{"id":1745,"date":"2012-11-16T06:28:50","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T19:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/?p=1745"},"modified":"2021-08-02T17:39:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-02T07:09:11","slug":"research-finds-hungry-dogs-are-hungry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/research-dogs-and-politics\/research-finds-hungry-dogs-are-hungry\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Finds: Hungry Dogs are Hungry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some Thoughts About Dogs welcomes guest blogger Michael D Anderson from NerdWallet<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo \u00a9 Ruthless Photos.<\/p><\/div>\n

Biologists at the University of Vienna published a study last month about dogs\u2019 temperament in relation to their owners. The study hypothesized that without their owners, dogs would be more likely to view ambiguous events as negative ones. This is a common feature of human cognition \u2013 you\u2019ll often hear that depressed people \u201csee the glass as half-empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

The abstract of the study is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Vienna researchers found that, unlike in humans, when presented with ambiguous stimuli, dogs don\u2019t have a negative judgment bias when they\u2019re in distress. This is a jargon-loaded, awkward way of generalizing on the following: These scientists found that, when hungry, dogs don\u2019t become emotional if their owners are absent\u2014they go right to the bowl of food because, following one of the experiment\u2019s stipulations, these dogs hadn\u2019t eaten in at least three hours.<\/p>\n

Experimenters measured how long it took each of 24 dogs to approach a bowl\u2014the study had initially included 32 animals, but the scientists decided to exclude dogs that had unusually extreme separation anxiety.<\/p>\n

In training\u2014before the two testing days\u2014the biologists conditioned the dogs to identify one side of the testing room as positive\u2014where a bowl had food\u2014and the other side as negative\u2014where a bowl was empty.<\/p>\n

On testing days, they refreshed dog’s memories about the room, but then they changed up locations a bit. They established near-negative (i.e. closer to the original negative location), middle and near-positive locations. At the beginning of each test, they approached one of these new locations with a bowl.<\/p>\n

The experimenters then tested for \u201clatency,\u201d or long it took the dogs to approach the bowl, when the owner was present and when he or she was absent. The owner, they said, had an effect. The dogs took longer to approach the near-negative location and shorter to approach the near-positive; in tests without the owner, they approached at the same rate to each respective location.<\/p>\n

What I don’t understand is how the biologists so tightly connect dogs\u2019 approach to food\u2014which they measure as \u201clatency\u201d\u2014to their mood. The idea, I think, was that dogs should take longer to approach a bowl\u2014even if the location is near-positive\u2014when the owner isn’t there. The idea is that the dog is distressed without the owner around\u2014they\u2019ll start barking, toileting, or whatever else instead of going right to the bowl.<\/p>\n

But these dogs were hungry: as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, owners were asked not to feed their dogs in the 3 hours before the study.<\/p>\n

The whole premise of this experiment is odd. What they pose is that dogs are less temperamental than humans: emotional distress or not, they\u2019ll logically discern where the food is. What I think they meant to ask is whether or not dogs behave any different after domestication: Are they still primal? The answer, I think, didn\u2019t even require extensive experiments: yes, they\u2019re hungry, owner be damned.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Further reading:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnimal Behaviour: Cognitive Bias and Affective State\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBias in Interpretation of Ambiguous Sentences Related to Threat in Anxiety\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cDogs Showing Separation-Related Behavior Exhibit a \u2018Pessimistic\u2019 Cognitive Bias\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This article comes from <\/em>NerdWallet<\/em><\/a>, a consumer-focused, analysis-driven website dedicated to dissecting the data behind the story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biologists at the University of Vienna published a study last month about dogs\u2019 temperament in relation to their owners. The study hypothesized that without their owners, dogs would be more likely to view ambiguous events as negative ones. The Vienna researchers found that, unlike in humans, when presented with ambiguous stimuli, dogs don\u2019t have a negative judgment bias when they\u2019re in distress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[12,511,510,509,11,512,513,203,514,515,249,154,152],"class_list":["post-1745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-dogs-and-politics","tag-dog","tag-dog-emotions","tag-dog-research","tag-dog-science","tag-dogs","tag-emotion","tag-emotions","tag-experiment","tag-guest-blog","tag-guest-blogging","tag-guest-post","tag-research","tag-science"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1745"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1756,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions\/1756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leemakennels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}