A Man’s Best Friend. . .

March 27, 2017

• Topical

In the 16^th century Descartes said that animals were just automata. They were red-blooded machines without any of that which makes humans human – desires, wishes, and thought. Since then numerous scientific studies have thrown this opinion into doubt showing our animal friends to have more human characteristics than people used to believe.

Dog owners have long suspected that their dogs know humans better than we might suspect however, a recent study has confirmed this scientifically. A study by some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna has found that many dogs have expression discerning ability, that is they can tell if humans are happy or angry. A group of eleven dogs were exposed to digital images of women’s faces which were either angry or happy. These were displayed on a touchscreen. Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when they saw an angry face and half when they saw a happy face.

The dogs could identify both expressions yet the ones trying to identify the angry faces took longer to learn. This is probably because they were naturally apprehensive when confronted with angry expressions. The same tests were repeated with different photographs and partial images e.g. only the top of the face, or the right side. The dogs could identify the correct emotion in each case suggesting they can discern an impression from very subtle nuances. Interestingly, the researchers noted that dogs with only male owners struggled more to identify the correct emotion using the picture of a woman than those with female or mixed owners. This indicates that dogs are more adept at discerning the expressions of people who are the same gender as their owner.

Of course, clever animals should not be a surprise to us. The group rituals of animals such as elephants indicate that they grieve their dead similarly to humans. Like humans, elephants visit the graves of their lost family members for years after they have died. Aristotle wrote that the elephant was, ‘the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind’. A famous 1958 experiment showed that hungry rats would refuse to shock their littermates even when offered a food reward. This indicated that the rats had some sense of compassion or empathy with their fellow creatures. The largest brain in the world belongs to a sperm whale and the intelligence of dolphins is legendary. Scientist think that whales and dolphin have a sense of self-identity and possess the ability to suffer. However, dolphins are not only clever, they have also demonstrated compassion. For example, rescuing swimmers from shark attacks and guiding stranded whales back to deep water. This inter-species ‘love’ is unusual. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams wrote this about dolphins, and with these interesting scientific studies constantly revealing new information about the animals of the world it may well soon prove true!

On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

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