More to a dog than tricks

"Since looking behavior has an important function in initializing and maintaining communicative interaction in human communication systems, we suppose that … the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has led to complex form of dog-human communication that cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialization."

So how did the dog/wolf split allow dogs to develop superior people skills?

This question led Hare to Siberia where scientists are running an evolutionary experiment that's decades old.

Back in 1959 Russian researcher Dimitir Balyaev and his colleagues began domesticating foxes in Siberia. Since that time a population of foxes had been selectively bred on one factor alone – their behavior towards humans.

Foxes who approached humans at a seven-month-old trial meeting were allowed to breed while others who appeared afraid or aggressive were not.

After 20 generations the fox population began showing signs of domestication, such as approaching humans and even wagging their tails. The animals are now tame enough to serve as house pets.

But the trial did more than note their behavior. The foxes, like many domesticated animals, began to exhibit curly tails, floppy ears, and smaller tooth and bone size, although none of these were selection criteria.

Hare asked himself, could cognition be a breeding by-product like these physical changes in the foxes? Just as you have accidental byproducts like curly tails and floppy ears, could you become smarter as an accidental byproduct of selection on 'niceness'?

In 2004 the magazine Science published a break through paper by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany after they tested Rico, a German border collie.

Rico was shown to have an extensive vocabulary and could do something scientists thought only humans could do – figure out by elimination that a sound he has never heard before must be the name of a toy he has never seen before.

The owners of nine year-old Rico said the dog knew the names of about 200 objects – his collection of toys, balls and stuffed animals.

In the first experiment, the researchers put 10 of Rico's toys in one room and Rico and his owner in the other room. The researchers then instructed the owner to order Rico to fetch two randomly selected objects.