From a young age, we’ve always been told to trust our instincts but a new study has found that perhaps we should be trusting our pup’s instincts instead!
If you own a dog, chances are you’ve had your suspicions about this. Maybe your dog’s gone off at a dodgy looking passerby or a strange person knocking on your door. We know that they are instinctive in so many other ways so it would only make sense that they could sense things about other people that we might miss.
Research published in a the journal of Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews has shown that dogs are actually capable of recognizing whether or not someone is a nice person. More specifically, they can tell whether a person is being horrible to another human.
Based on this information, they can then decide how to react to someone.
The research was gathered from a study that asked dog owners to act out different scenarios while their dogs watched them.
In one scenario, the owners were asked to pretend to struggle to open a container. In one instance, one researcher stood passively and another researcher helped them open it. After that, one researcher remained passive and the other refused to help.
Once the scenarios had both played out the researchers were then asked to offer the dog a treat. It was found that the dog would take the treat from the two researchers in the first scenario but many refused to take the treat from the ‘rude’ researchers from the second round.
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The researchers concluded from these set of experiments that dogs are able to tell the nice from the not-so-nice and act accordingly.
So maybe from now on we should take their advice and steer clear of people they act funnily around and it could save us the hassle of finding out they suck for ourselves.
