Your dog just wants to eat everything, shit everywhere and get away with it. Manipulating you is just part of their master plan.
You might think that Rover feels deep, genuine shame when you catch him in the garbage, but science just proved he's only fucking with you.
Before we get to the data, here's the most popular "guilty dog" video in the world as a reminder of their potential deception:
Turns out, that dog is just playing its owner like a goddamn tuba … and there's a pretty good chance that Denver didn't even eat them.
Despite their sad, super guilty looking faces, new research has come out to show that dogs can't feel emotions like guilt or shame. They're just reacting to the body language coming from the alpha male of the pack (i.e. you).
Owners taught their dogs not to eat a biscuit within their reach. Then the owners left the room, and another person conducting the experiment removed the biscuit or encouraged the dog to eat it.
When the owner went back into the room and saw the biscuit had gone, they were asked to decide from the look on the dog's face whether it had been eaten or not. But they could not do so.
Dr. Susan Hazel of the University of Adelaide, worked on the project. “There have been a number of studies, and it's pretty clear that dogs don't feel or display guilt,” she said. “It's not the way their brains work.”
Elaine Henley, an animal behaviorist and lecturer in Scotland, said that dogs could feel emotions but that emotions such as guilt and jealousy were just human ideas. “We don't know if animals feel them and must be careful about attributing human emotions to dogs,” she said.
If you catch Fido in the act of doing something wrong and scold him, your dog will exhibit submissive behaviors, and you'll just imagine it as guilty, because people project human emotions onto their pets in a effort to validate their relationships with them.
Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor at Barnard College in New York, who carried out the research, said: "Given that discovery of, say, a stolen roast or garbage on the floor is often followed instantly by cries of alarm and scolding, it is not surprising that, in retrospect, owners would conflate the sources of dogs' resulting guilty looks."
It's all in your head, man. "Merely uttering a dog's name with a rising, accusatory tone is often enough to elicit pre-emptive submissive behaviour. The results indicate that the so-called guilty look is a response to owner scolding; it is not expressed more often when actually guilty."
They're great companions, but we're really expecting a lot from an animal with a brain the size of a plum.
Here's the best version of dog training we've found utilizing this new information:
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