If a person who snubbed you offers food to your dog, your dog will refuse to eat it. Or so say Japanese researchers who studied social cooperation in canines. They set up a test in which a dog’s owner asked another person for help opening a box. The dog was able to see whether or not the person helped its owner.
Dogs that saw their owner being rebuffed were far more likely to choose food from the neutral observer, and to ignore the offer from the person who had refused to help, Fujita said on Friday.
Dogs whose owners were helped and dogs whose owners did not interact with either person showed no marked preference for accepting snacks from the strangers.
“We discovered for the first time that dogs make social and emotional evaluations of people regardless of their direct interest,” [Kazuo Fujita, a professor of comparative cognition at Kyoto University] said.
Image: “Don’t make fun of my slobber. It’s a medical condition.” Shutterstock