DOGS DECEIVE HUMANS TO GET WHAT THEY WANT

Our best friends can be sneaky and manipulative when they want to maximise the number of tasty treats they get to eat.

Marianne Heberlein at the University of Zurich in Switzerland wanted to test dogs’ ability to use deception to get what they want from humans. The idea came to her as she watched her own dogs – one of them occasionally pretends to see something interesting in the backyard to trick the other into giving up the prime sleeping spot. “This sort of thing happens quite often, but it is not well studied,” she says. To see if dogs would deceive humans too, Heberlein’s team paired various pooches with two human partners – one who always gave the dog treats and another who always with held them.

After the dogs learned which of the pair would give them the food, the pets were given the opportunity to lead each person to one of three boxes containing either a juicy sausage, a less-appetising dry dog biscuit or nothing. The humans didn’t know what was in the boxes, and the dogs got a chance after the trial to get a treat from a box. This gave the man incentive to deceive the humans who with held the treats by taking them to the empty box before claiming the tasty treat.And that’s just what they did over the two days of testing.

Heberlein was surprised how quickly some dogs figured out the optimal behaviour to get most of their preferred treats.A few of them led the selfish human to the empty box from the very first trial, and always managed to get the most treats.

The question now is whether dogs are flexible enough to deceive us in other contexts, says Daphna Buchsbaum,who studies dog cognition at the University of Toronto, Canada. “If they can, I’d say it was evidence of very sophisticated social reasoning,” she says.

By Brian Owens in "New Scientist", USA, vol. 233, n.3117, March, 18, 2017, excerpts p.12. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.