(I mostly just posted this because I love this devil golden!)
Canine Smarts: Behavioral Science Turns to Dogs for Answers – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. “Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered,” says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
It is precisely their proximity to people — which disqualified our four-legged friends as a model for so long — that now makes them interesting to animal researchers. “When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog,” says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.
No Responses