, or are in a situation likely to trigger anxiety (such as going to the vet) are more likely to yawn.  The results of this study will help us understand the mental processes underlying social behavior in dogs and provide insight into the significance of yawning to help us more accurately interpret body language in our dogs.  Both of these things will allow us to improve the relationship between people and dogs and improve the quality of life for dogs in general.

               

                 

 

Do Dogs Understand Contagious Yawning?

When we yawn, it seems like the whole world yawns with us. Let one person start to yawn, and pretty soon everyone else is yawning too. Chimps also yawn contagiously, and possibly some other primates as well.

But what does yawning mean to a dog? Because dogs and humans have been associated for so long, is it reasonable to expect that when we yawn, our dogs will yawn along with us? These are the questions that are asked by two recent articles.

In one of the articles (Joly-Mascheroni et al. 2008. Dogs catch human yawns. Biology Letters 4:446-448) the authors had 29 dogs watching a human yawning, and recorded that 21 of the dogs yawned in response. The authors suggest that this represents a rudimentary form of empathy that dogs might feel for humans, causing the dogs to yawn after they see a human yawning.

In the other article (Harr et al. 2009. Do dogs (Canis familiaris) show contagious yawning? Animal Cognition DOI 10.1007/s10071-009-0233-0), the authors showed 15 dogs video clips of either humans yawning or dogs with either yawns or open mouths, and recorded how many dogs yawned under these circumstances. Only one dog yawned in response to the video clips, and this was to human yawns.

So here we have a difference. One article says that dogs yawn in response to human yawns, and the other article says that they don’t. How do we find our way out of this?

One problem is that there are a lot of unknown factors that could influence the interpretation of these results.

For example, can dogs see and understand video clips? My dog Raja seems utterly indifferent to what is happening on the TV screen, even when there are dogs bouncing around in commercials.

And even if they can see what is on the screen, can they interpret what they are seeing? The other day I came across a website that was talking about the work of Samuel Renshaw, a pioneer in human perception research. The website had a picture that Renshaw showed to people, asking them what the picture represented. I could not figure out what was in the picture until I saw the answer, and then it was obvious to me. If you are curious, take a look at the picture at: http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Renshaw/notassmart/notassmart1.html and see if you can identify what is there.

Also, when seeing real human faces yawning, are the dogs responding by yawning through empathy, or are they yawning because of discomfort?  In a book called On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals, Turid Rugaas describes a yawn as a calming signal that one dog gives to another (or to a human) signifying that the dog is not a threat, as a way of defusing a potentially stressful or aggressive situation.

When I first got Raja as a rescue dog, I would extend my hand to him to try to get him familiarized with my smell. He would often yawn in response. I understood this to mean that he was stressed and nervous, and I made sure that I did not push my attention onto him. Could the dogs watching yawning humans have responded by yawning because they were feeling stressed in the experimental situation?

What it comes down to is that some of the time, we know surprisingly little about why dogs do what they do.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Is It Normal For Dogs To Eat Grass?

My two Standard Poodles, Zephyr and Raja, are as different as night and day when it comes to eating grass. Zephyr would make a beeline towards any grass stems that he saw and start munching on them right away. After a few minutes of chomping on grass, he would have the tell-tale signs of what comes next: his stomach would start to heave, he would start to make gulping noises, and soon all of the grass would come back up, accompanied by a frothy yellow liquid from his stomach. Zephyr was so enthusiastic about eating grass that one time he ate some kind of grass leaves that had sharp edges, damaging his throat. He went around coughing for about three weeks after that, but the experience did not deter him from wanting to eat as much grass as he possibly could. Raja, on the other hand, could take it or leave it. When Zephyr was eating his fill of grass, Raja would take a few mouthfuls to be polite, but otherwise he was not interested. And he never vomited what he ate.

As I was thinking about this difference in behavior, I came across an article that was published last year about plant eating by dogs (Sueda, KLC et al. 2008. Characterisation of plant eating in dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 111: 120-132).

This article reported the results of a couple of surveys of dog owners whose dogs had eaten grass or other plants. One survey was given out to people who brought their dogs to the outpatient clinic at the University of California, Davis, Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. To guard against any biases in reporting, the owners were not told that the survey was designed to assess plant eating by dogs. Instead, they were told that the survey was to provide information about the general eating behavior of pet dogs, and there were questions about the diet of the dogs, whether the dogs ate non-food items, and also whether they ate plants. Of the 47 dog owners whose responses were analyzed, 79 percent reported that their dogs ate plants, and 95 percent of those dogs primarily ate grass.

The authors then did an internet survey of plant eating by dogs. They analyzed 1571 responses. Most people (98 percent) reported that their dogs ate grass at least some of the time. Other plant material included berries, sticks and leaves. Most of the owners (92 percent) said that their dogs were not ill before eating plants, and relatively few (22 percent) said that their dogs vomited within one hour of eating the grass. Those dogs who were fed a commercial diet were more likely to vomit after eating grass than dogs fed a home-cooked or raw-food diet.

