Latest news with #animalbehavior
The Independent
4 days ago
- Science
- The Independent
Researchers find your dog might actually have a preferred TV show
Researchers at Auburn University in Alabama studied the TV viewing habits of 453 dogs aged between four months and 16 years. Their findings indicated that excitable dogs were more likely to react as if TV stimuli existed in a 3D environment, while fearful dogs responded more to non-animal sounds such as car noises or doorbells. Separate scientific research revealed that dogs' comprehension of human speech significantly improves when spoken at a slower tempo. This slower speech rate matches the receptive abilities of dogs, allowing them to better understand commands. The study, published in the Plos Biology journal, analysed vocal sounds from 30 dogs and humans speaking in various contexts across five languages.
The Independent
5 days ago
- Science
- The Independent
Dogs prefer certain TV shows depending on their personality type, researchers find
Dogs prefer certain TV shows depending on whether their personality is nervous or excitable, researchers in the US have revealed. Auburn University experts in Alabama recruited 453 dogs, aged from four months to 16 years old, and their owners to record their responses to different TV shows. 'The survey investigated trends in the dogs' TV viewing habits, including whether the owner tried to teach the dog to watch TV, the average number of hours per week the owner's TV is switched on, and the average number of seconds the dog pays attention to the TV,' researchers told The Times. 'Dogs who were more excitable were more likely to exhibit behaviours suggesting an expectation that the television stimulus exists in the 3D environment,' said the researchers, whose study was published in Scientific Reports. 'Furthermore, dogs who displayed more fearful tendencies were more likely to respond to the non-animal stimuli, for example, car [or] doorbell.' Last year, scientists revealed the trick to getting your pet dog to understand what you are saying. The research, published in October, claimed people should try speaking a little bit slower. It concludes that dogs' comprehension of human speech relies on a slower tempo. Despite not being able to produce human sounds, man's best friend is capable of responding to human speech. When people talk slowly, it matches the receptive abilities of animals, allowing dogs to better understand commands, researchers say. Writing in the Plos Biology journal, the authors said: 'Comparative exploration of neural and behavioural responses to speech reveals that comprehension in dogs relies on a slower speech rhythm tracking than humans', even though dogs are equally sensitive to speech content and prosody.' They hypothesise that people may adjust their speech rate 'as means to improve communication efficacy'. Eloise Deaux, of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and colleagues analysed the vocal sounds of 30 dogs, and the sounds of 27 humans across five languages speaking to other people, and 22 humans across those languages speaking to dogs.
ABC News
18-07-2025
- Health
- ABC News
Self-medicating species: Animals that say yes to drugs
It turns out self-medicating and herbal remedies are not exclusive to humans. From cats eating grass, to elephants making medicinal tea in their throat pouch — the animal world has its own prescriptions. And naturally, there's plenty of digging through poo involved in this scientific research! Featuring: Dr Kevin Feeney, Central Washington University. Dr Kevin Feeney, Central Washington University. Professor Michael Huffman, University of Kyoto. Professor Michael Huffman, University of Kyoto. Dr Sophia Daoudi-Simison, Newcastle University UK. Production: Ann Jones, Presenter / Producer. Ann Jones, Presenter / Producer. Nick Kilvert, Presenter/ Producer. Nick Kilvert, Presenter/ Producer. Petria Ladgrove, Producer. Petria Ladgrove, Producer. Mastering: Angela Grant. This episode of What the Duck?! was first broadcast in 2022 and was produced on the land of the Wadawarrung and the Kaurna people. Stream the brand-new series Dr Ann's Secret Lives on ABC iview.
