Dog owners have a way – sometimes within DAYS of first becoming dog owners – of becoming EXPERTS on animal behavior. It blows my mind. These are people who observe their animals displaying interesting or curious behaviors and make up things like “dogs like being put in tiny cages, actually, because of when their ancestors were pack animals and lived in caves.”
In wild animals, food selection begins with foraging (or hunting, for carnivores) behavior, and ends with food consumption. Through domestication, however, hunting behavior in dogs seems to have been genetically modified if not entirely eradicated. Some evidence that this is so comes from studies of “village” or feral dogs. These are dogs that generally survive by scavenging, raising the possibility that domesticated dogs have not maintained a fully functional repertoire of hunting behaviors. It should be noted, however, that not much is known about how wolves decide what is palatable (e.g. appearance, odor, texture, flavor), so it is hard to determine if dogs’ preferences in that respect have changed in domestication. So it is unlikely that any food-related behavior you observe in a domesticated dog is “leftover” from their wolf ancestors. Possible, but unlikely.
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Then, I asked this reader a few questions: are there other dogs in the house? Yes, a male dog. Does she generally feed the dog the same food every day? Yes.
I could not find anything in the literature directly addressing this issue. Here are some things we do know about food selection in domesticated dogs, and my best guess as to the explanation of this particular dog’s behavior:
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(1) It is certain that odor plays a strong role in food selection, because anosmic dogs (who can’t smell) show significantly reduced discrimination between types of meat that are otherwise highly discriminable.
(2) Dogs combine olfactory information (smell) with social information to select what type of food they want. In this study, dogs preferred eating something that smelled like the breath of another dog who had recently been fed.
I wonder if perhaps Shug (white poodle) smelled something on the other dog’s breath, and was looking for it. This reader insisted that the two dogs are fed the same foods. It is possible that there is some odor produced by the interaction of the other dog’s saliva and the food that Shug was trying to find in her food bowl.
One other bit of interesting information that I stumbled across concerns laterality in dogs. Laterality is an observable measure of functional asymmetry in the brain. The human brain, for example, is strongly left-lateralized for language. This means that much of language processing occurs on the left side of the brain. Human handedness (whether you favor your right or left hand) has to do with laterality as well. Human handedness may be a topic for another day – this day, we shall focus on dog paw-edness. Do dogs favor one paw over the other?
So the answer is yes, and is actually related to their sex. Females tend to prefer the right paw, and males tend to prefer the left paw. What is most interesting to me is that task #3 was a food retrieval task.
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I am well aware that I might be reaching here and over-interpreting – but I wonder if perhaps Shug, if she is right-pawed like most other female dogs, is simply trying to move the food away from the wall. Kind of like, if you’re at a restaurant, and you’re right handed, it totally sucks to be the guy at the end of the booth with your right hand against the wall.
So, there you have it. Both may be stretching it a little, but you’ve got two workable hypotheses that are totally testable. Oh, and I promise, we’ll do one for the cat people next week.
Bradshaw JW (2006). The evolutionary basis for the feeding behavior of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and cats (Felis catus). The Journal of nutrition, 136 (7 Suppl) PMID: 16772461
Wells, D. (2003). Lateralised behaviour in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris Behavioural Processes, 61 (1-2), 27-35 DOI: 10.1016/S0376-6357(02)00161-4
LUPFERJOHNSON, G., & ROSS, J. (2007). Dogs acquire food preferences from interacting with recently fed conspecifics Behavioural Processes, 74 (1), 104-106 DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2006.09.006
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
