For any Dog or animal lover, it is very annoying when people make fun or disbelieve the fact that they can actually communicate. They think that the owners are nuts and peculiarly blabbering with their pets.
But now, recent research on puppies suggests that they can actually communicate with humans and that this ability is maybe with them from a very young age. This means, while you can train your dogs for better response, their basic ability to respond to your gestures is present with them right from the start.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona who tried to understand the dogs’ ‘social communication’ skills with humans.
About 375 eight-week-old puppies performed a series of tasks designed to measure the same. There were 98 Labrador retrievers, 23 golden retrievers and 254 Labrador golden crosses from 117 different litters. All had an extremely similar rearing history and a known pedigree dating back to multiple generations. Also, these puppies had little prior experience of human interaction.
For example, the puppies were required to find a treat hidden under overturned cups when a researcher pointed to it. The dogs were successfully able to do it even when the odor was masked to make sure that they were not following their sense to do the task.
Likewise, for another task, the researchers tried initiating an interaction by speaking in ‘dog-directed speech’ using a high-pitched voice. The response was measured in terms of how long the puppies held gaze with humans.
The dogs were also given any random direction but they did not look at people for answers when food was locked in a container. This suggested that these puppies may have the capability to respond to human direction.
And as hypothetically expected, all the 375 puppies observed under this experiment were able to do at least one task suggesting that it is compatible with social communication using gestures and eye control since the very start.
Also, read: 5 Benefits Of Dogs And Children Growing Up Together
As a result, a team of researchers led by Dr. Emily Bray suggests that dogs are born with human-like social skills which allow them to communicate with people right from the start. Even puppies can listen to people by following cues such as pointing gestures. However, it takes a bit longer for dogs to communicate back.
Even genetics play an important role in these abilities in them and the researchers saw a 40 percent variation of capability in the different breed.