The Modern Bark | Dog Training Tips

Did he do it? Does this dog look guilty to you? Is it a mistake to confer human emotions and motives on our dogs? Are dogs really more human than some of us are prepared to believe?  Recently, dogs have become the new darlings of cognitive science, and research exploring the range of canine emotions and cognitive abilities is mounting at an exponential rate. Among the many human characteristics attributed to dogs is the concept of guilt. It’s not unusual for a dog owner to state, “I knew he had done something; he had that ‘guilty look.’” We all know that doleful, guilty dog expression, but does it really demonstrate that dogs feel shame? If not, what’s behind it? Researchers at University Barnard College in New York set out to answer a few of these questions. The Guilty Dog Experiement In a study by Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College, dogs were placed in a controlled environment where they and their owners were setup to make guilty...

The average dog can learn as many as 150 words, a fairly substantial vocabulary beyond sit, stay and come. Research with several border collies has brought those vocabulary numbers up beyond 400 words, and a border collie named Chaser has learned the names of 1022 objects, which he can differentiate and fetch on command.  There appears to be no upper limit in Chaser's vocabulary lessons, as he continues to add words to his lexicon. In the wake of such impressive results, researchers Emile van der Zee, Helen Zulch and Daniel Mills sought to determine the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in canine learning. In the research article,  Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris): Is Shape Important?, the researchers sought to determine if shape bias existed in dogs as it does in humans. Experiments with human 2 year olds, have shown a "shape bias" exists in the learning of new words.  Simply put, once the child associates a name with ...