smokerblog

Doggie Two Card Monte

To continue the dog kick I've been on lately, Harvard anthropologist, Brian Hare has conducted a study that reinforces what every dog owner already knows is true: dogs can read our minds.

Mr. Hare compared dogs' ability to react to human gestures and facial expressions with the same ability in Chimpanzees (humans' closest genetic relatives) and wolves (dogs' closest relatives). Two identical containers, one containing food, were placed next to each other. A human would gesture toward the container holding the food and record the subject's response. Dogs were most likely to choose the correct container while wolves and chimpanzees chose the correct container not much better than 50% of the time.

The test was conducted with animals of varying ages and having had varying levels of human contact. Puppies who had had little human contact still outperformed wolves who had been raised entirely by humans. This suggests that the ability to understand human cues was an important factor in the evolution of dogs from their wolfish ancestors.

But really, is there any doubt about this?