Can you imagine your dog being able to understand you without you saying a single word? A recent scientific study revealed that dogs They have the incredible ability to understand words even if their owners don’t pronounce them. This discovery surprised experts and animal lovers and changed the perception of the cognitive ability of pets.
Dogs understand different words
A study published in the journal Plos One indicates that dogs trained to use sound boxes (buttons that, when pressed, reproduce a word) understand words like ‘play’ or ‘go out’ it doesn’t matter whether these are spoken by their owners or by the box.
These animals don’t just read their owners’ body language. They are able to understand words and react to them even if they are not spoken by their own masters.
The research was conducted with two experiments in 2022In one of them, the researchers visited the homes of 30 dogs from different parts of the United States. During the analysis, they checked the responses of these pets to the sounds of the buttons on the soundboard.
In the second observation, the citizen science. 29 dog owners carried out the tests themselves at home under the remote guidance of the research team.
The study, which is part of a research project involving thousands of dogs around the world, concluded: “The results demonstrate first of all the importance of studying pets in the domestic environment to better understand your abilities; and secondly, that dogs answer the the words themselves and not just the body signals associated with them“, says one of the authors, Federico Rossano, a researcher at the University of California in San Diego.
The “sixth sense” of these animals
The dogs They don’t just respond to basic commands. These animals are able to understand certain words and mentally associate them with objects, according to a study from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, published in Current biology.
These animals seem to have a sixth sense that allows them perceive aspects of the environment and human emotions. According to experts, dogs can detect bad intentions in people thanks to their ability to interpret hidden signals such as body language, tone of voice, and smells. Finally, dogs can also pick up on details such as hormonal changes, natural disasters, and more.
