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LONDON: Human’s inclination to invest
dogs with human-like states of mind isn’t as unscientific as it might appear for
scientists are now suggesting that canines are becoming more intelligent and are
even learning morals.
Studies presented at the first Canine Science
Forum in Budapest, Hungary, backs the idea that the descendants of grey wolves
have become more intelligent, and even learnt a sense of right and wrong, the
New Scientist
journal
reported.
“Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity. I would prefer
not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might,” said Dr Friederike Range,
of the University of Vienna, who led the study.
Through experiments
done with children and dogs, Prof Ludwig Huber and colleagues at the University
supported the idea that dogs have a rudimentary “theory of
mind.”
During one study, dogs which held up a paw were rewarded with
a food treat.
When a lone dog was asked to raise its paw but received
no treat, the researchers found it begged for up to 30 minutes.
But
when they tested two dogs together but rewarded only one, the dog which missed
out soon stopped playing
the game.
Scientists argue that the
fact that rough-and-tumble dog play rarely escalates into full-blown fighting
shows that the animals abide by social rules and expect others to do the same.
In other words, they know right from wrong.
They possess a moral
compass too, in order to negotiate the complex social world of people, adds Prof
Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
According to
the journal, Dr Peter Pongracz from Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and
colleagues have produced evidence that dog barks contain information which
people can understand.
They found each of the different types of bark
has distinct patterns of frequency, tonality and pulsing, and that an artificial
neural network can use these features to correctly identify a bark it has never
encountered before.
This is further evidence that barking conveys
information about a dog’s mental state, reports New Scientist
magazine.
They found even people who have never owned a dog can
recognise the emotional ‘meaning’ of barks produced in various situations, such
as when playing, left alone and confronted by a stranger.
His team
has now developed a computer program that can aggregate hundreds of barks
recorded in various settings and boil them down to their basic acoustic
ingredients.
They also discovered people can correctly identify
aggregated barks as conveying happiness, loneliness or
aggression.
‘Even children from the age of six who have never had a
dog recognise these patterns,’ says Dr Pongracz.
Dogs are not just
able to ’speak’ to us–they can also understand some aspects of human
communication.
Meanwhile, Dr Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University in
Japan has described as-yet unpublished work that examined what is going on
inside a dog’s mind when it hears a stranger’s voice.
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August 21, 2008 
Medical 
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