When the authors considered the results by age and breed of dogs, some interesting trends showed up. Older dogs (9 or more years old) tended to eat grass more often than younger dogs (less than one year old), although younger dogs tended to eat more different kinds of plants overall than older dogs. Also, older dogs tended to vomit more after eating grass than younger dogs. Among the different breeds, hounds and toy breeds tended to vomit more than other breeds.

Ultimately, the authors of the study could not come to any conclusions as to why dogs eat plants, particularly grass. Here I should say that some plants are very toxic to dogs, particularly some houseplants, and dogs definitely should not eat those plants. But as to why dogs eat grass, the authors were left only with some speculations. One idea was that the grass somehow helps remove internal parasites from the stomach, and the authors suggest that this might explain why older dogs, who might be expected to have accumulated more intestinal parasites, eat more grass. Another idea was that the dogs are somehow extracting medicinal qualities from the plants that are beneficial to their nutrition.

To get back to Zephyr and Raja, this still leaves me puzzled. Zephyr always had problems with his stomach being upset, and perhaps this was a way of clearing out a painful accumulation of stomach acids. Raja, on the other hand, has a cast-iron stomach. Maybe this is the reason, or maybe it is something else. At least I know that my dogs have good company – most of the other dogs in the world probably eat grass too.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Do Confrontational Training Methods Work?

In my dog training classes, people would often come to me and tell me that they tried hitting their dog or yelling at him to get him to stop a particular behavior, but nothing seemed to work. My response has always been that rewards are better than punishment. However, this was based on my own experience and on learning theory. All I had was anecdotal data, and a conviction that dogs should not be treated this way.

Now an article in the February 2009 issue of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science addresses this matter in a scientific survey (Herron, M.E., F.S. Shofer and I.R. Reisner. 2009. Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesirable behaviors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 117: 47-54).

In this article, the authors surveyed 140 dog owners whose dogs had a variety of behavioral issues, such as aggression to familiar people, aggression to unfamiliar people, aggression to dogs, separation anxiety, or a variety of fears such as to thunderstorms and loud noises. The authors asked the owners to list the methods that they used to deal with these behavioral issues. The owners were also asked if they were bitten, snapped-at, or growled-at as a result of using these methods.

The methods that were used could be grouped into two categories: confrontational and non-confrontational.

Confrontational methods were subdivided into direct confrontation and indirect confrontation.

Direct confrontation included the alpha roll, pushing the dog down into a lying position, hitting or kicking the dog, jabbing the neck, using a prong or choke collar, using leash corrections, using a muzzle, forcibly removing something from a dog’s mouth, forcibly pulling the dog down with a leash, grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck, using a shock collar, and rubbing the dog’s nose in soiled areas.

Indirect confrontation included yelling “no”, spraying the dog with a water pistol or bottle, growling at the dog, or staring down the dog.

Non-confrontational methods included using the “Look” or “Watch Me” commands, food rewards, food-stuffed toys, use of food as a trade for an item that the dog is holding, using the “Sit” command, and clicker training.

Among the direct confrontational methods, many provoked an aggressive response (bite, snap, growl, bare the teeth, or lunge at person) from some dogs. Each of the following direct confrontational methods is listed with the percent of dogs who responded with an aggressive response: Hitting or kicking the dog, 43%; Forcibly removing something from the dog’s mouth, 38%; Muzzle use, 36%; Alpha roll, 31%; Dominance down, 29%; Grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck, 26%; Forcing the dog down with a leash, 17%; Choke or pinch collar, 11%; Shock collar, 10%.

Indirect confrontational methods also provoked aggressive responses from some dogs. Each of the following indirect confrontational methods is listed with the percent of dogs who responded with an aggressive response: Growl at dog, 41%; Stare down the dog, 30%; Water pistol or bottle, 20%; Yelling “no”, 15%.

Among the non-confrontational methods, the percent of dogs responding with aggression ranged from 0-6%. The highest aggressive response was when food was used as a trade for an object that the dog was holding (6%). Using the “Look” or “Watch Me” commands and using clicker training showed a 0% aggressive response, while using food rewards, the “Sit” command, and food-stuffed toys each had a 2% aggressive response.

The results of this survey show that using aggressive methods on a dog can result in an aggressive response. Some of this might be aggression as a result of fear on the part of the dog. An earlier study published in 2007 reported that using punishment in training dogs can give rise to fear-related responses (Blackwell et al. 2007. The relationship between training methods and the occurrence of behaviour problems in a population of domestic dogs. In: Proceedings of the 6^th International Veterinary Behaviour Meeting, Fondazione Iniziative Zooprofilattiche e Zootecniche, Brescia, Italy, pp. 51-52).

Interestingly enough, the dog owners were asked in the survey where they learned about the methods that they used.

Many owners reported that they learned about the direct confrontation methods from dog trainers. The percent of owners who learned about these methods from trainers is as follows: Force dog down with a leash, 70%; Choke or pinch collar, 66%; Leash correction, 50%; Knee dog in the chest for jumping, 31%; Bark-activated shock collar, 40%; Remote-activated shock collar, 29%.

