How Well Do You Know Dogs?

Internally Coordinated Responses of Dogs to Internal and External Stimuli:

• Dogs have evolved to understand and communicate with humans through millennia of contact with humans and their lifestyles.

• The origin of domestic dogs is unclear, but there is evidence of human-canine behavioral coevolution.

• Dogs have advanced memory skills and can learn and retain the names of over 1,000 words.

• Dogs can read and react appropriately to human body language and voice commands, and demonstrate a theory of mind by engaging in deception.

• Dogs have a keen sense of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, proprioception, and sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field.

• Dog communication involves eye gaze, facial expression, vocalization, body posture, and gustatory communication.

• Dogs engage in play with other dogs and humans, and play behavior is training for important behaviors later in life.

• Empathy is linked to facial mimicry in dogs, and dogs have been observed responding empathetically to humans and other dogs.

• Studies have identified broad personality traits in dogs, including playfulness, curiosity/fearlessness, chase-proneness, sociability, aggressiveness, and shyness-boldness.

• Dominance is a relative attribute that describes the relationship between pairs of individuals, and there is no good evidence that "dominance" is a lifelong character trait.

• Dogs have a keen sense of smell and use pheromones for communication, marking their territories with urine and stools.

• Feral dogs live in a wild state with no food and shelter intentionally provided by humans and show a continuous and strong avoidance of direct human contact.Behavior of Dogs: Reproduction, Parenting, and Common Behavior Problems

• Dogs prefer novelty over familiarity and sleep an average of 10.1 hours in captivity.

• Dogs can reach sexual maturity and reproduce during their first year, with females having their first estrus at 6 to 12 months of age.

• Female dogs have a nonseasonal and monestrus estrous cycle, with an average interval of seven months between cycles.

• Dogs are polygamous and have no pair bonding, allowing them to maximize pup production and maintain or increase their population with a lower pup survival rate than wolves.

• Wolf pups are cared for primarily by their mother for the first 3 months of their life, while dog pups are cared for by the mother and receive no further maternal care after being weaned at 10 weeks.

• Common behavior problems in dogs include overexcitement, jumping up on people, separation anxiety, resource guarding, jealousy, noise anxiety, and tail chasing.

• Separation anxiety in dogs is related to their dependency on their owner and can lead to destructive and vocalizing behaviors.

• Resource guarding is exhibited by many dogs and can lead to aggression if not treated.

• Canines can express jealousy, fear loud noises, and exhibit tail chasing as a stereotypy.

• Dogs were initially selected for their behaviors, with reduced fear and aggression compared to wolves due to selection for tameness during domestication.

• Feral dog groups are composed of a stable 2-6 members compared to the 2-15 member wolf pack whose size fluctuates with the availability of prey, and feral dog groups consist of monogamous breeding pairs compared to the one breeding pair of the wolf pack.

• The critical period for socialization in dogs begins at 4 weeks of age, with only 90 minutes of contact with humans needed for social attachment, while wolves require 24 hours of contact a day starting before 3 weeks of age and can only be socialized until age 4 months.Differences Between Dogs and Wolves

• Dogs have evolved to have a capacity for attachment to humans similar to human infants.

• Dogs and wolves have the cognitive capacity for prosocial behavior towards humans, but relevant lifetime experiences are required for canids to perform well on human-guided tasks.

• Dogs reach sexual maturity and can reproduce during their first year, while wolves reproduce at two years.

• Domestic dogs are polygamous, while wolves are generally monogamous.

• Dogs stand alone among all canids for a total lack of paternal care.

• Feral dogs are not primarily scavengers but have an opportunistic diet ranging from garbage to live prey.

• Studies have shown that humans can influence the behavior of dogs through food, petting, and voice.

• The scent of the familiar human activates the canine caudate maximally, suggesting that dogs have a positive association with the scent.

• The type of relationship between dog and master significantly affects the dog's performance on a cognitive problem-solving task.

• Service dogs are trained to help people with disabilities, while detection dogs are trained to detect substances.

• Between 2005 and 2013, there were 17 fatal dog attacks in the UK.

• In the US, there were more than 300 human dog bite-related fatalities between 1979 and 1996, and each year more than 4.5 million people in the US are bitten by dogs.