BBC News
14-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
'They hold hands, they embrace, they kiss': The woman who changed our view of chimps
In 1960, Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking field study by living among chimpanzees in Tanzania. In 1986 she told the BBC how similar chimps and humans really are. On 14 July 1960, 65 years ago this week, a young English woman with no formal scientific background or qualifications stepped off a boat at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to begin what would become a pioneering study of wild chimpanzees. Her discoveries would not just revolutionise our understanding of animal behaviour but reshape the way we define ourselves as human beings. Although she was just 26 years old at the time, Jane Goodall had long dreamt of studying and living with animals. "Apparently, from the time I was about one and a half or two, I used to study insects, anything, and this gradually evolved and developed and grew and then I read books like Dr Dolittle and Tarzan, then it had to be Africa that was my goal," she told the BBC's Terry Wogan on his talk show in 1986. Upon finishing school, Goodall took a secretarial course while working as a waitress and as a film production assistant to fund her childhood ambition. By 1957, she had finally saved enough money to travel to see a friend in Nairobi, Kenya. While there, she arranged to meet the renowned Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist Professor Louis Leakey, merely with the hope of talking to him about animals. Leakey, whose secretary had recently left, was so impressed by Goodall's quiet determination and extensive self-taught knowledge of African wildlife that he offered her a job as his assistant at the natural history museum. Leakey would then become Goodall's mentor. "It was he who said, 'Well, I'm looking for someone to go and study chimpanzees because of the light their behaviour may shed on understanding early human behaviour,'" she told Wogan. Leakey viewed her lack of an academic science background as an advantage rather than a hindrance, believing her observations wouldn't be hemmed in by pre-existing scientific theories. Goodall would not be alone on her trip to the Gombe Reserve. To comply with the colonial safety regulations of the time, her mother Vanne came along as a chaperone. "Initially I wasn't allowed to be on my own," she told the BBC. "The British government as it then was said, 'No, this is absolutely almost amoral for a young girl to go out in the bush.' So, I had to choose a companion, and my mother came with me for three months." The first months proved to be tough going, with both Goodall and her mother, who were staying together in an ex-army camping tent, developing malaria. Even when Goodall was well enough to venture into the reserve, she could only go out with a local escort, and often at the sound of their approaching footsteps, the chimpanzees would simply vanish into the undergrowth. But as she learnt the forest trails and became used to moving through the dense terrain, "the authorities decided, well, I was crazy and I was OK", she said. Once she started hiking on her own in the forested hills, she began to catch sight of the elusive primates through her binoculars from a peak overlooking two valleys. It was then that Goodall began to adopt an unorthodox immersive approach. Each day she would edge ever nearer to their feeding area with the hope of being able to sit among the chimpanzees and study them up close in their natural habitat. Chimps use tools and communicate like humans "I wore the same-coloured clothes every day and I think the most important thing was I never pushed it," she told BBC's Witness History in 2014. "I never tried to get too close. I would wait by a fruiting tree, where I knew the chimpanzees were coming, and when they left, I didn't follow them. Not to start with, because I felt that was pushing my luck. So gradually they came to accept that I was harmless." As the apes lost their wariness of her, Goodall was able to sit for hours, patiently observing their behaviour and their hitherto unrecognised complex social system. She discovered that the chimpanzees were not in fact vegetarian as previously thought, but omnivorous, and would communicate with each other to hunt for meat. She was able to witness the closeness of their family bonds and how each animal's individuality would influence their behaviour. "In chimp society, a female can be mated by all the males, or she can be led away and kept by one, and the males have very close bonds," she told Wogan. "They patrol the boundary of the community territory, they keep strangers out, they bring young new-blood females in, and all of them act as nice, tolerant, gentle, protective fathers to all the infants inside that community." Instead of using a numbering system for her subjects, as was traditional in a research project, Goodall instead gave them names, recognising each animal's unique personality: She named one male chimp David Greybeard. It was while watching David Greybeard that she first saw him fashioning and using tools – activities that scientists had previously thought were exclusive to human beings. Indeed, at the time, toolmaking, which requires abstract thought to conceive of a tool's use in a future situation, was considered a defining characteristic of being human. "[Chimpanzees] use more different objects as tools than any creature except ourselves. For example, a little twig from which they may strip the leaves, thus they modify it, for feeding on termites," she told Wogan. "A long stick from which they peel the bark, feeding on a very vicious biting ant and they chew it. Crumpled leaves for supping water out of a little hole when they can't reach it with their lips, or for wiping blood off their bodies. And weapons: stones hurled, branches used for intimidation or for clubbing." At the time, the idea was