![]() "When my children were 2 or 3 years old, they wanted all of my attention. Their theory was inspired in part by Flip's behavior at home, which struck Csányi as uncannily familiar. Human owners and their dogs, they theorized, formed bonds in the same way-growing close through a process that mimicked that of a human parent and child. ![]() ![]() As ethologists, they were familiar with the extensive scientific literature on "attachment," the process by which parents and children of different species formed lasting emotional bonds. Establishing a specific social relationship with another species is quite challenging."Ĭsányi and Miklósi decided to examine the process by which humans and dogs forge strong emotional bonds. "Dogs are smart enough to survive in a human family, which is actually a quite complicated task," recalls Miklósi. The ability of canines to insinuate themselves successfully into the lives of their human owners seemed like an amazing feat of evolutionary magic. Flashpop/Getty Chad Latta/Gettyįlip seemed to be living proof that the conventional wisdom about dogs-that they were unintelligent-was wrong. What was it about this "fuzzy male of low stature, surely a mixed breed," Csányi wondered, that made him so magnetic?įrom left, a disinterested Chihuahua and a mastiff. Flip quickly became an indispensable member of the household and won over all their friends and family. Flip, as they called him, was white and brown and had stumpy legs and resembled an Ewok, a cute furry biped from Star Wars. The dog followed them for five miles through the snow before Csányi picked him up and carried him the rest of the way home. The implication was that the dogs were stupid.Īll that changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, thanks to a series of groundbreaking experiments by ethologists Vilmos Csányi and Ádám Miklósi and their collaborators at Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University.Ĭsányi and his wife were hiking one winter in the Hungarian mountains and stopped to pet a particularly gregarious stray. In a famous 1985 experiment, University of Michigan researchers found that wolves could unlock a gate mechanism after watching a human do so, but domesticated dogs didn't seem to get it. This attitude was driven in part by the mistaken belief that domestication had dumbed dogs down. Scientists who study animals have tended to turn their noses up at dog cognition. They confide their deepest secrets, rearrange vacation schedules to accommodate their idiosyncrasies and shower them with gifts and luxuries such as dog houses and rawhide. alone is home to an estimated 90 million pooches (roughly one for every four Americans), many of whom have owners who treat them like mini people, dressing them in raincoats, sweaters and booties (the global pet clothing market topped $5.2 billion in 2021). Humans have been domesticating dogs for at least 32,000 years-more than 10,000 years longer than horses. Tiffany Kelly/Noble Soul Photography/Getty Flashpop/Getty Dogs Are No Dummies The new dog science is also addressing the issue most prominently on the minds of Bern and dog owners everywhere: Does my dog really love me?įrom left, an elder Chihuahua and fluffy pup with a human. They're able to read and assess human emotions with great accuracy, can understand some language and are even capable of making rudimentary signals. ![]() Over the millennia, they have evolved to be cooperative animals, endowed with the neural machinery to understand abstract ideas and complex social dynamics. Far from being dumb creatures with good noses, as previously thought, they're actually smart in specific ways that make them ideal human collaborators and companions. The insights emerging are confirming things many dogs owners have long suspected and are fundamentally changing what scientists thought they knew about dogs. A new international consortium called the ManyDogs Project, with researchers in Austria, Poland, Italy, Canada, the U.S., Argentina and a number of other countries, recently completed its first major collaborative study and plans to publish it later this year. Today there are Canine Cognition labs at Yale, Duke, University of Arizona, University of Portsmouth, Barnard College, University of Florida and a wide array of leading scientific institutions around the globe-and the study of dogs in general is one of the fastest growing areas in the broader field of animal behavioral science. Read more Puppy love: Newsweek readers share adorable photos of their furry best pals
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