Dogs overcome obstacles to aid owners

Anyone who watched the long-running TV show “Lassie” or the movie “Benji” knows that no barrier could stop those dogs from helping their humans.

It turns out there’s some fact to that fiction.

That’s the conclusion of a recently published study called — in a nod to Lassie — “Timmy’s in the Well: Empathy and Prosocial Helping in Dogs,” co-authored by a now-Johns Hopkins University graduate student.

Many dog owners have a story about their dog comforting or coming to aid them or even a stranger in a time of need. A Google search of “dog helps human” turns up hundreds of millions of hits.

But the new study takes what’s known about canine empathy another step and suggests that not only will dogs try to help, they will overcome obstacles to do it. The study furthers the science on the bond between dogs and humans but also could lead to better animal models for research into human disorders.

In their experiment, researchers wanted to devise an obstacle that was a true barrier but not too confusing or too hard to overcome.

They placed dogs on one side of a see-through door from their owners and had the owners alternately cry or hum “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” The dogs could see and hear them. About half the dogs came through the door, attached with magnets, but they came four times faster when their owner cried.

There was no difference among breeds, and the study’s 34 test subjects in- cluded everything from golden and Labrador retrievers to Shih Tzus and pugs.