Puppies Understand You Even at a Young Age, Most Adorable Study of the Year Confirms

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Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2021

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Researchers in the happiest lab in the world tested 375 pups and found they connected with people by eight weeks

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0:29.3	platform. This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.
0:40.5	Dogs and their people.
0:43.8	Are you a good boy? Yes, you are.
0:46.8	We like to think our pooches can follow what we're telling them.
0:50.2	Go eat your bolly. Over there. Look at it. Good doggy.
0:55.0	Well, to some degree they can, even when they're young. Because a new study shows
1:00.3	that puppies are able to track human social cues at just eight weeks of age
1:05.7	before they've really spent much time with people. And their ability to do so
1:10.0	has strong roots in their genetics. The work appears in the journal Current Biology.
1:15.5	We have known for a long time that adult dogs are especially skilled in understanding
1:20.7	cooperative communication from humans. Emily Bray is a postdoctoral researcher at the University
1:26.4	of Arizona and the canine companions for independence. So, for example, they can spontaneously
1:32.3	follow a human pointing gesture. They're even better at it than apes, which are much more closely
1:37.7	related to us than canines are, evolutionarily speaking. So this begs the question of why.
1:44.0	Is it a skill that dogs pick up simply by spending time with people? Or is it a trait that was
1:50.1	selected for when dogs first became domesticated? To find out, Bray and her colleagues spent time
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