A new study has found that dogs can identify unreliable and bad persons from good and trustworthy ones.
The study conducted by Akiko Takaoka and his team from Kyoto University, Japan, aimed to know more about dogs’ behavior and find out if they would trust an untrustworthy person who lied to them.
The research, which comprised 34 participant dogs and their owners, was divided into three parts.
In the first part, the dog owners pointed to containers with food at the meal time of their dogs. The animals ran toward the containers and devoured the food.
However, in the second part of the study, the owners tricked the dogs by pointing to empty containers.
And when the owners pointed again in the third part of the study, neither of the 34 participant dogs followed the pointing hand.
The study, published in the Animal Cognition Journal, concluded that dogs use their previous experiences to interpret the situations and decide if someone is trustworthy or unreliable.
Although the study provides an incredible insight into dogs’ behavior, it’s not the first one to do so and several previous studies have concluded somewhat similar things.
It has been proved that dogs are extremely intelligent. They can not only read our facial expressions and gestures but can also decipher them to decide if they want to follow our social clues.
A study published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews journal found how dogs could clearly interpret the interaction between their owners and strangers. The participant dogs behaved well with ‘good’ strangers and avoid the persons who acted rudely with their owners.
In another interesting experiment, dog owners asked for help from random strangers who later tried to give their dogs a treat. And the findings surprised everyone!
Neither of the participant dogs accepted the treat from the people who mistreated their owners.
The dogs even accepted treats from the strangers who did nothing in response to their owners’ begging, but the people who were aggressive and rude couldn’t earn their trust.