Tuesday, December 09, 2008

More on the emotional lives of animals...

According to an article by Eliza Strickland in yesterday's Discover Magazine:

"Dogs have a sense of fairness, and get jealous and upset when several dogs perform a trick but only one is rewarded, a new study has found....

....While some owners may say that they’ve known about the deep emotional lives of their dogs for ages, the new experiments mark the first time a complicated emotion like jealousy has been observed in dogs in a controlled laboratory setting. “We are learning that dogs, horses, and perhaps many other species are far more emotionally complex than we ever realized,” [says] Paul Morris, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth who studies animal emotions…. “They can suffer simple forms of many emotions we once thought only primates could experience” [Times Online].

1 comment:

Chris Berry said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3794079.stm

Thought this was interesting. Apparently this dog, Rico, has an amazing comprehension of words. Researchers could put a new toy in his room and make up a new word for it he had never heard before, and was able to deduce the new word was for the new toy by process of elimination.