Tuesday, December 16, 2008

No fair!

How often have you said that to your parents when you think another kid got more of something. Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.

Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward -- sausage, say -- they'll happily keep at it.

But if one dog gets no reward after performing and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.

Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.

"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna in Austria, who led a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."

Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.

Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs' reactions, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.

In the reward experiments reported last week in a scientific journal, Range and her colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place a paw in the hand of a researcher. It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."

Twenty-nine dogs were tested. They sat side by side in pairs with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.

The dogs were asked to shake hands, and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

When both got a reward, all was well.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that, unlike monkeys, the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals' reaction to fairness.

But Wynne also said there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."

-- Associated Press