Go get help, Lassie!

Would your pal run for help to save Timmy from the well?

Usually the title of a scientific paper leaves people without the appropriate Ph.D. scratching their heads in puzzlement. “Timmy’s in the Well” is an exception.

Yes, the reference is to a mythical episode of the Lassie TV show. Timmy never did fall down a well, although Lassie did.

This new scientific report questions whether dogs would help, or not help, their owners. And the research was, of course, inspired by a collie.

Julia Meyers-Manor, who studies animal behavior and cognition, had some experiments going on investigating empathy in rats that were running into some difficulties when she ran into a difficulty of her own.

“My children had buried me in a pile of pillows and I started calling out for help to my husband, who did not come to my aid.”

Her collie, however, came at a run and started digging her out.

Aha, she wondered, why not use dogs and people instead of rats to study animal empathy? The people would cry for help and the dogs would, or would not, respond.

She discussed the idea with Emily Sanford, then an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where Meyers-Manor was then teaching. They designed an experiment.

No one really doubted that dogs show some kind of concern or empathy for human distress. As the abstract for the paper states: “Dogs are thought to evaluate humans’ emotional states, and attend more to crying people than to humming people.”

The question was whether they would act to help a person in distress. Thus the scientific-sounding rest of the title of the article, which was published July 23 by the journal Learning and Behavior: “Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs.” (A link is at arkansasonline.com/806dog.)

In earlier studies that have found evidence of dogs’ empathy, researchers have documented that dogs show signs of distress, including higher stress hormone levels, when listen-