I would have liked other smells to have been given. They didn't answer their first question properly, do dogs love us or are we food delivery machines? If they'd been given a q-tip smelling of food, would the same part of the brain have lit up?
I wonder if the question posed by the instagram personality was the actual question posed by the experimenters or if it was a clickbaity, easy to swallow tidbit that would be expected to catch and hold an audience for views.
The brain lighting up when they smell only the owner and not other humans would be consistent with them viewing that specific human as the pack leader and provider of food anyways, right? Like yes they’re only happy to see their owner, that’s the only who feeds them
That's what I want to know. If they smell food and the exact same parts of the brain light up, they care about us for the food, if other parts light up then they like us for other reasons.
No, he's making an absolutely fair point. After this study you can't say if dogs love their owner or if they just associate them with food (pavlov's dog). For knowing whether they love their owner consciously you would have to prove this the way OP described
Animals, like humans, have skills that make them useful in different scenarios; some are good at scent work while others are good at swimming. In each scenario, a new leader will step up, and the others will learn or follow.
So in this context, the wolf with the best hunting abilities would be the equivalent to the human being. I’d like to see what similar reactions would be to seeing anything that is associated with the giving of food and care.
We might be talking about the same thing if you mean reward or "enrichment experience"
A dog, who has an incredible powerful sense of smell (debated hundreds or thousands times stronger than ours), should connect the smell to the experience of security, play, health, annoyance, pain, and so on. In fact, their ability to notice the decay of smell is their ability to tell time, and know when you are coming home.
While my dog is mine, he will "light up" from the smell of my friends who play with him, "light up" from the smell of my parents who cuddle and baby him, "light up" when he smells the drunk bike rider who tried to kick him or "light up" from the smell of the urine/ glands from the dog that bit him.
I like to believe that my dog has the ability to read a 4D map, one that includes time, of my day. He can read that I've touched another dog with specific fingers, hours ago, and the layers of more recent experiences on top of that one, like washing my hands, eating food, opening a door, etc.
Yup they can get full on PTSD from their owners "abandoning" them to go on holidays. It even happened to my cat, the stress made the fur on his legs fall out and it never fully recovered. God I loved that little guy.
Similar happened with both my dog and cat. I got sick back in 2022 and spent the better part of a week in the ICCU. Keep in mind, they were at home with 3 other people they saw every day, one of which would feed, and sleep with, them (my ex, obviously). My dog barely had any drive to play (and he was 2 at the time, peak energy). My cat slept the entire time and barely ate or used her litterbox. When I finally was released and came home, they were literally stuck to me like glue for the same amount of time I had been gone. Our animals definitely love us.
My Newfie didn't eat for five days when I had to board him to go on a cruise. He was just laying there, really lethargic when I picked him up. I felt so guilty that he got an ice cream cone and pig ears for days.
The next time I went on vacation, I got a dog-friendly cabin.
I was recently listening to Nature's Table, a BBC Radio 4 programme where experts and a couple of comedians discuss stuff in nature. Would recommend.
Anyway, they happened to talk about this experiment (or a similar one) and found the stronger response lit up when the dogs were shown a sausage, sooo... maybe love, but we maybe second to a sausage.
(Looking back on the episode list, I think it was science writer Jules Howard who said that)
Another question I have is are dog brains similar enough to ours that we can confidently say that the region of their brain that lit up is associated with happiness?
507
u/Tsunami6866 Jul 09 '24
I would have liked other smells to have been given. They didn't answer their first question properly, do dogs love us or are we food delivery machines? If they'd been given a q-tip smelling of food, would the same part of the brain have lit up?