Do dogs exhibit jealous behaviors when their owner attends to their companion dog?

Abstract

Jealousy appears to have clear adaptive functions across species: it emerges when an important social relationship with a valued social partner is threatened by third-party that is perceived as a rival. Dyads of dogs living together and their owners were tested adapting a procedure devised to study jealousy in young human siblings. Owners at first ignored both dogs while reading a magazine (Control episode), and then petted and praised one of the dogs while ignoring the other, and vice versa (Experimental episodes). We found several differences in the dogs' behavior between the Experimental episodes and the Control episode, even though only monitoring (gazing at the owner) was exhibited for a significantly greater amount of time in the Experimental episodes. Remarkable individual behavioral differences emerged, suggesting that the dogs' reactions could be influenced by the relationships that they establish with their owner and the companion dog. Overall, current results do not clearly support our prediction that the ignored dogs would exhibit more behaviors aimed at regaining the owner's attention when their owner directed attention and care to a companion dog, compared to the control situation. The great intra- and inter-dyad behavioral variability and the choice to test cohabiting dogs could have prevented the emergence of a clear jealous reaction. These findings do not exclude that dogs may exhibit a primordial form of jealousy in a realistic situation, but an additional research is needed to fully gauge which situations, if any, could trigger jealousy in dogs and to rule out alternative explanations.

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“…Thus, to the extent animals experience emotion beyond core affect, it is likely constrained by such predictive concepts. For instance, while there is some evidence that dogs may have a “concept” of jealousy (and behavioral reactions to it) similar to that in humans (Abdai, Terencio, Fraga, & Miklósi, 2018; Harris & Prouvost, 2014; Cook, Prichard, Spivak, & Berns, 2018, cf Prato‐Previde et al, 2018,b), dogs do not appear to have a “concept” for guilt or the situations that would elicit guilt in humans (Horowitz, 2009). And, conversely, animals may experience discrete emotions for which humans lack concepts, such as the emotion of “sensing the vibrations of a dying family member's voice hundreds of miles away (as might be the case for cetaceans and elephants), or an emotion that results from the physiological consequences of a 250m deep dive that has turned up a favorite food (as may be the case for California sea lions)” (Bliss‐Moreau, 2017, p. 187).…”

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“…From the literature consulted [48,49] it emerged that the dog identified a difference between the owner and other people and improved itsperformance. Even the studies of Pratoprevide and other authors [50,51,52,53] reported that in the presence of its owner, the dog showed greater security towards new stimuli. A harmonic interspecific relationship is one in which the human referent represents the safe base of the dog according to the principles of secure attachment, [2,3,4] and in which the dog does not respond to the need to replace the human being.…”

“…It is therefore a very complex system of relational feedback that start from bodily gestures and attitudes, with the activation of emotional sense-motor models between the two species. This type of relational dimension gives the dog an important sense of security to be able to express itself and neutralize the stress of the first meetings until the next adaptation [3,49,50,51,52,53,54,55]. The veterinary conductor allowed the dog to move away and back even during the session [56].…”

“…The veterinary conductor allowed the dog to move away and back even during the session [56]. These conditions are also important for total safety from possible zoonotic risks [42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57]. The training program followed the guidelines of the national center for sports education (CSEN Rome, Italia).…”

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“…Yet results are mixed: whereas some studies have demonstrated dogs' jealous reactions to their owners interacting with a "rival" dog (Abdai, Baño Terencio, Pérez Fraga, & Miklósi, 2018;Cook, Prichard, Spivak, & Berns, 2018;Harris & Prouvost, 2014), other researchers have failed to find evidence for jealousy (Prato-Previde, Nicotra, Fusar Poli, Pelosi, & Valsecchi, 2018a;Prato-Previde, Nicotra, Pelosi, & Valsecchi, 2018b). Such discrepancies may stem from the artificial nature of the experimental paradigms employed: some studies show that dogs exhibit jealous behavioral and neurological responses to fake dogs (Cook et al, 2018;Harris & Prouvost, 2014), but findings that fake dogs are not perceived as real social threats cast doubt on this interpretation (Prato-Previde, Nicotra, Pelosi, et al, 2018, 2018a, 2018b. Variation in the nature of relationships under consideration is therefore critical to both precise definitions of, and methodological approaches to, jealousy (Webb & de Waal, 2018)-underlining the need to use real social interlopers and move beyond artificial experimental contexts (Prato-Previde, Nicotra, Fusar Poli, et al, 2018).…”