Dogs Decoded

My family and I watched a Nova show: Dogs Decoded.

According to the show, dog owners live longer than non-owners. Of course, this is correlation, not causation, but causation is possible, and owing a dog is fun.

Some researchers have examined animals' ability to track human eye and finger gestures. The first animals mentioned were chimpanzees, the animal most similar to humans in terms of DNA sequences. A treat was placed under one of two opaque cups and presented to a chimp. A human would point, or look at, or both, the cup with the treat. The chimps paid no attention to these signals. Dogs, however, did.

The show described attempts to domesticate wolves, the animal believed to have DNA most similar to dogs. The wolves were removed from the mother at birth and fed and raised in a human home. After about eight months the wolves became too aggressive to live with. Or, rather, their aggressiveness did not diminish and they became too large to live with safely.

The show then described attempts to domesticate foxes. Adult foxes were selected based on their initial contacts with humans. Some react fearfully, some aggressively, some with curiosity. The curious foxes were bred with each other and, after eight generations (eight years) the researchers had foxes that were perfectly suited to live in a human home. These foxes also developed some of the physical traits of dogs: their legs were shorter and their tails curlier than standard foxes.

Dogs were described as having intelligence beyond our common assumptions but did not list any research to back this claim. It did, however, recount the activities of a particular dog. The dog was placed in one room and several dozen stuffed toys in another. The subject dog was verbally instructed to retrieve a particular toy, and did so. Fair enough, not so impressive. Then the dog was shown a smaller version of a particular toy; this dog went to the other room and retrieved the full-size version. Pretty neat. Then this dog was shown a picture of a particular toy; that toy was retrieved. That, I thought, was pretty impressive.