Summary: Do Dogs Truly Have Human-Like Social Skills

Throughout the years there has been a magnitude of studies and tests done to see if dogs truly have human-like social skills. The article that this essay will focus on is written by Brain Hare and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In the article, it discusses various reasons as to why dogs do have social qualities that are similar to that of humans. After reading and analyzing this article, I truly believe that dogs do indeed have human-like social skills. People tend to wonder as to if dogs are just great cue readers, meaning that they are just very good at following wherever the human points. Studies have been done to prove that this accusation is certainly false. One of the first experiments was having a human hide some food in a random spot where then a control procedure was used to make sure that the dog wouldn't be able to use smell to find the hidden object. The dogs then found the food according to different levels. The first level was a human pointing at the target, second level was human just looking at the target, third level was nodding to the target and the last level was the human placing a marker in front of the target location (Hare and Tomasello, 2005). The dogs showed great comprehension

In a very simplistic game of fetch, the dog will usually bring the ball back to the human on whichever side their face is on. Based upon another study done, “when dogs are forced to choose between two humans with food, they prefer to beg from a human whose head and eyes are visible and are not covered with either a blindfold or a bucket— something chimpanzees do not do spontaneously.” (Hare and Tomasello, 2005) This is just another instance proving that dogs have and are adapting to human-like social skills. It is very convenient in this article when they compare and contrast the dogs with chimpanzees, it makes the reader genuinely see the differences between the