Should You Play with Your Dog?
The science of play, and what it might offer your relationship with your dog.
Dogs and other animals play because playing is fun – seems obvious. As an explanation of play, though, fun puts the cart before the horse. Behaviors, like body parts, evolve because they confer a reproductive advantage – that’s how natural selection works. The experience of fun probably makes an animal more likely to play. But what advantages might play offer? And how can we use scientific knowledge about play to improve our relationships with our dogs?
How Do Scientists Define Play?
People usually recognize play when we see it, but an explicit definition can help us bring what we’re seeing into sharper focus. Here’s a definition I like: play is “an apparently purposeless activity with no immediate adaptive goal, utilizing species-typical motor programs that are exaggerated in intensity or number of repetitions, or misordered compared to mature behavior, or mixed together with behavior appropriate to different contexts.” In other words: play has no immediately obvious purpose. Playing animals do things that are typical of their species, such as chasing and leaping. But they do those things in exaggerated and mixed-up ways, and they do them out of the usual context. Chasing, for example – outside of play, it’s usually a food-getting behavior. But if playmates wind up eating each other, you know the play went seriously wrong.
Why Do Animals Play?
So, why do this crazy mixed-up apparently pointless thing called play? One early hypothesis was that young animals play to burn off steam and because they’re bored. There might be something to this if we’re talking about our pet dogs, who mostly get their food for free. Animals living on their own, though, rarely have surplus calories to waste. Indeed, that’s probably one reason why social carnivores, like wolves and dogs, show so many conflict-avoiding behaviors, and why most aggression, like those noisy fights that scare the heck out of the humans at the dog park, results in little or no injury. A hurt animal has a tougher time getting food and must use precious energy to heal.
These days, behavioral scientists are throwing around several hypotheses about the purposes of play. One, play develops motor and cognitive skills. Two is closely related — play helps young animals learn to deal with physical surprises such as losing one’s balance, and with unpredictable behavior by other animals. The idea is that animals develop behavioral flexibility and resilience by coping with surprises in a safe context. Third, social play helps build and maintain social bonds.
Nobody Knows for Sure Why Animals Play
Now let me astonish you. All those hypotheses seem intuitively obvious, and none of them has been proved. Any Animal Planet fans out there have probably heard of meerkats, social carnivores related to the mongoose. A researcher who studied social play among meerkats couldn’t find any connection between play and social cohesion, or between play and later success in fighting. On the other hand, if you’re a brown bear cub, your odds of survival seem to improve with social play. So maybe play has different effects in different species. We don’t know – there are so many kinds of animals in the world, and it’s so hard to measure the effects of play.
Play Between Dogs Seems to Reflect Their Rank
According to one study, by Erika Bauer and Barbara Smuts of the University of Michigan, play between pairs of unrelated adult dogs reflected existing rank relationships between those dogs. Studies of rats, squirrel monkeys, and human beings suggest that the same applies to them. Relatively little of the play the dog researchers observed was what we’d call fair with respect to “who’s on top.”
“Uh-oh,” you might be thinking, “if play reflects rank relationships, I’m in trouble! My dog always hangs on to the ball when we’re done playing fetch. He even carries it home.” Or “My dog wins an awful lot of our games of tug.”
Do Dogs See People the Way They See Other Dogs?
If we want insight into how dogs perceive their relationships with people, we have to study their behavior with people – not their behavior with other dogs.
Here, a little detour. My dogs generally cooperate with my house rules, most importantly that goodies such as treats, walks, and attention become available to those who do as I ask when I ask them to. But do they think I’m the Alpha Dog Queen of England or the village goatherd? Beats me – their behavior seems deferential, but I can’t read their minds. Many dog trainers and behavior specialists state with certainty that dogs perceive humans as more or less exalted dogs. But – and this might be one of the most important things I’ve ever said in these articles — there is no evidence that dogs perceive people, or their relationships with us, the way they perceive their relationships with other dogs. If we want to develop insight into how our dogs perceive humans, then it’s their behavior toward humans we need to study.
Dogs May Be More Eager to Play with People Than with Other Dogs
Fortunately, Nicola Rooney and her colleagues at the University of Southampton, in England, have been doing just that, in the context of play. Here are some of their findings. Access to play with dogs doesn’t spoil dogs’ appetite for play with humans. This suggests that play with dogs and play with humans may have different motivations. Dogs playing with people are more likely to present a tug toy to their play partner than dogs playing with other dogs. In other words, they seemed more eager to engage a human play partner. Dogs playing with people were also more likely to give up the tug toy. They hung on to the toy longer when their play partner was another dog.
Neither Winning Nor Losing at Tug Made Dogs Act More “Dominant”
Wait, there’s more! In a study of how play affected the dog-human relationship, Rooney and her colleague John Bradshaw assessed confident, supposedly dominant behaviors in a group of Golden Retrievers before and after 20 rounds of tug in which the dogs mostly won or mostly lost.
Then they did the experiment backwards, letting the dogs win if they’d lost in the first round, and vice versa. Important note: the experimenters used Goldens because this breed has a rep for owner-directed aggression. So if winning at tug causes trouble, you might expect these to be the dogs it caused trouble in.
Dogs Paid More Attention to Their Human Playmates
The researchers found no significant change in confidence or dominance whether the dogs won or lost. The “dogs scored higher for obedient attentiveness” after the tug games than before. Whether they won or lost, they did become more demanding of attention as the tests went on, and the most playful dogs showed more “playful attention seeking.”
More Research Needs to Be Done
The experimenters carefully note the limits of their work. They studied a small number of Labs and Golden Retrievers. Surveys by other researchers of mixed-breeds came up with similar results, but the various full breeds differ behaviorally. So follow-up experiments should use other breeds. And do we know for sure that you can relax and play with your dog, no worries about who wins or loses and whether there’s going to be a palace coup? We don’t.
Behavioral science, unlike pop experts, rarely has definitive answers to give. Caution’s in order if your dog has aggression problems, especially if she guards her food or toys. But the best evidence we have suggests that for most of us, the hypothesis that play builds social bonds is right on target. Reward yourself for taking all this science on board — go forth and have fun with your dog!
Email your comments and questions to me, dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email, or call 206-600-5661. And come and say hi on Facebook. That’s all for this week. Bye!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).
