For blog post #2 I’m going to talk about Leo, and how his behavior could be explained by information from  “Grumpy Dogs Are Smart Learners-the Association between Dog-Owner Relationship and Dogs’ Performance in a Social Learning Task,” by  Péter Pongrácz primarily. To test this theory dog owners first had to take a test regarding their relationships with their dogs. In this test owners had to answer questions about the dogs’ natures and their relationship status with the dogs.Afterwards, there were 3 groups where one was a dog completing a task with no instruction, another being instructed by their owner, and the third group was instructed by the demonstrator group. Dogs that were “irritable” performed best when they were with the unfamiliar demonstrator group. However, dogs that were more obedient did best when they were with their owners. A subgroup of that category was split by dogs that were more self driven and didn’t look back at their owners much for help, while others needed much more reassurance from their owner.

 

Now, how does Leo fit into all of this? I haven’t taken the quiz, so I don’t know exactly what our relationship is. But, I feel like we have a good bond that he is dependent on, and he has a sweet, mellow personality. Since he hates strangers, I would definitely assume he would do better with me or my parents rather than the random demonstrator. He’s very lazy so he probably wouldn’t do great at the detour tests in general. As someone that has had multiple dogs throughout my life, I agree with the article’s claim that the dog-human relationship affects the social behavior of dogs. Overall his behavior would be categorized as obedient, however he is not a dog that is willing to tackle tasks on his own. Behaviors he has, like cowering away from cleaning people, but when we are around he will just stand by our side, or even become aggressive, are very confusing. I would love to see him do the experiment to fully understand his behaviors.

Pongrácz P;Rieger G;Vékony. “Grumpy Dogs Are Smart Learners-the Association between Dog-Owner Relationship and Dogs’ Performance in a Social Learning Task.” Animals : an Open Access Journal from MDPI, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 30 Mar. 2021, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33808379/.