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‘Good girl and true hero’: dog saves owner by leading US officer to her home
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Honestly, given a canine's physical capabilities, I'm not sure that I could have done as well as she did in that situation.
And for a dog, what had to have gone into that...
Assess that her owner was in trouble.
Assess that another human could help. I'm not sure that that's an obvious conclusion for a dog to come to from an evolutionary standpoint. My guess is that most cases, in a pack of wild dogs, for most problems short of being attacked by something, there's not a whole lot that bringing another dog to help is going to do, if one gets hurt.
She had to plan out in advance a way to get a human to do what she needed them to do.
Assess that disrupting traffic would be a way to get attention. That is, she had to have a model of the mental state of other humans sufficient to predict how they'd act in a situation that I doubt that she'd seen before.
Evade capture when someone tried to capture her.
And keep them interested enough to follow her to the cabin.
Dogs seek humans for help when they cannot solve the problem themselves. It's one of the behavioural adaptations that distinguish them from wolves.
I can't find the video of it, but there's an experiment where a chunk of meat has a long piece of rope tied to it and placed in the centre of a cage so that only the end of the rope is accessible. Both both domesticated wolves and dogs are smart enough to start pulling on the reachable end of rope to get the meat to the cage edge.
Same experiment is repeated but this time the rope is nailed to the floor so that pulling on it will not work as last time. A wolf will eventually give up trying and ignore the cage. A dog will try every way it can think of and then seek out a human for help when all the attempts fail.
The behaviour of the dog in this article is more common than you think. What is impressive is that the human didn't get in the way and actually figured it out.
If my dog has poop stuck to his butt he comes over and whimpers at me for help. My cat smears it all over my floor.
Some animals can figure it. At the nursery I used to work at, the new nursery cat decided to take a nap in a customer’s truck, and woke up in the nearby town (still several miles away).
She started to walk back, got part of the way, realized she didn’t know the rest of the way, and waited at an intersection. Then, when a local family stopped to put up some signs for a town festival, she accosted them and wouldn’t let them leave until they took her with them.
They recognized her and brought her back to the nursery.