After its owner passed away, a dog continued to guard his grave for two years. An insider said that even when villagers kindly offered to take it in, it would still run to the cemetery, "because it is very loyal, and we named it Zhongbao (Loyal Treasure)."
Netizens commented: This is truly a real-life version of "Hachiko: A Dog's Tale".
Hachiko, nicknamed "Hachiko the Loyal Dog," was born in Akita Prefecture, Japan in 1923. He was adopted by Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University who lived in Shibuya. It is said that Hachiko waited for the professor to come home at the station after his sudden death, and he passed away in 1935.
Dogs can understand human emotions
According to the China Science Daily, dogs' ability to sense human pain may be innate. A community science study suggests this is the result of centuries of co-evolution between dogs and humans. The study compared the responses of dogs and pet pigs to human crying and whimpering sounds, and the findings were recently published in Animal Behavior.
Humans tend to pay attention to the feelings of animals in their daily lives, and this attention seems to be mutual. Researchers have found that horses are more willing to stop and listen to human roars than to human laughter. Furthermore, domestic pigs react more strongly to human sounds than wild boars.
However, whether animals only react to strange human voices or are capable of genuine emotional contagion is still a subject of limited research.
Emotional contagion is the ability to interpret and reflect people's emotional states. Most animals can only accurately sense the emotions of their own kind, but research shows that dogs can also sense the emotions of humans around them.
One question is whether this emotional contagion stems from "universal emotional vocal cues" that all domestic animals can understand, or is it unique to companion animals like dogs? To test this, researchers compared the stress responses of dogs and pet pigs to human voices.
Unlike dogs, pigs have been domesticated as livestock for most of their history of interaction with humans. Therefore, if emotional contagion can be achieved through proximity to humans, then pet pigs should react in a similar way to dogs.
The team recruited dog and pig owners from around the world, asking them to film themselves and their pets in a room while recordings of crying or whimpering were played back. Researchers then counted the number of stressful behaviors exhibited in the experiment, such as whimpering and yawning in dogs, and rapid ear flapping in pigs.
“As expected, dogs are very good at picking up on the emotional content in our voices,” said Paula Pérez-Fraga, a co-author of the study and an animal behavior researcher at the University of Budapest in Hungary. Dogs become stressed when they hear humans cry, but are largely unaffected by whimpering. However, while pigs do experience some stress when they hear crying, their behavior suggests that they experience even more stress when they hear whimpering.
Natalia Albuquerque, a cognitive behavioral scientist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, says this may be because pigs don't interpret crying as a negative emotion. However, grunting may be "very strange" to pigs because they "don't know how to react to it."
She added that the findings suggest companion animals may have a stronger emotional connection with humans compared to livestock, but further research is needed.
A dog's love for people may surpass its love for food.
According to a previous report by Reference News Network citing the American website Live Science, news reports often feature stories of dogs leading rescuers to their injured owners or brave dogs protecting children from animal attacks. However, a question often arises in these extraordinary situations: are dogs willing to help because they love us, or because they see us as their meal tickets?
"I have no doubt that our dogs love us," said Clive Wayne, a psychology professor at Arizona State University and head of the university's canine science collaborative laboratory.
Gregory Burns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, is the author of two books: "How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dogs Decoding the Canine Brain" and "What It Feels Like to Be a Dog: Exploring the Neuroscience of Other Animals."
Burns said that after his beloved dog Newton died, he became curious about dogs' feelings and thoughts. So he trained his dog Kelly and other dogs to tolerate the noise of MRI scans and analyzed their brain activity. Then, he let the dogs smell various familiar and unfamiliar dog and human scents.
A 2015 study published in the journal Behavioral Processes found that the olfactory areas of the brains of 12 experimental dogs lit up when they smelled either people or dogs, but only familiar scents would light up the caudate nucleus, an area associated with higher mental activities such as emotions, motivation, rewards, and romantic feelings.
In another study of 15 experimental dogs, Burns found that 86% of the dogs showed similar or higher levels of caudate nucleus activity in response to praise compared to their response to food.
A 2022 study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Life & Environment found that, although no sophisticated equipment was used, Wayne and his colleagues discovered that even if dogs were left at home for more than four hours without food or company, they might still prefer to see their owners rather than eat.
The researchers' experiments were very simple, mostly conducted in suburban homes with garages. After the dog owners returned home, an assistant placed a bowl of food in a small circle in the garage, two meters from the door at an angle, while the dog owners stood in a circle two meters away from the door on the other side. Wayne said, "Eight out of ten times, the dog chose the owner."
In a research report published in the bi-monthly journal Current Biology in 2022, Takefumi Kikumizu, a researcher at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Azabu University in Japan, said that he and his colleagues found that dogs shed tears when they are reunited with their owners after a long separation, but do not show the same deep reaction when they are reunited with other people that the dogs know.
