A recent study, conducted by a team led by Lauren Brubaker, a doctoral student at the OSU’s Human-Animal Interaction Lab, shows how people can influence dogs and their behavior. The study was published in the journal “Applied Animal Behavior”.
In the study, the test subject were rescue dogs, search dogs, and pet dogs and they all were offered with the same problem-solving task. All dogs took the same amount of time handling the task, but the rescue and search dogs showed higher success when they were encouraged by their owners. But the rescue and search dogs were not able to solve the given task when they were alone, without the owners.
The “ordinary” pet dogs were able to solve the task with and without the presence of their owner.
They concluded that even everybody believed that the working dogs will be able to solve tasks independently, they were dependent on the owner’s encouragement and praise.
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