Pet dogs copy their owners’ actions!

According to the Austrian researchers,dogs’ imitative abilities are shaped by the way their owners actually interact with them as they grow up.

In the study,the researchers trained 10 dogs to open a sliding door using their heads and also with their paws for a food reward. Five of them — three border collies,an Australian shepherd and a mongrel — were asked to open the door in the same way as their owner.

The remaining five dogs — four border collies and a mongrel — were required to use their paw after seeing human head use and their head their owner used a hand. They took significantly longer to respond correctly to the task than those simply imitating.

Lead researcher Dr Friederike Range of University of Vienna,said: “The dogs brought with them to the experiment a tendency automatically to imitate hand use and paw use; to imitate these actions even when it was costly to do so,when imitation interfered with efficient performance of an ongoing task.”

His colleagues added: “The results provide the first evidence of automatic imitation and of automatic counter -imitation in dogs. Dogs are special animals,both in terms of their evolutionary history of domestication and the range and intensity of their developmental training by humans.

“Both of these factors may enhance the extent to which dogs attend to human activity. But the experiment suggests it is the latter training in the course of development which plays the more powerful and specific role in shaping their imitative behaviour.”

The findings have been published in the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B’ journal.