Confirmed: Dogs can recognize other dogs on TV
A new study shows that dogs really do recognize themselves – and their own breed – on computer screens.
Ever wonder if your dog can recognize other dogs on TV?
It turns out they likely can.
Researchers in France have shown that dogs are able to pick their own kind off of computer screens.
They're also able to recognize their own breed.
Their work is the first to test whether a dog can recognize their own species, said Science Daily.
The study aimed at understanding if dogs could recognize their own species despite the enormous variety of dogs.
There are estimated to be about 400 pure breeds of dogs.
Showing the dogs pictures of their own breeds along with others at the same time, researchers were able to determine that the dog was able to recognize their own by putting their paw in front of the image, reported NBC News.
Over numerous trials dogs showed they prefered their own breed over pictures of other dogs, humans and other animals.
“The fact that dogs are able to recognize their own species visually, and that they have great olfactory discriminative capacities, insures that social behavior and mating between different breeds is still potentially possible,” the authors wrote, according to Red Orbit.
“Although humans have stretched the Canis familiaris species to its morphological limits, its biological entity has been preserved.”
The findings were published in the journal Animal Cognition.