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Imitation In Dogs Matches Humans and Apes
sciencehabit writes "The next time your dog digs a hole in the backyard after watching you garden, don't punish him. He's just imitating you. A new study reveals that our canine pals are capable of copying our behavior as long as 10 minutes after it's happened. The ability is considered mentally demanding and, until this discovery, something that only humans and apes were known to do."
Stop chewing on your wife's best shoes and the dog will stop doing that too! Oh and also don't chew on the sofa cushions either.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I know i shouldn't kiss the girl that owns him
I did not copy that song! I Swear! It was my dog!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
"Doggie see, doggie do" just doesn't have the same catch as "monkey see, monkey do".
Especially the "doggie do[o]" part...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
my old dog watched me open the fridge one day, and carried on doing it and emptying the contents until a child lock was put on it
P.sure that evolution is about retention of particular traits more suited to the environment. Whether that environment is dominated by non-organic or organic processes, and whether those organic processes are floral, bestial or human, is irrelevant. So, a breeding programme is an excellent demonstration of evolution at a fast pace.
Dogs didn't evolve from wolves. Dogs were bred from wolves. There is a world of difference. And that breeding program was designed to maximize certain aspects of canine intelligence. A dog is a man-made creation that has no relation to evolutionary development. In this light, the fact that dogs exhibit mimicry while almost no other animal does is not surprising.
The difference is purely semantic. The difference is that dogs didn't evolve from wolves through natural selection, they evolved via human selection (which may still considered natural), but it's still an evolution.
So this is why I see many fat dogs lately..
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Dogs have been scrutinizing us humans for 400 centuries, so they're experts at understanding our moods and behaviors.
My cat imitates my actions, but then again he's a rare breed that has a reputation for acting more like dogs than cats. He's a Turkish Van who barks (short, loud verbalizations to get my attention instead of the traditional "meow"), fetches (some other cats can be taught to fetch... Turkish Vans teach their owners to play fetch), and generally exhibits the behavior of a pack animal that wants the favor and attention of the alpha animal (the human).
As for imitative behavior, he loves to watch me wash dishes. Turkish Vans are fascinated by water (in nature they swim for fun and fish for food), so he has to be on the counter watching whenever I'm washing dishes. He sees me apparently rubbing my "paws" together under the stream of water, and if I turn to put the dish in the drying rack, he will invariably start pawing at the stream of water, and then rubbing his paws together under the stream. He's invariably very confused because he doesn't understand what this accomplishes, but he keeps doing it because he sees me doing it.
Cats have the intelligence to imitate behavior, but they don't exhibit it because most domesticated cats do not have the pack mentality. They do their own thing unless there is a reward for doing your thing. You hear about people teaching their cats to flush the toilet, but that's usually because they're fascinated by the "reward" of getting to watch the whirlpool. Turkish Vans and dogs, however, will do things because they see you doing it and they want to win your approval by doing what you do.
Mimicry is perfectly standard behaviour for animals. There have been studies on how parents teach their offspring how to hunt dating back decades. This applies on land, on/under water and in the air. Most of the studies I have heard about involve mammals or birds, I can't remember any involving reptiles, fish or (in particular) insects. Some larger spiders may have this ability - ones large enough to eat small ground-nesting birds for instance
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The article itself is more about adapting behaviour by watching humans and that is self-limiting, apart from speech there is not much useful a bird can learn that way. I have a neighbour who used to look after the garden before it was turned into a lawn. Back then he had a fan - a blackbird which would hang around when he was digging, waiting for worms to be unearthed. It presumably recognised my neighbour as non-threatening and the digging as the same thing it would do but on steroids.
I was attacked by a goose a few years back. We were sitting outside and someone had fun throwing it scraps, closer and closer to me. It tried to drive me off by driving at me while hissing and flapping its wings. I joined in the fun by advancing on it, hissing back and 'flapping' my arms the same way. Communication was achieved, goose withdrew to a safer distance.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Still won't do my taxes.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My cats, both of them will attempt to do stuff like reach for the door knob to open closed doors. They are round knobs so they can't do it. But they know what they need to do. One of them has opened a bag of litter and knocked it over when we were out so she could do her business in it after the door to the room with her litter tray blew shut in the wind (I kid you not).
Animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, a lot of the tests they "fail" is likely because they are simply differently motivated.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
My friend's dog is always getting yelled at over voice chat because instead of going to bed at a normal time, she hops off the bed and watches him play Neverwinter. He plays on his TV with a controller and headset so the dog knows that he's playing with the controller. So she always licks it and bites at it because she wants to play too. One time he got up for a second and his character basically had a seisure that involved running around and falling off a cliff in game and it turns out she was messing with the buttons with her tongue. So she's not very good at Neverwinter but at least she tries to imitate him.
I had a border collie when I was a kid that would figure out just about anything. Opening doors, the refrigerator, digging up holes (and filling them in after getting an earful from my dad)... The most impressive thing she ever did though was picking vegetables from the garden. She could smell when they were ripe, and one year all the cantaloupe seeds that were planted sprouted. We had well over 400 cantaloupe that year, and it was very time consuming to pick them all. We would wake up in the morning with tens of fruit left at the back door, with teeth marks gently pressed in the rind from my dog.
She also tried to pick other vegetables, with varying levels of success. The funniest was tomatoes, as she just couldn't manage to be gentle enough and always ended up leaving them semi-squished on the back step.
My dogs LIE. Really. If they whine and point their noses at the door, they get let out. If they whine and point their noses at the kitchen, sometimes they get bones and sometimes we just say STFU we gave you enough bones already. So........they point at the door and you get up and when you are almost at the door they run back to the kitchen and point at the bones.