Researchers find dogs can thing "hey no fair."

[k9mania]

Dogs can think "no fair" too

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — No fair!
What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something. Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.
Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it.
But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.
Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.
Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.
"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."
Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.
Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.
Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together. "Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.
In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."
Those that refused at the start — and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs — were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.
The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.
The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.
When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.






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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5goqDNpGnvVACLUqZHdJUW1z-XZ3AD94UK6200

[Shells_k]

I really love all these articles you post k9, thanks a lot!

[Jr_K9_Expert]

Wow, the EXACT opposite of what I just read in a dog training book. I'll go out on a limb and say that I disagree with the article. I think that fairness is a human term and doesn't apply, in the whole definition of the word, to animals.

The dog that didn't get the treat would and should react the way it does! The dog gained no benifit from doing an action, therefore there is no point in doing it again. Its the basic principle behind the "ignoring method" when it comes to dogs jumping or attention seeking.

Not to mention that this is a possible reaction because it could have gone against the pack hierarchy. In the wild, the less dominant canines/animals don't get privilages over the higher ones, therefore if the dog that recieved the treat is less dominant, this obviously goes against the animals nature.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it makes sense to me. I would love to have a debate about it, if someone thinks that maybe animals do have a sense of fairness and could solidly back up the claim.

[k9mania]

There are a lot of variables that they probably did not report in the AP story. If they were first teaching them the trick with food, there should be some burst of the behavior to try and get the food. So if they did not get it the first time after being rewarded they would try again. Think about when you train your dog to touch. Every time they think about it they will give the behavior trying to get the reward and continue even if no reward. Now, I don't know the training protocol. We would have to look up the actual study. But your assumption would be that the dominant one was always the one getting the food. The chances of that would be almost impossible. Any time you read a report like this and you want to figure it out, try and find the real study. It is true that we interpret our animals' behaviors into human terms (anthromorphise). So one would have to know the entire research protocol and the controls they had before debating this particular study.

Steven, when you read all these books and articles. Remember to read those that disagree with what you just read. Because there is no recipe for training. It depends on the personality of the dog, the knowledge and temperament of the owners and others living with them, the situation, and the interaction between all of that. Then you must factor in the relationship between trainer and dog and owner; and knowledge about dog and human behavior that the trainer has.:D Good questions. Let's see what others have to say.