Dog owners: you’ve been had. Behind the supine slink and fawning eyes, your dog doesn’t give a rat’s backside for your reprimands. A scientific study has suggested that dogs cannot feel complex emotions — the downcast face is just a human-pleasing façade .
This appears to undermine the trend for “dog shaming”, where owners post online pictures such as those above of their dogs looking contrite.
Ljerka Ostojic, a dog trainer and comparative psychologist at the University of Cambridge, set up an experiment to test whether owners could really smell the whiff of remorse when their dogs had been bad.
She asked volunteers to train their dogs not to eat a biscuit. The owners then left the room, at which point the biscuit was either swiped away or fed to the dog. Not one owner could later determine whether their dog took the biscuit or not.
Dr Ostojic said guilty-looking behaviour could stem from distress rather than a blackened conscience. “I had a client who had three dogs, and whenever something happened like a shoe was chewed, it was always one of them that had the guilty look,” she told the Daily Mail.
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“Yet often she was not the dog who had done it. She was just the most timid dog and got frightened more quickly by her owner’s reaction.”