Biology News Blog- Charles Beacom

Article: Dogs may be pessimistic too

Source: University of Bristol's head of animal welfare Mike Mendi

Date: October 11, 2010

Link: Dogs may be pessimistic too

Summary:

This article regards findings about how science has found a new way of measuring emotions, particularly with dogs. Professor Mike Mendi explained that we have no way of really knowing emotions dogs are feelings because feelings are private, but says we can now use findings from human psychology research for new methods of measuring these emotions. To conduct this experiments, Mendi placed two bowls in separate corners of the room. One corner was considered the "positive side" and the other was known as the "negative" side. The positive side's bowl was filled with food and the negative side was not, and the dog's re-homing centres let the dogs know this. Mendi stated that the dogs that ran fast to the positive locations, as if expecting the positive food reward, were classed as making optimistic decisions. These dogs were interestingly enough dogs that were not left alone for a long time by their owners and also showed the least anxiety like behavior. To go along with this, it was concluded that dogs left alone by owner for an extensive amount of time turned out to be much more pessimistic.

Significance:

This article shows how the feelings of dogs can be determined by science. It also shows advances science is making in measuring dog's emotions and being able to conclude more from it. For example, the first experiment to show dogs reaction to a stimulus was when Pavlov used a bell to let dogs know it was time to eat, and after a while when the dogs heard the bell they immediately thought of food and began to salivate. This shows the advances in scientific experiments and gives thought that eventually we will actually be able to understand completely how all animals think and we can in turn learn from their thoughts as well as act off them. I feel this is going to be especially important when dealing with household pets as we as owners will be able to understand their needs and be able to not only satisfy them, but prevent them from turning "optimistic" and possibly violent.