Good Judge of Character?

People have said for generations that dogs are good judges of character, and now there is scientific evidence to back it up. After living with man for more than 10,000 years and as avid observers of human behavior, our dogs have become quite skilled at evaluating their human counterparts. Akiko Takaoka, Ph.D. of Kyoto University in Japan, recently published an article in the journal Animal Cognition, that studied twenty four dogs shown containers under which a treat was placed. In the next round, the treat was moved to another container, but the humans indicated to the dogs that it remained under the original container. During the third round, the morsel was moved to yet a third container although the humans continued to indicate it existed under the first container, as in the first round. The dogs quickly lost confidence that the human was offering good direction with only 8% of the dogs checking under the original container for the reward. “These results suggest that not only are dogs highly skilled at understanding human pointing gestures but also that they make inferences about the reliability of humans who present cues and consequently modify their behavior flexibly depending on the inference,” says Takaoka. Similar studies conducted with human children indicate that they develop this skill at about age 5. Dogs are often said to have the intelligence of a 2-3-year-old human, but modern research is beginning to disprove this theory. This study is one example. Another study a Kyoto showed how dogs “snubbed” humans that were rude or aggressive toward their humans, again indicating a lack of trust. Since the dogs in these studies quickly evaluated the dependency of the human, you can clearly understand why it seems our dogs can make such snap judgments when meeting strangers for the first time. Dogs clearly understand the human body language making it even more important that we keep it in mind when greeting new dogs. You would clearly hate to meet your soul mate and be met with a bad review from their dog!