Dogs are wired to rescue owners from stressful times, according to a study. A test trial revealed that dogs respond to their owners' emotional distress.
The study, “Do dogs rescue their owners from a stressful situation? A behavioral and physiological assessment”, found out that a median of 65 percent of the dogs observing their humans acting as if they were in a tense condition opened the door to rescue them.
When the owner remained calm, results showed there was only 18% of the dogs that attempted to free their owner from their situation.
Published on Animal Cognition, the study determined the length of time it took the dogs to free their owners. Dogs that responded to owners acting in a distressed situation took around 75 seconds. Dogs with owners who were calm averaged around 107 seconds. Search and rescue trained dogs responded within 45 seconds to free their humans.
The research team led by Fabricio Carballo of the Canine Behavior Research Group at the University of Buenos Aires Institute of Medical Research in Argentina set up an apparatus that appears like a wooden telephone booth with a door consisting of a clear Plexiglas panel. There was a small gap that would allow a dog to insert its paw or muzzle in order to open the door. For the first batch, the owners would act in a distressed manner, such as screaming, hitting the walls, crying.
For the second group of dogs, their owners were seated in the booth reading and in a calm condition. “In Experiment 2, we investigated if emotional contagion could be a possible mechanism underlying dogs' rescue responses by measuring dogs’ behavior, heart rate, and saliva cortisol level in the stressed and calm conditions, and also controlled for obedience by having the calm owners call their pets while trapped,” the study notes.
Researchers affirms that emotional contagion is a plausible mechanism for dogs’ rescue behavior in the present setting.
“We observed an increase in heart rate across trials in the stressed condition and a decrease across trials in the calm condition. In brief, we found evidence that approximately half of the dogs without previous training showed spontaneous rescue behaviors directed to their owners,” the study concludes.
