As soon as you have ever interacted with a dog, you will know that these animals have an amazing ability to communicate with us. What’s more, this characteristic may even have a genetic origin and don’t require much experience or prior training , according to a study just published in the journal Current Biology .
“We have shown that dog puppies respond to the human social gaze and successfully use the information provided by a human being in a social context from a very early age and even before having a lot of contact with people,” explains the University researcher from Arizona and study author Emily E. Bray. “For example, even before puppies leave their littermates to go live with breeders, most are able to find hidden food by following the directions of a human .”
In addition, the work showed that more than 40% of the variation in a puppy’s ability to follow the signals of a human finger can be explained by genetic inheritance. “This is a very high number, similar to estimates of intelligence heritability within our own species,” Bray noted.
Does biology explain the ability to communicate?
To try to answer this question, the researchers used data from hundreds of dogs at an early age. They all had a very similar breeding history and a known pedigree dating back several generations. To explore the puppies’ abilities, the scientists tested 375 puppies for eight weeks. Since they knew the degree of kinship between the animals, they could use this information to build a statistical model that evaluated genetic versus environmental factors.
The results revealed that when we talk about forms of communication that include gestures and eye contact, puppies are very skilled from an early age. However, such communication only worked when the people also started the interaction by speaking to the puppies in a high-pitched voice.
“From a young age, dogs show social skills similar to those of humans, which have a strong genetic component, which means that these skills have great potential to undergo selection,” explains the author. “Therefore, our findings could point to an important part of the history of domestication, in the sense that animals with a propensity to communicate with our own species could have been selected in the wolf populations that gave rise to the wolves. dogs”.
Bray says the next step is to see if they can identify some of the specific genes that contribute to these behaviors. They are currently collecting cognitive data and blood samples from adult dogs and plan to conduct a genome-wide association study, with the goal of identifying genetic markers associated with these social behaviors. They will also track the results of the dogs tested in the service dog program to see if performance on any of the social tasks tested at eight weeks predicts successful graduation as a service dog. In addition to understanding genetics, they also hope to explore how different aspects of a dog’s early environment might influence its cognitive and social abilities.
