I don’t know of any dogs who respond to pointing. The best I can do with a dog to divert their attention elsewhere is to act like I’ve thrown something in that direction, or tapping on the floor to indicate a dropped food morsel they’ve miraculously missed (a learned behavior, too). No doubt they can be trained to respond to pointing, and no doubt other apes can too.
I believe that a lot of animals respond to any show of teeth as aggressive. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that even dogs don’t innately recognize a human smile as happy, but have to learn it. On the other hand, recognizing a human smile as a good thing seems to be instinctive in humans. (Sorry, don’t have a cite, but believe I’ve read this in a number of different books. Detecting and looking at faces is certainly instinctive and present in newborns; I’m a bit less sure about the smile part.)
Dogs can not only read human expressions, they can apparently do it better than any other animal including our closest relatives like chimpanzees. Wolves are not even nearly as good at it even though they are the same species. Dog owners are not imagining it. The science backs it up.
All wolves are wild animals. There is no such thing as a tamed wolf. People may have wolves as pets, but they are taking a huge gamble. Hybred wolves/dogs are even more dangerous because they lack the fear of human beings. I don’t argue your point about how wolves with a lot of human interaction have a more limited ability to interpret human expressions than dogs. That may be because of their wildness. The one rule that I remember not to break is “Don’t look wolves in the eyes.”
Well, it isn’t “responding to facial instructions”, but when we had this cute little jumping spider wandering around the desk at work somebody here told me that they’re very visual spiders and that if you put your fingers up to your mouth and wiggle them around, the spider may wiggle their papae back in a similar fashion.
And damned if it didn’t do it. No idea what it thought I was saying, though.
Yes. I did not mean “tamed” in any other sense than “raised in captivity, hence have had the opportunity to learn about humans”. Wolves are highly intelligent extremely powerful wild carnivores from beginning to end, and amateurs who keep them are in the Grizzly Man category in my view. I could tell you stories.
The point I was making was that wolves and dogs differ in this way, although very closely related. This appears to show that it is not an innate trait of canids, only of dogs.
We have have a large tortise,female, who lives in our warm kitchen in the winter, we just figured out today, after years, she comes a running- when only my wife comes into the area- by using hearing NOT sight just like our dogs, yes we did some weird cool experiments!
The many people who’ve done experiments in this field don’t seem to think that’s the explanation. Besides, dogs open their mouths to show happiness too, but that’s not how they show submission.
Indeed. I had believed that dogs couldn’t understand pointing. My observation had been that they followed hand movement but not a stationary pointing finger. But I was wrong and recently Blackjack has shown me he can follow my stationary finger to find something.
Good link, thanks, and also more helpful for the OP’s question than most of the posts here.
There’s not quite enough detail, but I get the impression that dogs can be trained to respond to pointing. In my experience, by default, they don’t understand pointing: they look at the end of your hand. But I have no difficulty believing they can be trained to respond to pointing – and perhaps, trained very quickly.
I like the possible explanation proposed in that article: not that dogs and chimps have a different ability to understand gestures, but that dogs and chips have different attitudes about watching humans to achieve their goals. However, that’s somewhat contradicted by a later paragraph that says gun dogs and sheep dogs were better at it than other breeds.
I can call one of my cats name from across the room. He’ll lazily lift his head up and look in my direction. I’ll just stare at him and not say a word. He’ll start meowing non stop as I continue to sit there and not say a word.
Eventually he’ll get up, come jump in my lap and start to head butt me in the face. Once I start talking to him again, he’ll jump off my lap and return to his napping place.
For the life of me, I really wish I knew what is going through his mind when that happens.
Also, (And yes, I’m silly) one time after watching a Nat Geo special, the guy on the TV said dogs don’t generally like it when other critters show their teeth.
As an experiment, I tried this on my dog. I got right up in his face and grimaced as largely as I could, exposing as many of my pearly white as possible.
I don’t think he felt all that threatened as all he did was lick my face. (Yuk)
If Wikipedia is to be believed, during WW2 America tried to train attack dogs to attack Japanese soldiers, using Japanese volunteers, the idea being that just before an invasion of the Japanese mainland by human soldiers, waves of dogs would be released to run havoc. The program failed when it failed to find dogs that could be trained to be so aggressive. I think part of that was that the trainers and the dogs knew that there was no actual aggression during the training sessions so the dogs didn’t take it very seriously.
Gun dogs and sheep dogs are specifically selected for working closely with a handler, more than other types. To do their jobs they need to be able to correctly obey a stream of complex directions. Watch any retriever trial or stockdog trial and you’ll see what I mean. Lots of other breeds are selected for things like “chase down animals and kill them” or “run fast pulling a sled” so you can see why the former breeds do better at watching and interpreting humans.
I think facial expressions of animals are very important in how they interact or avoid one another in the wild. Showing of teeth or standing large with ears erect for instance. My belief is that animals in general are sensitive to facial expressions of other animals as well as humans. Chimps will interpet a smile as a growl so they can misinterpet.