Dog saves abandoned human child
Reuters:
A newborn baby abandoned outdoors in winter by her 14-year-old mother was found safe in a dog pen with a mother dog and her brood of puppies near the city of La Plata, Argentine media reported on Friday.Dogs seem to have compassion for babies that continues to surprise us. It reminds me of the story of the founding of Rome where the twins Romulus and Remus were said to be nursed by a wolf. My guess is the dog was not a pit bull.Farmer Fabio Anze found the naked baby girl on Thursday, being kept warm among his dog China's puppies, La Nacion newspaper said. Anze called the police and the baby was taken to a hospital.
Egidio Melia, director of the Melchor Romero hospital, told television and newspaper reporters that the baby was just a few hours old when she was found, and was in good health although she had some bruises.
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[there are better sources for this, but this is all i had time to pull up]
ReplyDeletewww.redorbit.com/news/science/1529182/human_contact_teaches_dog_morals/
Human Contact Teaches Dog Morals
Scientists say dogs are becoming increasingly more intelligent and are even learning morals from living in close contact with humans.
The fact that dogs' play rarely escalates into a fight shows the animals abide by social rules, they say.
One study observed dogs in an experimental setting where when they held up a paw, they were rewarded with a food treat, but when a lone dog was asked to raise its paw but received no treat, the researchers found it begged for up to 30 minutes.
Researchers found when they tested two dogs together but rewarded only one, the dog which missed out soon stopped playing the game.
“Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity. I would prefer not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might,” said Dr. Friederike Range, of the University of Vienna, who led the study.
More than 200 experts curious to discuss what is going on inside the mind of a dog attended the first Canine Science Forum in Budapest.
Many believe human's inclination to invest dogs with human-like states of mind isn't as unscientific as it might appear.
Domestic dogs evolved from grey wolves as recently as 10,000 years ago.
Dr. Peter Pongracz from Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and colleagues have produced evidence dog barks contain information that people can understand.
They’re research suggests even people who have never owned a dog can recognize the emotional 'meaning' of barks produced in various situations, such as when playing, left alone and confronted by a stranger.
They’ve developed a new computer program that can aggregate hundreds of barks recorded in various settings and boil them down to their basic acoustic ingredients.
Each of the different types of bark has distinct patterns of frequency, tonality and pulsing, and an artificial neural network can use these features to correctly identify a bark it has never encountered before, the researchers said.
New Scientist magazine said this is further evidence that barking conveys information about a dog's mental state.
People can correctly identify aggregated barks as conveying happiness, loneliness or aggression, they found.
Pongracz said even children from the age of six who have never had a dog recognize these patterns.
They say dogs can also understand some aspects of human communication.
Dr. Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University in Japan described a soon to be published work that examined what is going on inside a dog's mind when it hears a stranger's voice.
She played dogs a series of recordings of unfamiliar voices - both male and female - with each voice followed by a photo of a human face on a screen.
She noticed that if the gender of the face did not match that of the voice, the dogs stared longer, a sign that their expectations had been violated.
“This suggests dogs generate an internal visual representation of a male or female correlated with the voice,” said Takaoka. She suggests that this ability to infer information about a person from their voice alone might help dogs communicate with people.
The term "theory of behavior" may describe a dogs' apparent insight, said Dr. Alexandra Horowitz from Barnard College in New York
“I think there is a massive territory between a theory of mind and a theory of behavior,” she said.
Her study shows that when dogs play together, they use appropriate signals for grabbing attention or signaling the desire to play depending on their playmate's apparent level of attention, such as whether it is facing them or side-on.
She said such behavior could be interpreted as mind reading, but a simpler explanation is that dogs are reading body language and reacting in stereotyped ways.
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is it really any wonder that they pull us out of fires, bark to wake us, save babies, give their lives to save their owners when the owners are attacked (even if they are a tiny dog which would never survive or fight that other any other time), smell cancer, and are all around mans best companions?
remember what Groucho Marx said.
Outside of a dog, a book is mans best friend, inside a dog, its too dark to read.
:)