Dogs sense who is a good and who is a bad person: interesting scientific research

Have you ever noticed your dog behaving strangely around certain people? Maybe he senses something you have no idea about? Here's the explanation!

The relationship of dogs to humans has been the subject of much research throughout history. An experiment carried out about a year ago showed that dogs also have moral standards and can distinguish between inappropriate behaviour and kind, helpful treatment. Maybe dogs can sense things that we humans can’t.

A lie has no legs

Akiko Takaoka, a senior researcher at Kyoto University, organised a three-step experiment involving 34 dogs and their owners. The humans were asked to point to a plate of food in the presence of their dogs, which the pets happily ran to.

Of course, they were delighted with the tasty treats, but then came the second round, the black pudding. This time, the empty bowls were replaced with empty ones. And the familiar hand signal was used to send the dogs back to them.

The dogs were visibly frustrated and disappointed, not understanding why they had been deceived by their owner.

In the third round, empty bowls were also placed at the other end of the room. But the dogs refused to run to the bowls even at the hand signals of their owners. Cognitive dissonance (i.e. internal tension triggered by new information that contradicted their previous experience) was caused by their two-legged friends’ failure to use the forward gesture consistently, and their distrust of being disappointed again.

Where does this behavior come from?

Akiko revealed that he would like to do the same experiment with wolves in the near future. Because he is curious to see if this is a learned pattern from humans in dogs or an instinctive reaction.

A previous experiment has already shown that dogs also sniff at people who mistreat their beloved owners. In the staged scene, the owner was trying to retrieve an object from a transparent box, with a passive participant sitting next to him doing nothing. In one scene, the third ‘actor’ helped the dog’s owner to retrieve the object. And in the other, the fourth turned away visibly, scowled and did not help.

All three actors then attempted to give a reward treat to the dogs in the experiment, many of whom refused to take it from the boorish character. They were happy to take it from the sidekick and the helper.

The dog smell bad intent

Because a dog’s nose is more sensitive than a human’s, it can pick up valuable information from the presence of pheromones and odours that we can’t even smell. You’ve probably noticed that when someone is nervous, the smell of their sweat is much more intense than usual. When you’re in a bad mood, you usually sweat through the apocrine glands. And these bodily fluids are more quickly broken down and contaminated due to their alkaline chemistry.

This causes the unpleasant body odour, to which a dog with a stronger hunting instinct may react like a shark to blood, i.e. it may be aggressive.