Why not decipher canine instincts with our own 'animal' instincts?

All dog lovers who have ever received timely comforting licks when feeling low know that their four-legged friends have an uncanny ability to gauge human emotion. So, science, as usual, is second-guessing human instinct by ‘discovering’ that canines can recognise positive and negative emotions by collating information from varied senses — a trait quite surprisingly thought to be hitherto restricted only to Homo sapiens. A team of animal behaviour experts and psychologists in Brazil showed 17 pet dogs pictures of happy or angry people and playful or aggressive dogs and then played appropriate sounds for all these, to deduce that the pooches knew exactly which photo corresponded to each sound. Interviewing a few dog lovers would have yielded the same ‘discovery’, with a lot less effort. Unless, of course, the researchers were dog lovers themselves and jumped at the chance for some quality time with the canines, even at work.

Before dismissing any dog lover’s testimony about canine empathy as unscientific, it may be germane to recall that several studies in the last decade have found that human intuition and instinct are surprisingly accurate tools too, pinpointing correct choices over 9 per cent of the time. So what better way could there be to judge animal behaviour than by trusting some of our own animal instincts?