revolutionary, challenging years of conventional scientific thinking. Since then, research has shown evidence of tool use across the animal kingdom, from the Indonesian octopus who uses coconut shells discarded by humans as armour against predators, to New Caledonian Crows who bend twigs and wires with their beaks to create hooks, enabling them to pull larvae out of tree bark. As Goodall sat silently observing the chimpanzees, she began to see how similar their familial bonds and their non-verbal communication were to those of humans. "If chimps meet after a separation, they hold hands, they embrace, they kiss," she said. Understanding of this commonality with humans raised "new questions about the way that we are bringing up our children in the West", she told Wogan. A common ancestor "Well, if we leave a child crying at night, if we leave a child for long hours in a playpen, if we take a child to a daycare centre where there is a constant turnover of people, we may bring up a child that is highly intelligent. But from our experience of chimps who've had difficult upbringings, there is a suggestion that that child when it is an adult may have difficulty in making close relationships with others – may find it harder to cope in a stressful situation. This is very important," she said. Goodall recognised how closely chimpanzees' ritualised behaviours and emotions can resemble our own. And how, like ours, their destructive and violent impulses could lead to brutal killings. "We discovered after the first 10 years that although chimps were very like us in their friendly ways, they're also like us in the fact they can become very aggressive. We found that under certain situations, there can be cannibalism and also an inter-community interaction that in some way is like a primitive form of human warfare," she said. More like this:• The first men to conquer Everest's 'death zone'• The man who created Charlie Brown and Snoopy• The powerful music biopic – with a CGI chimp hero In 1962, with Leakey's encouragement, despite not possessing an undergraduate degree, she began a PhD based on her exceptionally detailed findings. The same year, the National Geographic Society sent a Dutch wildlife photographer and film-maker, Hugo van Lawick, to document her work, which resulted in a 1965 documentary, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. Narrated by Orson Welles, the film helped showcase her discoveries to the wider public. Van Lawick would become her first husband, and in 1967, the year after she gained her doctorate, she gave birth to a son, Hugo, whom they nicknamed Grub. They built him a protective shelter to enable Goodall to remain with him and keep him safe while she continued her field work. "Chimpanzees are hunters just like we are," she told Wogan. "They hunt co-operatively, they hunt medium-size mammals. There had been records of them hunting human children, just as humans hunt chimps, and so when he was very tiny and this was before he could walk, he was in a sort of caged-in veranda, and we always had to have people with him." Goodall's trailblazing research into primatology presented evidence that humans are not separate from the rest of animal kingdom, but that Homo sapiens and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. Research has since shown that chimpanzees are incredibly genetically close to humans, sharing about 98.6% of our DNA. "This is the thing," said Goodall. "Behaviour we see in man today and chimp today was probably in that common ancestor, and therefore we can imagine Stone Age people having long friendly relationships between family members and using little twigs to feed and embracing one another. I like to think of that." -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
5 Strange Things Your Dog Can Predict—And Science Backs It Up
5 Strange Things Your Dog Can Predict—And Science Backs It Up originally appeared on Parade Pets. You likely recognize that look: your dog's wide-eyed stare 10 minutes before you grab the car keys. Or maybe it's the way your dog slinks under the bed right before that sudden rumble of No, it happens over and over with a certain frequency. Your dog's predictive behavior may cause you to stop and wonder whether your dog is psychic, but can that be truly the case?Dogs have evolved alongside humans for tens of thousands of years, and in that time, we must factor in that they've become astonishing readers of our behaviors and emotions. This can make them appear as if they have a sixth that with their keen sensory awareness, finely tuned pattern recognition and a profound attunement to your habits and dogs appear to have a canine crystal ball that allows them to predict several strange are several of the many strange things that dogs can predict—and that are actually backed up by unusual as it may sound, dogs can predict illnesses in humans. In better terms, dogs can sniff out diseases because they change the body's chemical smell, dogs are able to detect physiological changes associated with illness, such as changes in body temperature, fluctuations in blood sugar levels and shifts in emotional are some of the medical conditions that dogs can predict: Dogs predict blood sugar changes before a glucose monitor can. They can 'detect scents associated with hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia as well as behavioral changes associated with blood sugar abnormalities,' according to a 2024 study. In a 2015 Italian study, German Shepherds were able to detect prostate cancer in urine samples. In 2024, a novel study showed a Belgian Malinois capable of smelling breast cancer from body secretions. Studies show that dogs can alert owners of upcoming seizure episodes 'within time periods varying from 15 to 45 minutes prior to a seizure occurring.' Dogs are now even trained to be seizure alert service dogs. A 2018 study conducted in London concluded that 'dogs can detect malaria by sniffing people's socks' before symptoms start. A Labrador Retriever was used as the sniffer dog in the study. 