Study involved an apparatus that looks like a wooden telephone booth with a door consisting of a clear Plexiglas panel that ran top to bottom and the width of the booth.
New Delhi, January 27, 2020: Whether your mutt has ability to sense your emotions like happiness and distress or not is still a matter of research. To find this a team of researchers headed by Fabricio Carballo of the Canine Behavior Research Group at the University of Buenos Aires Institute of Medical Research in Argentina decided to experimentally test whether dogs would recognize when their owners were in distress and if they would then make some attempt to rescue them.
The study
According to Psychology Today the basic setup for this study involved an apparatus that looks like a wooden telephone booth with a door consisting of a clear Plexiglas panel that ran top to bottom and the width of the booth. The door could be closed and held in place by a round stone weighing about three pounds (1.5 kg). There was a small gap at the place where the door closed which would allow a dog to insert a paw or its muzzle in order to push the door open. The idea was that in one test condition the dog’s owner would be placed in the booth and would act in a distressed manner (for example, screaming, pretending to cry, hitting the walls of the booth and so forth).
The second group of dogs was presented with their owner seated in the booth reading. In this calm condition, the owners were operating under instructions not to pay any attention to the dog, and they were forbidden to call the dog or interact in any way. The question: When dogs see their owner apparently suffering, will they attempt to free them from the booth by rolling the stone away or attempting to pry the door open in some manner to allow him or her to escape.
In the main part of the study, the dogs were simply pet dogs, who had lived with their owner for at least a year and had received no formal obedience schooling. In addition, to see if training made a difference an additional group of dogs that had been trained for search and rescue was also tested in the situation where their owner appeared to be in distress. Each dog was tested in only one condition (although this condition was repeated three times).
Fifty-Fifty Chance
The main results showed that you have a fifty-fifty chance of having your dog rescue you if he sees that you are in distress since a median of 50% of the dogs on any given test trial actually opened the door and let their owner out. Compare that to only 12% of the dogs opening the door to free their owner when they were sitting calmly in the booth. Dogs who had been trained to do search and rescue work did somewhat better, freeing their owner a median of 70% of the time.
If we look at the times that it took for the dog to open the door to their owner we find that when the owner was acting stressed it took the dogs around 75 seconds to free them, and for those few dogs who freed their owner when they were calm, they took a longer period of time to decide to do anything (averaging around 107 seconds). For the search and rescue trained dogs, when they responded they were very fast, taking only 45 seconds to release their owner.
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