Your dog knows when you are lying

Well, not every dog breed is equally smart (ouch, this sounds dramatically unkind but really, studies have been done on intelligence by breed and it varies quite a bit if we are to believe the researchers), but generally speaking, dogs are clever animals. Research has shown that they can understand our human speech. Okay, you don't have to read The Stone Bridal Bed by Harry Mulisch, but they can recognize and also understand human language. To a certain extent.

Dogs can also see on your face whether you are angry or happy. And it has also been scientifically proven that dogs have a sense of jealousy, something that psychologists find particularly interesting because they consider jealousy a sentiment that they attribute only to the human species since you need to be able to apply self-reflection for it.

Now, Kyoto University in Japan has proven that dogs can tell when you are lying. They did this by exposing 34 dogs to a few rounds of research. Take two plastic boxes, one containing tasty meat and the other empty. A man pointed to the filled box and then showed the dog that he had pointed to the filled box. In the next round, the man tricked the dog and pointed to the empty box. After this, the ‘reveal’ followed. In the third round, you could see that the dog ignored the man's instruction because he had learned that he could not rely on that person.

I wonder if this also applies to non-food-related issues. I don't think my Monti raises an eyebrow when I say that that kimono from Pauw was a sale item, but it's a nice story nonetheless.

Hooray for our four-legged friends.