Stop Blaming the Dog
June 13, 2009 by Peggy Rowland
Filed under Pets
That “guilty look” has nothing to do with whether your dog actually committed an offense, says Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York. Her study was recently published in the “Canine Behaviour and Cognition” special issue of Behavioural Processes.
Horowitz showed that the tendency to attribute a guilty look to a canine wasn’t due to whether the dog was actually guilty. During the study, dog owners instructed their pets not to eat a forbidden treat, then they left the room.
In the end, whether the dog looked guilty had almost nothing to do with whether the dog had actually eaten the forbidden treat. Horowitz found that the dogs were merely responding to their owner’s behavior. For instance, good dogs that didn’t eat the treat were still scolded and looked guilty! The study shows that we’re a little too quick to attribute human emotions to animals.
(Image via flickr SashaW)
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