Puppies are often trained with treats — but maybe they don’t have to be. Pups may be able to learn by mimicking people’s actions.
Some past studies have hinted at dogs’ ability to learn by observing humans, says Claudia Fugazza. She studies animal behavior at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. But past experiments used food to reward dogs when they mimicked people. So, they didn’t reveal whether dogs were natural copycats.
There’s even less known about puppies, Fugazza adds. But there’s reason to think young dogs would be especially good at copying actions. The young of all species have to learn the most. “There’s a lot to learn from observing others,” she says.
Fugazza and her team tested whether puppies and other young animals might imitate people. They rounded up 42 puppies, 39 kittens and 8 young wolves. All of these animals lived with human families. In each test, the researchers showed an animal an object. Once they got the animal’s attention, a researcher modeled an action — either touching an object with their nose or hand. Then, the scientists watched whether the animal copied the human.
It often took a while to get the attention of kittens and young wolves, Fugazza says. But “the dog puppies were basically immediately looking at the human even before we started to call their attention.” After showing the actions, cats rarely replicated what humans did. Wolves sometimes copied, but the dogs were much more reliable. The team shared its findings February 16 in Scientific Reports.
Dogs and cats have both been bred to live with humans — a process known as domestication. “Since they both evolved in a human environment, they should have the same tendency to match human actions,” Fugazza says. But cats don’t. That suggests the importance of another aspect of the animals’ history: social behavior.
Cats evolved from solitary hunters that did not work together. Once they cozied up…
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