Our actions, attitude and even the occasional glance will tell Rover a lot about what we are feeling and thinking. Try the following test to see if your pup is picking up on body language.
Test for Yourself
One of the simplest tests you can do at home is to start with two cups turned upside down. Make sure both cups smell the same by smearing a bit of CANIDAE caDog-Animated-no-offernned dog food around the rim of each. Then plop a spoon full of food under one of the cups. Do all this while your dog is out of the room. Then bring him into the room and give some sort of indication as to which cup is hiding the food.
There are many ways to use body language to direct your pup to the correct cup. The most apparent cue would be to tap the cup with the food underneath. If your dog gets that right, move to a less obvious cue – point at the proper cup. Then move on to a subtler indication by simply cocking your head in the direction of the cup with food. When he nails that, don’t even tilt your head but simply look at the correct cup. You may be surprised at how well your dog reads your body language, even when it’s incredibly subtle.
The Experts
Daniel J. Povinelli, a psychologist at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, conducted this same experiment with chimpanzees and found that at first they were not very good at reading human social cues. To add depth to his study, Povinelli ran the same test with three-year-old kids. While better than our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, young children were also not very good at this initially. Both the chimps and the children, however, learned to read the correct cues quickly.
Robert Hare and a team of researchers at Harvard University conducted this same test on dogs and there it was: dogs were able to instantly interpret the human’s body language four times better than the chimps and more than twice as well as the three-year-olds – even if the human was a complete stranger.
If has been theorized that our canine friends develop this talent while in the wild, when the livelihood of a wolf packs depended on cues from one another during a hunt. Another theory has it as a learned behavior between humans and canines. Some dog lovers think of it as a psychic bond!
While experts might poo-poo these notions, the fact is that dogs do have an uncanny ability to pick-up on human body language. If you would like to read more on this subject please go to Canidae. Then study your pooch as he studies you. What is he learning from you right now?
