The Arizona State University’s Canine Science Collaboratory (CSC) (love the name) study has proven that pet dogs will try to save their distressed human – as long as they know how.
Surprisingly, little research has been done on dogs’ interest in rescuing humans – despite the popularity of Lassie and more recently the Disney film Bolt.
So, the CSC teamed up with the University’s psychology department to test the legend, setting up an experiment to assess 60 dogs’ willingness to save their owners. None of the dogs had any training in rescuing people.
In the main test, each owner was confined to a large box (why not?) equipped with a light-weight door, which the dog could move aside. The owners pretended to be distressed by calling out “help” or “help me”.
The researchers coached the owners so their cries for help sounded authentic beforehand, while the owners weren’t allowed to call their dog’s name in case this encourage the dog to cat out of obedience (highly unlikely for my pooch) and not out of concern for their owner’s welfare.
20 or one-third of the dogs rescued their owner, which doesn’t sound that impressive to us.
But the researchers say it is remarkable when you take a closer look at the results.
In a control test, when the dog watched a researcher drop food into the box, only 19 of the 60 dogs opened the box to get the food – so more dogs rescued their owners than retrieved food.
“The fact that two-thirds of the dogs didn’t even open the box for food is a pretty strong indication that rescuing requires more than just motivation, there’s something else involved, and that’s the ability component,” Joshua Van Bourg, a graduate psychology student and co-author of the study, said.
“If you look at only those 19 dogs that showed us, they were able to open the door in the food test, 84% of them rescued their oxwners. So, most dogs want to rescue you, but they need to know how.”
The dogs also showed more signs of stress, such as whining, walking, barking and yawning, during the distress test – again indicating that they genuinely want to help.
When they failed to ‘rescue’ their human, it wasn’t because they didn’t care – they just didn’t know how.
Time to kit out little Rex with a Swiss army knife, some rope and a torch then – just in case.
