Can Your Dog Save Your Life?
Will your dog purposely rescue you if you’re in danger?
Jolanta Benal, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA
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Can Your Dog Save Your Life?
Let’s all picture it together: Timmy’s fallen in the well! Thank goodness for his noble, beautiful, brilliant dog, Lassie, racing in just the right direction to get help before poor Timmy … you know. Apparently, nonfictional hero dogs exist too, or the SPCALA wouldn’t be issuing its yearly National Hero Dog Award. Your dog could be one of them, right? As always, The Dog Trainer is here to crush your hopes and dreams.
Can Your Dog Save Your Life?
Obviously, trained search-and-rescue dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, and service dogs, among others, have saved lives aplenty. The question is whether your own Dogalini, without special training of any kind, would recognize that you were in danger and go find help. The study I’m going to discuss this week is a small one, like most behavioral studies, and its authors clearly recognize its limits and weaknesses. Still, it leaves me with the feeling that if I want help in an emergency, I’d better keep my cell phone charged.
What Do Dogs Do When Their Handler Seems to Have a Heart Attack?
The study was done by Krista Macpherson and William Roberts of the University of Western Ontario and published in 2006. It included two experiments. In the first, 12 people were briefed on how to fake a heart attack. They and their dogs then went for a walk on a large, fenced field with a big X to mark the spot. When they reached the X, the people panted and gasped and grabbed their chests and then keeled over. For 6 minutes, they remained silent and motionless.
Meanwhile, one or two confederates sat in chairs nearby, reading magazines and paying the little drama no mind. As for the dogs, sometimes they pawed their guardians or nuzzled them, sometimes they sat or lay down next to them, and sometimes they wandered around. Exactly one of the 12 dogs touched the indifferent magazine-reading confederate, and that was a Toy Poodle who jumped in the guy’s lap and stayed there for 62 seconds. You’ve probably guessed by now that none of the dogs ran back and forth barking between the bystander and the faux victim, and none of the dogs grabbed the bystander’s sleeve and tried to drag him over to have a look-see.
Did the Dogs Perceive an Emergency?
So, okay, the experimenters said, maybe the dogs were unconvinced by their guardians’ acting and didn’t perceive an emergency. Maybe the sight of their guardian lying quietly on the ground reminded them of sleepytime. Or maybe the magazine readers’ indifference to the scene communicated to the dogs that there was no emergency. Clearly, another setup was called for. Get ready for the Falling Bookcase.
What Do Dogs Do When Their Handler Cries Out for Help?
This second experiment took place at an indoor training center and used 30 dog-human teams. Fifteen of the teams came in, greeted a bystander, and then went into another room where there was a bookcase. The people in these teams were so clumsy! As soon as they started examining the books, they knocked the whole case over on top of themselves. They then spent 6 minutes crying out in pain and “imploring” their dogs to seek help. “Imploring” is the experimenters’ word, by the way, and for the record the bookcases were light and nobody got hurt.
As for the 15 pairs in the control group, they also entered the training center, introduced themselves to the bystander, and then headed for the bookcase in the other room. Instead of knocking it over on themselves, the people dropped their dog’s leash and stood in front of the bookcase quietly for 6 minutes. I hope the books’ spines made interesting reading.
Dogs Mostly Stay Near Their Fallen Handlers
Bless their little hearts, the experimental dogs spent more time approaching their fallen, pleading guardians than doing anything else. Neither the experimental dogs nor the control dogs spent much time near the bystander; with that Toy Poodle out of the picture, none of the dogs even touched the bystander. The control dogs spent most of their time roaming, checking out the training center’s agility equipment, for instance.
[[AdMiddle]As a trainer I find support here for something I tell my clients all the time: If you want your dog to attend to you, be interesting. As between a handler who stands there like a lump staring at a bookcase, and a handler who lies on the ground in a funny position making all kinds of noise, there’s no contest. Mr. or Ms. Noisy and Unusual is going to grab much more doggy attention. That is also the researchers’ suggested explanation for why the experimental dogs hung around their guardians more.
Hero Dogs Probably Save People by Accident
How do these results square with news stories of hero dogs? Pretty easily, I’m afraid. Take Brutis, who saved a little kid’s life by grabbing up a nearby coral snake. Seriously, did Brutis pull a guide to venomous snakes out of his back pocket, consult it, and decide to risk his life by removing the snake from the vicinity of Junior? Nooooooo. He’s a Golden Retriever, so the odds are pretty good he’s inclined to pick things up in his mouth. He spots a novel item on the ground. The novel item moves! Brutis is curious! Brutis picks the novel item up! Cue screaming grownups! Lucky kid! Lucky Brutis, too, because the coral snake bit him and he nearly died.
See Also: How to Keep Snakes Out of Your Yard
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Or consider Moti, a German Shepherd belonging to a family named Patel. The account I found says that “When a masked intruder made his way into the Patel household, Moti wasted little time, leaping to his feet and barking to draw the gunman’s attention.” The gunman shot Moti and then ran away. So tell me: How many of you have dogs who get up and bark when visitors come in? What if the visitor breaks in? What if the visitor looks really funny on account of he’s wearing a mask? P.S., not to attribute everything to a dog’s breed, but German Shepherd Dogs are high on anybody’s list of “Likely to react strongly when something takes them by surprise.”  “Something” can be a blowing garbage bag.
We Don’t Even Notice All the Times When Dogs Do Nothing
The study’s authors don’t claim they proved that dogs never purposefully help us in emergencies. But, they argue, most likely, most of the time, dogs act on their doggy perception of what’s going on, and once in a while, by coincidence, the result helps us. We notice those events. We talk and write about them, and we remember them. We don’t record, or usually even notice, the many times when dogs do nothing, or when their actions aren’t any help at all.
We certainly love our dogs, and on the evidence of how their brains are built it’s a good bet they love us. But though their emotions probably resemble ours, their thinking is another matter. Our dogs generously supply affection, warmth, and entertainment, just the way they are–so cut them a break on the disaster response skills, okay?
That’s all for this week’s article. I hope you’ll visit me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, where I’m Dogalini, and write to me at dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. I welcome your comments and suggestions, and I may use them as the basis for future shows. Thank you for reading!
Note
The study discussed in this article is Macpherson, Krista, and William A. Roberts. 2006. Do dogs (Canis familiaris) seek help in an emergency? Journal of Comparative Psychology 120 (2), pp. 113-119. The abstract is here. In case you were wondering, each of the two experiments included a couple of Rough Collies, just like Lassie.
A wonderful book about the canine brain and canine emotion is Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., For the Love of a Dog (Ballantine, 2006) – which, by the way, includes McConnell’s account of being rescued by one of her dogs.
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).