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Is Your Dog An Optimist Or Pessimist?

  • 29/09/2014

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Research from the University of Sydney has found some dogs are more pessimistic than others.

Dr Melissa Starling, from the Faculty of Veterinary Science who completed her PhD on the topic, said finding out whether a particular dog is optimistic or pessimistic is helpful in the context of working and service dogs and has important implications for animal welfare.

She has been working with Assistance Dogs Australia, a charity organisation that provides service and companion dogs to people with disabilities, to investigate whether an optimism measure could aid in selecting suitable candidates for training.

Dr Starling said the research could help dog trainers select dogs best suited to working roles.

“If we knew how optimistic or pessimistic the best candidates for a working role are, we could test dogs’ optimism early and identify good candidates for training for that role,” she said.

“A pessimistic dog that avoids risks would be better as a guide dog while an optimistic, persistent dog would be more suited to detecting drugs or explosives.”

With her research, dogs were taught to associate two different sounds, which were two octaves apart, with whether they would get the preferred reward of milk or instead get the same amount of water.

Then once the dogs had learnt the discrimination task, they are presented with ‘ambiguous’ tones and if they responded it showed that they expected good things would happen to them and they were optimistic.

The tones which they responded to also showed how optimistic they were as a very optimistic dog may even respond to tones that sound more like those played before water is offered.

Dr Starling said pessimistic dogs appeared to be much more stressed by failing a task than optimistic dogs.

“They would whine and pace and avoid repeating the task while the optimistic dogs would appear unfazed and continue,” she said.

The research has the potential to completely remodel how animal welfare is assessed, Dr Starling said.

“The remarkable power of this is the opportunity to essentially ask a dog ‘How are you feeling?’ and get an answer,” she said.

“It could be used to monitor their welfare in any environment, to assess how effective enrichment activities might be in improving welfare and pinpoint exactly what a dog finds emotionally distressing.”

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