Penelope is an optimist

This new study makes me chuckle. Apparently some dogs hurry to a location where there might or might not be a small amount of food in a bowl and some don’t. The optimists hurry and the pessimists don’t. Those same optimist dogs are less likely to suffer from separation anxiety and tear the place up or howl uncontrollably when their owners are out.

When Penelope was a pup she once chewed up a bean bag chair and spread the little foam (fake beans) all over the family room while we were away. She also chewed on the wood desk and a few other things. She slept in a kennel and we put her in there when we went out. Once she was about two she never did anything destructive again, but continued to sleep in her kennel with the door open. The kennel is long gone now but she sleeps on her dog bed which was placed in its spot. She happily greets us at the door when we come home. She is a good dog and an optimist I guess. Who knew?

The findings emerged from tests involving 24 dogs taken in by two re-homing centres. The scientists first assessed each animal to see how they would react to being left alone, which can lead to undesirable behaviours – such as barking or chewing – in about 50 per cent of cases.

The researchers then tested each dog for their levels of "optimism" based on how quickly they would walk or run to a bowl that may or may not contain a small amount of food. The bowl would be positioned ambiguously between two other positions in the room where the dogs had learned what to expect – one where the bowl would always contain food, the other where it would always be empty.

"Dogs that ran fast to these ambiguous locations, as if expecting the positive food reward, were classed as making relatively 'optimistic' decisions. Interestingly, these dogs

tended to be the ones who also showed least anxiety-like behaviour when left alone for a short time," Professor Mendl said.

Click on the “these dogs” link above to an article about the study. Don’t read too much into it, the researchers admit it needs more testing and they only had 24 dogs in the study. I still think it is funny, like a grade school science project. One of our kids did a study on if you can teach an old dog new tricks and IQ testing in dogs.

Lou