'Dogs can be trained to reliably detect the odour of PD,' reports a 2023 study. Scientists believe that when properly trained, dogs can predict Parkinson's disease years before symptoms emerge. Dogs are able to 'discriminate between sweat samples from symptomatic COVID-19 individuals and those from asymptomatic COVID-19 negative individuals,' says a 2020 study. Dogs can predict both pregnancy and labor. More accurately, they can sense the scent of many hormones and pheromones associated with pregnancy and impending childbirth.'There are many stories of dogs changing their behavior when pet parent(s) become human parents,' according to PetMD. These stories have scientific of the hormones that surge during pregnancy and prior to childbirth include progesterone, estrogen, relaxin, human placental lactogen and hormones alter the person's natural scent, and the dog's nose detects the change. Studies show that dogs have '220 million olfactory receptors in their nasal cavity,' whereas humans only have 5 also likely that dogs sense cues beyond what their noses catch, including changes in behavior like going to the toilet more frequently and throwing up in the 'dogs have an extremely acute sense of hearing, so it's possible that they can hear a fetal heartbeat as early as the 28th week of pregnancy,' says Rachel Barrack, DVM, in an article for The Bump. Old records from ancient Greece show that dogs fled the city of Helice before an earthquake hit. Similar stories of dogs leaving before natural disasters strike circulate in we know that dogs can sense natural disasters, thanks to their heightened senses. Dogs recognize changes in barometric pressure (the amount of air pressure in the atmosphere) and electrostatic charge (static electricity).Additionally, when the air pressure drops, scent particles move downward and collect at ground level, making them easier for dogs to pick up. At the same time, static electricity builds up in the dog's fur, creating small shocks, while the dog's nose detects electrical currents in the also plays a role in predicting natural occurrences. Dogs can hear rocks crumbling under the ground's surface and thunder rumbling from several miles to the American Kennel Club, 'there's no conclusive scientific evidence yet that dogs can predict tremors.' Despite the lack of scientific explanation, 'animals seem to sense the impending danger hours in advance,' says Prof. Dr. Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute of Animal on anecdotal reports and observations, scientists believe that dogs can predict various natural phenomena, like earthquakes, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, floods and tsunamis. Dogs predict human emotions. Relying on subtle changes in a person's chemical makeup, body language and facial expression, dogs are able to sense mood swings and emotions.A 2021 study examined the behavioral responses of dogs after being exposed to sweat samples from individuals who were happy and frightened. The tested dogs were more social toward the 'happy' people and avoided the 'scared' can also sense the presence of "negative" people. Negative people tend to be emotionally unstable and have unique chemosignals, explains a are so sensitive, intuitive and predictive of human emotions that they seem to catch them as if they were contagious. A 2019 study found that dogs can mirror their owners' according to an Evolutionary Human Sciences study, 'Dogs can respond functionally to emotional expressions and can use the emotional information they obtain from others during problem-solving.' From ancient myths to modern-day folklore, there's a historical link between dogs and the spirit world. In Greek mythology, the three-headed Cerberus guarded the underworld's entrance. In Egyptian belief, Anubis guided souls into the afterlife. In Celtic folklore, dogs were seen as protectors of other to Norse legends, Freya, the goddess of death, rode the crest of a storm on a chariot pulled by giant cats. As natural enemies, dogs would bark and howl when she despite chilling stories, confessions on social media and hard-to-explain events, there is no scientific evidence that dogs can see ghosts or sense other paranormal Horowitz, PhD, a senior research fellow and adjunct associate professor at Barnard College, says, 'What I suspect is happening here is people are looking at dog behavior and wanting an explanation, and being reluctant to look at the more obvious ones,' in an article for Reader's research shows that 45% of Americans believe in the paranormal. According to Kinship, 'So much of canine personality and behavior is unexplained that a dog seeing a ghost isn't entirely out of the question.'Up Next:Jenkins DW, Thompson KM, Goeddeke N. How Canines Can Assist Our Patients with Diabetes: Diabetes Alert Dogs: What Are Their Capabilities? J Am Podiatr Med Assoc. 2024 Belaid, I., Baya, M.F., Ben Ayed, S. et al. Transcutaneous canine breast cancer detection in Tunisia: a pilot study. BMC Cancer 24, 151 (2024) Grandjean D, Sarkis R, Lecoq-Julien C, et al. Can the detection dog alert on COVID-19 positive persons by sniffing axillary sweat samples? A proof-of-concept study. PLoS One. 2020 Dec Jenkins EK, DeChant MT, Perry EB. When the Nose Doesn't Know: Canine Olfactory Function Associated With Health, Management, and Potential Links to Microbiota. Front Vet Sci. 2018 Mar Semin GR, Scandurra A, Baragli P, Lanatà A, D'Aniello B. Inter- and Intra-Species Communication of Emotion: Chemosignals as the Neglected Medium. Animals (Basel). 2019 Albuquerque N, Resende B. Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions. Evol Hum Sci. 2022 5 Strange Things Your Dog Can Predict—And Science Backs It Up first appeared on Parade Pets on Jul 12, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade Pets on Jul 12, 2025, where it first appeared.