Use of many of the non-confrontational methods fell into the category that the authors of the survey called “Self,” in other words, the owners thought of using these methods themselves, without any recommendations from anyone. The percent of owners who fell into the “Self” category for the different non-confrontational methods are as follows: Using food to trade for an item held by the dog, 63%; Food rewards, 56%; Using the “Sit” command, 54%; Food-stuffed toys, 54%; “Look” or “Watch Me” commands, 34%; Clicker training, 23%. However, between 31 and 60 percent of the owners reported that these methods were also recommended by dog trainers.

The value of this study is that it presents quantitative data showing that rewards work better than punishment in training dogs.

Let’s say that you are constantly exposed to someone who yells at you, can hit or kick you at any moment, hurts you, and generally scares you much of the time. Would you be willing and happy to do things for that person? If you answered “No,” then why should we expect dogs to be any different?

--Con Slobodchikoff

Alternative Ways To Train Dogs

In my dog training classes, I use a combination of operant conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning to train the participants. Operant conditioning involves reinforcement for a correct behavior or response, and Pavlovian conditioning involves pairing two stimuli together so that the dog learns to link the two in her mind. For example, when I say “Sit” and the dog sits, she gets a reward, either as a food treat or as praise. The sitting part and the reward are operant conditioning. And when I pair the word “Sit” with a hand signal for “Sit,” that is Pavlovian conditioning. This has been a tried and true method for training dogs.

However, there might be other ways of training dogs. In an article published in 2003, S. McKinley and R. J. Young tried training dogs with the model-rival method (McKinley, S. and R. J. Young. 2003. The efficacy of the model-rival method when compared with operant conditioning for training domestic dogs to perform a retrieval-selection task. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 81: 357-365). The model-rival method has been used extensively by Irene Pepperberg in training her African Grey Parrot Alex to learn to recognize different shapes and different colors, and to say the names of those shapes and colors when he was asked about them.

The basic method of the model-rival technique involves two people talking about an object in the presence of the animal. One person asks the other some question about the object, and the other person answers and is given the object if the answer is correct. Meanwhile, the animal observes the interaction. Then the animal is asked to join in by providing the correct answer.

In the case of dogs, the two experimenters compared the results of using operant conditioning and using the model-rival technique in training 6 male and 3 female dogs to retrieve an object that had a distinct name. In the model-rival part of the experiment, rubber toys that had a similar appearance were used. There were three red rubber toys (a boot, a fire extinguisher, and a strawberry) and three yellow rubber toys (a saxophone, a toothbrush, and a hammer). The experimenters chose a toy at random, and if it was a red one, they called it “Socks,” and if it was a yellow one, they called it “Cross.” Then, while a dog was tethered on a leash 0.5 meters (1.5 feet) away from them, the two experimenters had a conversation along these lines: “Can you see the Socks?” (handing the toy to the other person). “Yes, these are great Socks,” (handing the toy back), and so forth for 2 minutes. Then the dog was told, “Go get the Socks,” and the dog had to go and retrieve the object that the experimenters had called Socks, from among the other two similar toys that did not have any labels.

In the operant conditioning part of the experiment, the dogs were trained to retrieve a single toy whose name was given, when no other toys were available. Here the experimenters used the standard tool of shaping, or rewarding the dog at first if she came close to the object, and then later rewarding the dog for touching the object, and eventually only rewarding the dog for retrieving the object.

The experimenters found that the dogs on average learned to bring back the correct toy in the model-rival method as quickly as they learned to retrieve the toy with the operant conditioning method.

Another article published in 2008 repeated these studies, and extended them somewhat (Cracknell, N. R., D. S. Mills, and P. Kaulfuss. 2008. Can stimulus enhancement explain the apparent success of the model-rival technique in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)? Applied Animal Behaviour Science 114: 461-472). In addition to using the model-rival technique, these experimenters used a technique called direct enhancement, in which one person held the correct object in her hands and kept looking at it, while the other person spent the whole time looking at the dog. This study confirmed that the model-rival method worked well in training dogs to retrieve objects, but also found that the direct enhancement method, where the experimenter spent the time looking at the object, worked as well as the model-rival technique.

What these results show is that there may be other ways to train dogs. Some of these ways might be better than what we are using today. In the model-rival method, the dogs actually learned the labels that were given to the objects that they were expected to retrieve. With operant conditioning, it is not clear that they learned the labels for the objects, or simply learned that a particular word (e.g., Socks) stood for a food reward that they were given at the conclusion of their task.

These kinds of experiments suggest that dogs might be learning much more from us than we have given them credit for. Our theories about animal learning mostly come from laboratory rats that live their entire lives in cages. But our dogs are social, interacting creatures living in a rich world of experience, and it may well be that we have just begun to scratch the surface of their abilities to learn from us.

--Con Slobodchikoff