According to University of California San Diego researchers Dr Christine Harris and Dr Caroline Prouvost, dogs feel jealousy too.
German Shepherd puppy. Image credit: Marilyn Peddle / CC BY 2.0.
It is commonly assumed that jealousy is unique to humans, partially because of the complex cognitions often involved in this emotion.
However, some researchers predict that jealousy, at its most basic level, might even exist in other social species, like the cognitively sophisticated dog.
To evaluate dogs’ jealous behaviors, Dr Harris and Dr Prouvost modified a test used to assess jealousy in 6-month old infants.
The scientists worked with 36 dogs in their own homes and videotaped the owners ignoring them in favor of a stuffed, animated dog or a jack-o-lantern pail.
In both these conditions, the owners were instructed to treat the objects as though they were real dogs – petting them, talking to them sweetly, etc.
In the third scenario, the owners were asked to read aloud a pop-up book that played melodies.
The dogs’ behavior was then analyzed for aggression, attention seeking, and/or interest in the owner or object.
Dogs were about twice as likely to push or touch the owner when the owner was interacting with the faux dog (78 %) as when the owner was attending to the pail (42 %).
Even fewer (22 %) did this in the book condition. About 30 % of the dogs also tried to get between their owner and the stuffed animal.
And while 25 % snapped at the ‘other dog,’ only one did so at the pail and book.
These results, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, support the idea that jealousy may have some primordial form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species: dogs.
“Many people have assumed that jealousy is a social construction of human beings or that it’s an emotion specifically tied to sexual and romantic relationships,” Dr Harris said.
“Our results challenge these ideas, showing that animals besides ourselves display strong distress whenever a rival usurps a loved one’s affection.”
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Harris CR, Prouvost C. 2014. Jealousy in Dogs. PLoS ONE 9 (7): e94597; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094597
