For more information on how smart dogs are, watch the video below.
Video credit: Bright Side
Dogs can recognize whether a person is trustworthy or not, science has found.
It is famously said that dogs can perceive if someone is being bad toward their owners. Turns out, dogs can actually perceive the character of a person.
In an incredible study, scientists have successfully evaluated the behavior of dogs toward an untrustworthy person by a well-designed experiment.
Dogs almost always follow the pointing gestures made by humans. However, in this study, the team of scientists wanted to take into account the reliability of the person who pointed them to something.
“Dogs are known to consistently follow human pointing gestures,” the study abstract reads.
“In this study, we asked whether dogs ‘automatically’ do this or whether they flexibly adjust their behavior depending upon the reliability of the pointer, demonstrated in an immediately preceding event.”
In the experiment, a person pointed at a container either empty or filled with a treat. Dogs would run to the container in both cases whenever someone pointed at them.
After conducting several rounds of the experiment, scientists observed that if a person frequently directed a dog to an empty container, the dog would lose trust in them and would stop responding to their gestures.
On the contrary, no dog lost trust in a person who pointed at the containers filled with a treat.
“These results suggest that not only dogs are highly skilled at understanding human pointing gestures, but also they make inferences about the reliability of a human who presents cues and consequently modify their behavior flexibly depending on the inference,” the study concluded.
Dogs are smarter than we can imagine.
Another incredible study conducted in 2017 found that dogs can tell if a person is being rude to another person. And based on their judgment, dogs will behave accordingly with a rude or a nice person.
In this study, dog owners asked two persons to help them open a jar in front of their dogs. One of them assisted while the other one rudely rejected the request.
After some time, both the persons offered treats to the dogs. Shockingly, dogs didn’t accept treats from the persons who had behaved rudely with their owners.
The study concluded that dogs “pay attention to the outcome of the interaction, evaluate how the actors behave, and make use of that information in reaching a decision about which individuals to interact with or to avoid.”
Recommended Video!
“Hero Dog Saves His Friend From Drowning In A Family Pool”