Dogs preferably share their food with friends: Study

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New Delhi: A new study has revealed that man's best friend dog likes to share its food with friends.

The findings revealed that dogs continued to prefer familiar partners. However, the increased complexity of the task influenced the readiness with which the dogs delivered a food reward to another animal.

"This time we not only tested a different experimental set-up but also the level of difficulty," said Rachel Dale from Messerli Research Institute at Vetmeduni Vienna.

"The dogs were first trained to touch a token in exchange for a food reward for themselves. They were then trained to recognise two more tokens: one that resulted in a reward being delivered to a partner dog and another which did not," Dale added.

Three experiments were conducted to test whether the dogs exhibited prosocial behavior and whether they had to recognise special objects in the form of tokens in order to deliver a food reward to the other dog.

In the first test, either a familiar dog or a stranger sat in the receiver enclosure. The dogs could see each other during the experiment.

In the second test, the receiver enclosure remained empty but the other dog was present in the testing room.

In a third test, the test dogs were alone in the entire set-up.At the end of each test series, the donor animals would reward themselves by being allowed to touch the token that delivered the food reward to them.

(With ANI inputs)