How Did He Learn to Speak Volumes With a Look?

As any poodle, spaniel or mutt owner knows, dogs have an uncanny ability to read human body language, whether it's following a finger pointing the way to an errant tennis ball or spotting a glance that signals an imminent trip to the park.

But animal behavior experts have debated for years how much of this dogged perceptiveness is inborn and how much is learned by being raised around humans. New research, however, indicates that the capacity to communicate with humans silently through gestures and glances has become an inborn talent as a result of the thousands of years that dogs have lived, worked and played with people.

"They don't speak like we do. But there is communication," said Adam Miklosi of Eotvos University in Budapest.

Miklosi is among researchers around the world who have been working to gain a better understanding of the talents displayed by man's best friend. Most recently, Miklosi and his colleagues conducted a unique experiment to try to tease out exactly how much of the capacity to interpret humans' subtle signals is instinctive.

"People usually assume that dogs got more stupid because humans provided everything. All they have to do is lie back and enjoy life," Miklosi said. "What we think is that dogs went through a re-evolution that started from some sort of wolflike animals. . . . They acquired skills that make them adaptive to the human environment. They interact with humans. They learn from humans."

To test his ideas, Miklosi and his colleagues designed an experiment comparing dogs with their closest relatives -- wolves. They took 13 wolf pups from their mothers when they were just four or five days old and raised them in human homes just like puppies. As adults, the wolves received intensive contact with their human caretakers, who literally carried the animals with them wherever they went.

Previous studies had shown that adult dogs were better than adult wolves at reading human body language. But it was unclear how much of that was inborn and how much dogs learned growing up around humans. This experiment was aimed at clarifying that point.

"The wolves got more human contact than the ordinary dogs got from their owners," Miklosi said in a telephone interview. "They were really thrown into the human environment."

The researchers then trained the wolves and various breeds of dogs to get a piece of meat by pulling on a string. After the animals learned how to get the meat, the researchers attached the string so that no matter how hard the animals pulled they could not get the meat.

The wolves just continued to pull on the string in frustration. But the dogs quickly stopped pulling when the string did not move and turned to look at the faces of the humans, the researchers reported in the April 29 issue of the journal Current Biology.

"The dogs gave up much earlier. They were, very quickly, looking at the humans, the owners, looking at their faces," Miklosi said. "That is what is interesting. That never happened with the wolves. They just kept pulling. But the dogs, what they did was basically look at the owners. If you observe this as a human, you would describe it as an asking-for-help gesture."

The experiment shows that "the dogs have adapted to use this channel" of communication, Miklosi said. "This has provided the opportunity to communicate with us. And the wolves have not," he said.

"The dogs have learned our language, to some extent. So we don't need to learn dog language. They can use our channels of communication, like vision," Miklosi said. "You can point for a dog and communicate with it. You can point for a wolf, but it won't understand what you are doing."

Brian Hare of Harvard University, who previously conducted a similar experiment that showed dogs were superior to chimps and wolves at reading human gestures, said the results show that "dogs really understand that humans are their partners in life. They can elicit their help and use them as a kind of tool."

"Wolves don't know that. They keep trying to solve it on their own. It's something that's programmed into their genes," Hare said. Hare is planning a follow-up experiment to try to determine why dogs are so much better at reading human cues.

"It could be that because there was selection for dogs that are smart -- dogs that can read human cues and figure out what they want," Hare said. "Those were the ones that survived and passed their genes on."

But another possibility is that dogs' ability is a byproduct of domestication. Hare tells the story of foxes that were domesticated in Siberia 50 years ago. Over the generations, the foxes developed physical changes, including floppy ears, curly tails, different colorings and smaller teeth and jaws.

The human caretakers of the foxes "weren't trying to create any of those changes. They were just trying to get friendly foxes. But when they bred them together they got these changes as byproducts," Hare said.

So, for dogs, "the alternative is that when dogs were domesticated," the capacity to pick up cues from humans "was just an accident -- just like the floppy ears," Hare said.

Hare plans to compare the domesticated foxes with dogs to try to find out. "If they perform like dogs on the test, then we know it's likely the dogs also changed as a byproduct," Hare said.

"The question is: How did the evolution happen? It's very rare that you can actually demonstrate what the selection pressure was," Hare said. "That's why this is so exciting. We're going to take a big step towards solving a mystery."

Marc Bekoff, a dog behavior researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said that Miklosi's experiment shows that "dogs aren't just dumbed-down wolves."

"A lot of people think that domesticated animals, when compared to wilder animals, aren't as smart," Bekoff said. "It shows that species adapt to the social niche in which they live. And the social niche for a dog would be its human companions."

Bekoff said this ability probably helps explain the sense that many dog owners have that their animals empathize with their emotions. Dogs can pick up the subtle physical clues that signal what their human companions are feeling, whether it's happiness, sadness, anxiety or anger.

"I think part of the reason there is this strong bond between dogs and humans is because we are empathetic to them and they show empathy to us," Bekoff said.

"We can never know for sure. But I've done a lot of work on animals' emotions. Animals and humans share a lot of the same neurological structures and the same neurochemistry. I think it's really dog empathy."

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