“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive”
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Dogs don’t go “woof”
For a study that was originally supposed to focus on vocalizations produced by dogs when interacting with their owners, only two out of the 25 individuals visited ended up barking during their recordings. This low amount of vocalizations could be due to the nature of the experiment not being the best to provoke these types of behaviors (as some dogs vocalized during the setup of the recording equipment and after the experiment was done).
The use of snacks as the favoured item of interest could also be another unconsistent factor, as the hunger of the animal at the moment of the experiment could influence its interest in the food.
Another possibility could be that these dogs were simply accustomed by the owners to reduce the frequency of their vocalizations, as this can be seen as an unwanted behavior by most owners.
Dog-Owner dyad interaction during a request situation
Our aim for this study was to find if dogs exhibited more contact-seeking behaviors with their owners, when put in a situation where they would need to ask their owner for help.
As we saw in the Results section, there was a significant increase in the amount of time a dog spent looking at the tripod during the request phase, when comparing to the free-talk phase. There was also a significantly increased rate of gaze-alternation behaviors in the request phase.
Both of these results support our hypothesis, as gaze alternation events are associated with contact-seeking behaviors, and the increase in time spent looking at the tripod when the object of interest was placed on top shows that the dogs were at least mildly interested in the object used during the experiment.
What we could have done differently
As the selection of the subjects for this experiment was based on the original, unachieved aims, a future recreation of this study could be done without following the restrictions of only having female owners and having dogs of any size. This would allow for a larger, more varied sample, which would help verify the meaning of the significant results of this experiment.