It could lead to novel training methods less dependent on food rewards.

Researchers at the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, have found that puppies - but not kittens and wolf pups - tend to spontaneously imitate human actions, even when they are not rewarded with food or toys.

The trial, which took place at the university and at the owners’ homes, involved 42 dog puppies of various breeds, 39 kittens and eight wolf pups, all of which were socialised and living in human families. They had an average age of around 13 weeks old.

The subjects were initially observed to see how they behaved when an unfamiliar object (a box and Wobbler Kong) was placed in the room with them. The experimenter then knelt in front of the subject, and as soon as they had its attention (a fundamental requisite for social learning), they demonstrated two different actions with the object: touching it with a hand or nose.

While the experimenter demonstrated the action, the subject was held by its owner, and then released to explore for 25 seconds, or until it interacted with the target object.

Typically, it took four to five times as long to get the attention of the wolf pups and kittens compared to the puppies, who responded almost immediately.

Before the action was demonstrated, most subjects touched the object with its nose, and afterwards, results showed that in 70 per cent of the trials, puppies and wolf pups replicated the demonstrated actions twice as much as kittens. It was only the puppies that tended to imitate the action with the a body part homologue to the human experimenter e.g. paw - hand.

The researchers are not surprised by the results and co-author of the study, Andrea Temesi, explains: “While dogs’ and wolves’ ancestor was a group-living, social animal, with intense within-group cooperation for survival, cats’ ancestor was a solitary hunter”.

Dogs and cats both live in human families today, but dogs’ history of cooperation with humans throughout their 20,000-40,000 year history of domestication could explain puppies’ tendency to observe and mimic the actions of people, even when they are not being rewarded with food.

Cats have been domesticated for a much shorter period of time (10,000 years) and their process of domestication has been very different; they have been solitary hunters of mice and rats, and have not had to communicate or cooperate with humans.

Co-author, Ákos Pogány said: “We believe that our findings can form the basis for the development of novel training methods that rely on the tendency of puppies to learn by observation and to imitate human actions. This way, dog training can be less dependent on the use of food rewards and more able to take advantage of dogs’ natural propensity for social learning”

The study, ‘Spontaneous action matching in dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups’ has been published in Scientific Reports.

Image (C) Eötvös Loránd University.