Iron deficiency in dogs suffering from atopic dermatitis.

Background: Iron-deficiency is associated with increased morbidity and mortality in non-communicable diseases. However, iron parameters are rarely assessed in dogs. Here, we aimed to assess and correlate iron parameters in dogs suffering from Canine Atopic Dermatitis (CAD) compared to non-atopic, healthy dogs.

Free-ranging dogs match a human's preference in a foraging task.

Social learning is a mechanism used by many species to efficiently gain information about their environment. Although many animals live in an environment where members of other species are present, little is known about interspecific social learning. Domesticated and urbanized species provide the opportunity to investigate whether nonhuman animals can learn from heterospecifics such as humans, who are integral parts of their social landscape.

Dogs understand the role of a human partner in a cooperative task.

Humans are exceptionally flexible in cooperation, partly due to our ability to recognize the roles of cooperative partners. While some non-human animals understand the need for a partner in such interactions, it is unclear whether they grasp the consequences of their partner's actions and adjust accordingly. Previous studies utilizing economic games with non-human animals yielded mixed results.

Street-wise dog testing: Feasibility and reliability of a behavioural test battery for free-ranging dogs in their natural habitat.

Behavioural scientists are increasingly recognizing the need to conduct experiments in the wild to achieve a comprehensive understanding of their species' behaviour. For domestic dogs (Canis familiaris), such progress has been slow. While the life in human households is often regarded as dogs' natural habitat, this classification disregards most of the global dog population.

Why do dogs wag their tails?

Tail wagging is a conspicuous behaviour in domestic dogs (). Despite how much meaning humans attribute to this display, its quantitative description and evolutionary history are rarely studied. We summarize what is known about the mechanism, ontogeny, function and evolution of this behaviour.

Overimitation in Dogs: Is There a Link to the Quality of the Relationship with the Caregiver?

Overimitation, the copying of causally irrelevant or non-functional actions, is well-known from humans but completely absent in other primates. Recent studies from our lab have provided evidence for overimitation in canines. Previously, we found that half of tested pet dogs copied their human caregiver's irrelevant action, while only few did so when the action was demonstrated by an unfamiliar experimenter.

Is dogs' heritable performance in socio-cognitive tasks truly social?

Recently, Bray et al. (2021) showed that behavioural performance in cognitive tasks involving humans is highly heritable in dog puppies. Although the paper shows substantial heritability of specific behavioural traits, the absence of control conditions does not allow for strong support of the authors' claim that the cognitive performance they measured represents a special sensitivity to human cooperative-communicative acts.

Secure base effect in former shelter dogs and other family dogs: Strangers do not provide security in a problem-solving task.

Domestic dogs display behavioural patterns towards their owners that fulfil the four criteria of attachment. As such, they use their owners as a secure base, exploring the environment and manipulating objects more when accompanied by their owners than when alone. Although there are some indications that owners serve as a better secure base than other human beings, the evidence regarding a strong owner-stranger differentiation in a manipulative context is not straightforward.

Partial rewarding during clicker training does not improve naïve dogs' learning speed and induces a pessimistic-like affective state.

Clicker training is considered a welfare-friendly way of teaching novel behaviors to animals because it is mostly based on the positive reinforcement. However, trainers largely vary in their way of applying this training technique. According to the most, a reward (e.

Selective overimitation in dogs.

Dogs have not only shown different kinds of social learning, from either conspecifics or humans, including do-as-I-do imitation, deferred imitation, and selective imitation, but in two previous studies they have also shown an eagerness to copy causally irrelevant actions. This so-called overimitation is prevalent in humans but is totally absent in great apes. Whereas in one of two previous studies dogs copied actions from an experimenter (Johnston, Holden, & Santos in Developmental Science, 20, e12460, 2017), in the other a reasonable number of the dogs copied the irrelevant actions from their human caregiver (Huber, Popovová, Riener, Salobir, & Cimarelli in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018).

Would dogs copy irrelevant actions from their human caregiver?

Companion dogs learn easily from humans, including human behavior, human communication, and some aspects of the human-made environment. They benefit from having the opportunity to learn from humans and are able to spontaneously synchronize their behavior with that of their caregiver. Here, we tested whether pet dogs would show a special form of observational learning, one that has been considered uniquely human.

The Other End of the Leash: An Experimental Test to Analyze How Owners Interact with Their Pet Dogs.

It has been suggested that the way in which owners interact with their dogs can largely vary and influence the dog-owner bond, but very few objective studies, so far, have addressed how the owner interacts with the dog. The goal of the present study was to record dog owners' interaction styles by means of objective observation and coding. The experiment included eight standardized situations in which owners of pet dogs were asked to perform specific tasks including both positive (i.

Social Behavior of Pet Dogs Is Associated with Peripheral OXTR Methylation.

Oxytocin is a key modulator of emotional processing and social cognitive function. In line with this, polymorphisms of genes involved in oxytocin signaling, like the oxytocin receptor () gene, are known to influence social behavior in various species. However, to date, no study has investigated environmental factors possibly influencing the epigenetic variation of the gene and its behavioral effects in dogs.

DNA methylation patterns of behavior-related gene promoter regions dissect the gray wolf from domestic dog breeds.

A growing body of evidence highlights the relationship between epigenetics, especially DNA methylation, and population divergence as well as speciation. However, little is known about how general the phenomenon of epigenetics-wise separation of different populations is, or whether population assignment is, possible based on solely epigenetic marks. In the present study, we compared DNA methylation profiles between four different canine populations: three domestic dog breeds and their ancestor the gray wolf.

Dog Owners' Interaction Styles: Their Components and Associations with Reactions of Pet Dogs to a Social Threat.

The bond dogs develop with their owner received increased attention in the last years but no study aimed at characterizing the way in which owners interact with their dogs in their daily life and how this might influence dog behavior. In order to examine how dog owners interact with their dogs, we first analyzed the behavior of 220 dog owners in 8 different standardized situations involving the owner-dog dyad. We extracted 3 behavioral factors related to "," "," and ".