Dogs are said to be a man’s best friend, and according to new research, this might just be right. A new study has shown that dogs can feel if a person is untrustworthy, with bad intentions and they won’t act all cuddly around them. It is already a known fact that dogs are very intelligent and can learn lots of commands and communicate with their owners, but this new study by the Kyoto University of Japan went even beyond that. The experiments were conducted by Akiko Takaoka and his team and they tested if dogs could trust someone who is lying. The experiment was comprised of several test groups, so the result would be highly accurate, and it had 34 dogs as participants.
In the first round of the experiment, the team pointed to a container with dog food. The dogs ran there and expected a reward. In the second part, the dogs would run to an empty container to which the research team pointed. In this case, there was no reward waiting for them. In the final part, the team would again point to the full container, but the dog would not respond as it got misleading information in the previous round.
Dogs usually trust their owners (Credit: Victoria Standen)
The conclusion was that the dogs did not respond to in the end, because they spotted the lie. All the 34 dogs taking part in the experiment displayed the same behavior. The next step of Takaoka’s experiment will be to test this theory on wolves too, as they have common ancestors with dogs and it would be interesting to find that there is a common pattern of behavior too. Several other experiments have shown that dogs can indeed spot a bad person as they refused treats from someone rude to their owner. So, in case you have doubts about someone close to you, maybe it would be a great idea to spend some time with them and your dog, to observe its reactions towards that person.
