Dogs Say: Your Enemy Is My Enemy

by Monica Joshi

A dog is a man's best friend. They are trusting, friendly, needy and most importantly loyal. So loyal, in fact, that they don't even like the people who are mean to their owners. Japanese researchers have found that they will refuse food offered by people who have snubbed their masters.

The research, led by Kazuo Fujita, a professor of comparative cognition at Kyoto University, tested three groups of 18 dogs using role plays in which their owners needed to open a box.

The study - which appears in the science journal Animal Behaviour, to be published later this month - used three study groups. In all three groups, the owner was accompanied by two people whom the dog did not know.

In the first group, the owner sought assistance from one of the other people, who actively refused to help and showed negative expressions on their faces and in their body language.
In the second group, the owner asked for, and received, help from one person. In both groups, the third person was neutral and not involved in either helping or refusing to help. Neither person interacted with the dog’s owner in the third control group.

After watching the box-opening scene, the dog was offered food by the two unfamiliar people in the room.

Dogs that saw their owner being rebuffed were far more likely to choose food from the neutral observer, and to ignore the offer from the person who had refused to help.

The owners of those dogs who were helped and dogs whose owners did not interact with either person showed no marked preference for accepting snacks from the strangers.

With regards to the conclusions of the study, Fujita said that:

“We discovered for the first time that dogs make social and emotional evaluations of people regardless of their direct interest.”

If the dogs were acting solely out of self-interest, there would be no differences among the groups, and a roughly equal number of animals would have accepted food from each person.

The findings reveal that canines have the capacity to cooperate socially, which is a characteristic found in a relatively small number of species, including humans and some other primates.

“This ability is one of the key factors in building a highly collaborative society, and this study shows that dogs share that ability with humans.”

The research paper claims that the trait is present in children from about the age of three.

Fujita noted the interesting fact that not all primates demonstrate this behaviour:

“There is a similar study that showed tufted capuchins have this ability, but there is no evidence that chimpanzees demonstrate a preference unless there is a direct benefit to them.”

It might be interesting to see if dogs would come to their caretaker's aid if they were being purposefully hurt.