Puppies born ready to communicate with people
It’s in a dog’s genes to interact with humans.
In a result that won’t come as a surprise to dog lovers, US researchers have found that puppies are born with an innate ability to interact with humans.
The team studied eightweek-old puppies to see how they responded to human gestures without much (if any) training by giving 375 dogs the exact same tasks. They found that up to 40% of a puppy’s capacity to interact comes down to its genes.
“We show that puppies will reciprocate human social gaze and successfully use information given by a human in a social context from a very young age and prior to extensive experience with humans,” says Emily Bray, an animal behaviour researcher at the University of Arizona.
“For example, even before puppies have left their littermates to live one-on-one with their volunteer raisers, most of them are able to find hidden food by following a human point to the indicated location.” But this communication only seemed to work when a human initiated it; otherwise, puppies didn’t naturally look to humans to indicate how to find the food.
The study, published in
Current Biology, found that some puppies have a better innate ability to interact with humans, with 40% of the variation in following human gestures explained by inherited genes.
All of the dogs in the study were budding service dogs with a similar rearing history and known pedigrees, allowing the researchers to build a statistical model that could assess genetic factors in comparison to environmental factors. These findings add to our understanding of how dogs develop their abilities to think and problem solve, and have implications for determining what goes into making a successful service dog.
The next step is to identify specific genes contributing to the displayed behaviours – and to keep tabs on these puppies to see whether success on these early tests can predict their successful graduation into service dogs.
Bray says that their findings may also “point to an important piece of the domestication story, in that animals with a propensity for communication with our own species might have been selected for in the wolf populations that gave rise to dogs”.