Heh. I bet I caught you with that horrible title for this post. It's really about bitches. And dogs:
Dogs can sniff out unfair situations and show a simple emotion similar to envy or jealousy, Austrian researchers reported on Monday.
Dogs sulked and refused to "shake" paws if other dogs got treats for tricks and they did not, said Friederike Range, an animal psychologist at the University of Vienna, who led the study into canine emotions.
"It is a more complex feeling or emotion than what we would normally attribute to animals," said Range.
The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also showed dogs licked and scratched themselves and acted stressed when they were denied rewards given to other dogs.
Other studies have shown monkeys often express resentful behaviour when a partner receives a greater reward for performing an identical task, staging strikes or ignoring what they view as inferior compensation.
It turns out dogs are able to show a similar, if less sensitive, response, said Range in a telephone interview.
I have no idea if the study is any good and I'm not going to read it, because this is a fluff post (to make sure that not everything I write about is on feminism). Most dog owners would agree on the findings, though.
There's a funny Catch-22 in the expertise dog owners get about their dogs over time. On the one hand we learn an awful lot about dogs just by living with them and observing them. On the other hand, we are often viewed as biased observers of dogs, love making us prone to anthropomorphizing our dogs' behavior.
And of course domesticated dogs who live alone with humans are not representative of how dogs might act in a wild pack. Still, putting dogs into a laboratory is in some ways akin to finding how dogs would act in a concentration camp: It's a totally artificial environment. Yet we often study animals in cages and in mazes. Remember those famous studies about primate bonding in the 1950s? They were carried out in bare cages, too, so what we really learned from them is how primates might bond in prisons with nothing much to do or to see.
Oops. I'm already digressing from the fluffiness. Here it comes:
When my Henrietta the Hound was at her physical peak she loved to race other dogs in the dog park. She could catch and overtake all the other regulars except for the greyhound. One day a young Springer Spaniel came into the park, wanted to race Henrietta and won. Henrietta couldn't catch her because she couldn't turn very fast; she'd just keep running straight when the Springer swerved.
I had an enjoyable hour watching the two play the same game over and over again. Henrietta never caught the Springer. Then she changed her strategy: She started walking nonchalantly towards the Springer, stopping to sniff or to look at the horizon. Once she got close enough, she suddenly darted at the Springer.
It still didn't work, but I think I saw an attempt at deception there. Later I saw her trick Hank into certain forms of behavior by employing various types of deception. On the other hand, she broke off a piece of her dog biscuit and threw it to Hank when Hank whined for a piece (having already wolfed down her own biscuit).
How about that envy, then? I'm not sure if the emotion the study talks about is the same as human envy or it's something more like outrage at the unfairness. Those are not the same emotion in humans. What I do know is that I got told off pretty clearly if I absent-mindedly rewarded only one of the dogs for something.