DOGS PLAY WITH MATES TO MAKE OWNERS HAPPY: STUDY

Mon 15 February 2021:

Pet dogs are far more likely to play with one another when their owner is present and being attentive, according to a new study, raising the intriguing possibility that they are putting on a show for their owners’ benefit.

That our canine companions are keenly attuned to the level of interest humans are showing them is well established, Lindsay Mehrkam, an animal behaviorist and lead author of the paper that appeared in Animal Cognition, told AFP.

“But we weren’t aware of any research that has really shown the effect of a human audience impacting species typical behavior, in this case dog-dog play,” she added. Mehrkam oversaw an experiment involving 10 pairs of pet dogs that had lived together for at least six months. The duos ordinarily engaged in play at least once a day, according to their owners.

The researchers videotaped the dog pairs under three conditions: where the owner was absent, where the owner was present but ignoring them, and where the owner was present and showering them with attention in the form of verbal praise and petting. To ensure the experiment was robust, they ran each of the conditions three times over the course of several days.

Mehrkam found that the availability of owner attention did in fact facilitate play, and human attention increased both the frequency and intensity of behaviors like bowing, hip nudges, wrestling, chasing, gentle bites and so on.

“It’s really quite striking that dogs who have the chance to play with each other whenever they want to, nonetheless are much more likely to get up off their butts and start playing when a person is just paying attention to them,” said co-author Clive Wynne of Arizona State University.

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