Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [144]
Dogs who often wind up being called people dogs for their keen interest in owners over dogs.
Spelling the word instead of saying it is, of course, usually futile. Dogs can also learn the connection between the cadence of a spelled word and a subsequent walk, even if the latter does not immediately follow the former. On the other hand, used in an unlikely context—say, sitting in the bath—the spelled word will not evoke much interest. Chances are slim you're about to up and take a walk when naked and sudsy.
While dogs may in fact distinguish between people behaving subtly differently, one suspects that anyone using their dogs this way might be susceptible to what psychologists call confirmation bias: noticing just that part of their dog's response that supports their own theories about the person. Does the gentleman seem a bit untrustworthy to you? And yes, look how your dog growled at him once: that settles it. Dogs become amplifiers of our own beliefs; we can attribute to them that which we think ourselves.
Dogs have a preference for novel objects—neophilia. One study found that when asked to retrieve an unspecified toy from a pile of familiar and new toys, dogs spontaneously chose the new toys over three-quarters of the time. This penchant for the new might explain why when two dogs carrying sticks meet in a park, they often simultaneously drop the stick they've been proudly toting around in order to try to grab the pride of the approaching dog.
The dogs' ambivalence about the scent trail may at first seem surprising, given all our talk about their olfactory skills. But simply being able to smell a trail doesn't mean that they use this ability all the time. Often dogs need to be trained to be attentive to particular scents.
My favorite example of the child's overimitation comes from an experiment that psychologist Andrew Whiten and his colleagues ran using a locked box with a tempting piece of candy inside. They were curious if three-to five-year-old children could imitate the particular means experimenters demonstrated to unlock the box (involving twisting out rods fit through barrel openings). The children watched, captivated, and were then handed the re-locked box. Whiten found that the children almost all imitated—and the youngest children over imitated—twisting the rod not two or three but sometimes hundreds of times before pulling it out. What they did not yet understand was exactly what part of the (twisting) means was necessary to get the (candy-yielding) end.
Given the importance of regular visual assurances that the game is still a game, it is perhaps not surprising that successful three-way rough-and-tumble play is much rarer than play between two dogs. As with conversation, something is missed—a play signal here, an attention-getter there—when everyone is speaking at once. Typically, only dogs familiar with each other pull off threesomes.
Another indication of the dog's perception of fairness comes from a new experiment demonstrating that dogs who see another dog getting a reward for doing an act—shaking a paw on command—but who do not themselves get rewarded for the same act eventually refuse to shake anymore. (No rewarded dog was moved by the clear injustice of the situation to share his earned bounty with his unlucky partner, though …)
As when she spent a quarter hour digging a hole in which to drop a treasured rawhide chew, but in digging actually created more of a pile than a hole: the result