LinkyPost - Envy

[guppiecat]

Take a moment and read this article.

Then tell me where it proves that the envy that dogs feel "comes in a simpler form than what we and our primate cousins feel".

The nearest I can see is that they say "in contrast to primates, the dogs never rejected food ... so there is a fundamental difference in the behavior of the primates and the dogs.", which doesn't seem to me, to in any way invalidate or reduce the emotions of the dogs.

In fact, it seems to me to be yet another example of horrible science reporting. It's already known that different species of primates will behave differently towards food and that it's not a mark of intelligence to do so, so much different weighting in how the brain prioritizes things. It seems like it would be much more reasonable to hypothesize that dogs are weighted for consuming food and not causing offense towards higher ranking members of the pack than it would be think "the dogs don't react like primates, therefore they experience simpler emotions".

Someone in this experiment is acting like an idiot... and I don't think it was the dogs.

(Why do I keep reading these science news sites?)

ETA: The story has also been picked up by National Geographic and it clarifies things a bit. Basically, the jealousy experiments with primates could become more scientifically complex because they were able to fine-tune the methods to an extent that they couldn't with dogs. I still find fault with the conclusion that dogs are somehow "less evolved" than primates, but the majority seems to be with the reporting over at LiveScience.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

While I can believe this is the first time they've run experiments to demonstrate this, it's known by anybody who spends time with animals that some of them have fairly complex emotional lives. I suppose one could be so wedded to scientific method that one wouldn't think of using the verb "to know" to describe that; but the way they wrote this article makes them sound stupid.

Seems to me they did show primates exhibiting bigger emotional reactions -- emotion overriding a primary need like food is pretty big. And they did not show dogs exhibiting that level. This is all at a simple enough level that it doesn't give us much picture of the inside of their heads yet.

[guppiecat]

Emotion overriding food does not indicate more powerful emotions. While that is one possible conclusion, another would be that the animal exhibiting the behavior is biologically less dependent on food than one whose emotions cannot override the eating drive.

This would be expected in a species that evolved to forage for food (eat throughout the day) when compared to a species that tends to get one large caloric intake every few days (pack hunting).

But as per my edit, the big problem is with the crappy reporting.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Dogs, being pack hunters (meaning big piles of food not too often, with competition always present to eat it), should be exactly the ones that show such reactions, though.

Defining emotion, never mind quantifying it, is of course still a bit...difficult.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that it's idiotic pseudo-reporting--or pseudo-experimentation.

I don't know a lot about dogs--I've never lived with one. But unless you start with the assumption that dogs are emotional eaters, then the rest of it kind of falls apart.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Here's another take on what I think is the same study: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/12/08/dogs.jealousy/index.html

(The number of dogs seems to be different in every report.)