Abstract
Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are skilled at reading and correctly responding to human communicative gestures to locate hidden food. Whether they, like chimpanzees, will understand requests for help in retrieving a fallen object, is not known. The aim of this study was to examine whether dogs show spontaneous helping behaviour towards a human experimenter that tries to obtain an object that is out of reach. The object at stake either “accidentally” fell on the floor, or was thrown on the floor by either a familiar (owner) or unfamiliar human. In order to get a better understanding of individual differences between helping and non-helping dogs, the behaviour of all dogs was observed by means of continuous focal animal sampling and scored by means of an ethogram. Personality traits were measured by letting owners rate their dogs on 50 personality adjectives using a 7-point Likert scale. The results demonstrate that six out of 51 dogs showed helping behaviour and did so more in the accidental (experimental) condition, than when the object was thrown on the floor on purpose (control) condition (P = 0.001). Dogs in general wagged their tail more (P = 0.009) and looked less often towards the test leader (P < 0.001) in the experimental condition compared to the control condition, suggesting that they experienced more arousal whenever humans were in need of help. In addition, a principal component analysis indicated to retain 41 adjectives which revealed five personality factors, in line with previous research, that accounted for 60.7 % of the total variance. However, the six exceptional dogs had no outstanding personality traits and were of different breeds suggesting that this did not explain the differences in helping behaviour. We conclude that dogs appear motivated and willing to help humans, but that the majority does not understand the source of the problem or how to assist. We discuss this result in light of the previously reported social skills of dogs and nonhuman primates.
Highlights
Being able to offer help is fundamental to cooperation and a key social skill that humans show even towards complete strangers
Some researchers assume that this behaviour can be explained by kin selection (e.g., Clutton-Brock, 2002) or reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971)
Multiple studies have shown that nonhuman primates do display helping behaviour towards humans in a non-competitive set-up, which obviously cannot be explained by kin selection (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006; Warneken et al, 2007)
Summary
Being able to offer help is fundamental to cooperation and a key social skill that humans show even towards complete strangers. This difference was irrespective of the owner’s past interest in one particular object (i.e., when given the choice between two objects), suggesting the dogs had difficulties inferring the human’s goal in the situation These studies investigating helping behaviour in dogs have conflicting results and it is still unknown whether dogs are able and/or willing to help a human in need. In the study of Bräuer et al (2013) and Quervel-Chaumette et al (2016) the dogs were trained before the experiments started, in order for the dogs to understand how to open the door and help the human in need This does not answer the question of whether dogs would spontaneously help a human in need and how much of the results could be explained by training. Quervel-Chaumette et al (2016) suggested further research was needed where dogs were tested in a more naturalistic setting and where communication was allowed
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