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I was just outside of Dawson City talking with a dogsled racer named Peter. He was getting ready to harness his dogs and they were milling around in a friendly, excited manner. I reached over to pet a handsome, blue-eyed Siberian Husky, but stopped when Peter warned me “If you pet one, you have to pet them all. They get really jealous. If they think that one of them is getting more of anything, affection, food, or whatever, they turn into green-eyed monsters.” Jealousy and envy are common emotions in social settings. You might say it’s the art of counting the other person’s blessings instead of your own. In all social situations, there are inequities and some individuals come out better than others when it comes to rewards. Scientists tend to separate emotions into two categories: primary and secondary. Primary emotions, such as fear, anger, disgust, joy, and surprise, are considered to be universal. Secondary emotions guilt, shame, jealousy, and envy are thought to require mor
Treat a dog like a child and she might start acting like one, at least when it comes to a sense of fairness. According to a study conducted in the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Vienna, Austria, dogs, like children, think “no fair.” According to Friederike Range, lead researcher: “Animals react to inequity [and] to avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently.” This kind of social awareness in the pack can be traced back to dogs’ common ancestor, the wolf. Any dog owner can attest to their dog being more responsive when a reward is offered, but what if there are two dogs and only one is rewarded? The experiment, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences serial, involved pairs of dogs working with a human tester and a bowl filled half with sausage and half with bread. Each dog was asked to “give a paw” and then rewarded or not. When one dog received a reward and the other didn’t, the unrewarded canine stopped playing. But whe
Just how and when dogs originated has been the subject of much research. In one account, "Dogs originated from wolves domesticated in Europe, 19,000-32,000 years ago," based on DNA studies (2013). But other research points to many other.