Homeless dog tries to save dog hit by car in Chile
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Chileans have a new hero: an apparently homeless dog that pulled the body of another dog through traffic off a busy highway. A surveillance camera on a Santiago freeway captured images of a dog trotting past speeding cars to pull the lifeless body of the other canine, which had been run over by a vehicle, away from traffic and onto the median strip.
The scene was broadcast by Chilean television stations and then posted on Web sites such as YouTube.com, and hundreds of thousands of people had viewed versions of it by Monday.
Highway crews removed both the dead and live dogs from the median strip of the Vespucio Norte Highway shortly after the Dec. 4 incident. But the rescuer dog ran away.
Authorities say images of the rescue prompted some people to call and offer to adopt the dog, but neither highway workers nor a television crew could find they animal.
- posted on 12/09/2008
Studies show dogs have sense of fairness
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 18 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — No fair! What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something? Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way. Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it. But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again. Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.
Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.
"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who led a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."
Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.
Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.
Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together. "Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.
In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."
Those that refused at the start — and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs — were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.
The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.
The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.
When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.
When both got a reward all was well.
One thing that did surprise the researchers was that — unlike primates — the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.
Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference. Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got.
And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.
The dogs, the researchers said, "were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers."
Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.
"What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well," he said in a telephone interview.
But the researchers didn't do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone. In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.
Range responded, however, that her team did indeed do that control test as well as others in which food was moved or held in the hand but not given to the dog being tested.
In dogs, Wynne noted, the quality of reward didn't seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all.
However, Wynne added, there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."
- Re: 人越看越不如狗posted on 12/09/2008
若论忠诚,人从来比不上狗,连猫都不如。我现在不养宠物,第一是我到处走,二是我忍受不了猫狗的味道。特别是狗的味道,狗的味道我隔着很远就能闻到。为此我愿割掉鼻子,不再sensitive,与狗更近。
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