Dogs also don’t like people who treat us badly and act accordingly. A recent research carried out by the University of Kyoto (Japan) has concluded that our faithful friends are even capable of rejecting food offered by people with whom their owners no longer have a relationship or who they see as “mistreating” their owner. This capacity for social cooperation is found in a very small number of species including humans and some primates .
For their experiment, the scientists, led by Kazuo Fujita, tested 18 dogs divided into three different groups with various games in which the owner of the dog would be accompanied by two people whom the dog did not know . In the first group, the dog owner sought the help of one of the two people and the two actively refused to lend it to him. In the second group, the dog owner was helped by one of the people. In the third group, the owner of the dog did not interact with anyone as a control group.
After this scene, the two unknown people for each dog offered food to the pet. This is what happened:
The dogs whose owners had been helped certainly accepted the snacks.
Dogs whose owners had been denied help flatly refused food.
The control group dogs accepted the food without fuss.
“We have discovered for the first time that dogs make a social and emotional evaluation of the people around their owner, even influencing something related to their direct interest,” explains Fujita. And it is that if the dogs had been guided by their own interest, all of them would have accepted the food without any exception. ” This ability is one of the key factors in building a highly collaborative society , and this study shows that dogs share that sympathy with humans,” concludes Fujita.
The research has been published in the journal Animal Behavior.
