Wild Dingos Remember Human Gestures

[n2doc]

By Stéphan Reebs, Natural History Magazine
posted: 13 December 2009 10:42 am ET

Dingoes were semidomesticated village dogs once, in Southeast Asia. Then, about 4,000 years ago, they got loose in Australia, where their behavior reverted to that of their ancestor, the wolf. They howl, live in packs, and fear humans.

But even after so long on the lam they’ve retained at least one mark of domestication: an ability to read human gestures.

At the tender age of four months, ordinary dogs will spontaneously investigate objects that we point to or even just gaze at. In contrast, wolves—even when reared by people—only attend to such gestures after months of intensive training.

Bradley P. Smith and his graduate adviser, Carla A. Litchfield of the University of South Australia in Magill, wondered how dingoes measure up. They presented seven tame but untrained dingoes with two flowerpots, one containing meat. (Both were meat-scented to preclude olfactory clues.) In a series of trials, an experimenter tried out ten gestures to indicate the pot hiding the treat. The dingoes raced straight to it in response to most of the gestures, such as pointing at, tapping on, or standing directly behind the pot. When the experimenter merely gazed at it, however, the dingoes didn’t get the message.

In the course of domestication, dogs’ ability to understand human gestures was probably selected for. In spite of their wild ways, dingoes have kept most of that skill. It’s nice to know that our long-lost best friends still have a connection with us.

The research was published in the journal Animal Cognition.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/091213-dingos-gestures.html

[MercutioATC]

1. It's all fun and games until a dingo takes your baby.

[Bolo Boffin]

2. Don't point at your baby! n/t

[azul]

3. Duh. They are sentient beings and have language. nt

[hunter]

4. We have one dog who is a language and gesture genius...

... anything a dog is interested in she can communicate and it goes both ways. She understands dozens of words, dozens of gestures, and has dozens of her own distinct expressions. I can tell by her bark who's at the door -- the UPS man, an annoying salesperson, friends or family, they all get their own distinctive bark. Some visitors, the ones who generally annoy me the most such as alarm and pest control sales people, will get a banging against the door snarling full fanged fury of death show which will also set our neighbor's German Shepherds to barking and our parrots to making tortured-demons-from-hell noises. I've seen alarm salesmen turn around and walk away without ringing the doorbell. I loathe their "Ooooo....bogeymen, is your family safe...???" schtick.

Then we have a dog who is not so bright. She will look intently at your face, look at your gestures, but mostly when she's doing that she'll have this expression of "...duh???" Sometimes her tongue will even hang out, which is quite comical. The only thing she understands reliably is the stance of someone who is about to throw her a bit of food. She catches food pretty reliably, but mostly she'll sit in a sunbeam or other warm spot catching flies, scratching or licking herself, or sleeping. She's never going to herd sheep or any other dog work, but she is always happy and it's contagious so we like having her around.

I tend to think wild dogs such as coyotes or wolves could easily comprehend human gestures but it's simply not their nature to give a dog damn what humans think. In their society humans are hideous monsters best avoided.