Beyond the species! DOG-HORSE COMMUNICATION DURING SOCIAL PLAY (original) (raw)
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Rough-and-tumble play as a window on animal communication
Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 2015
Rough-and-tumble play (RT) is a widespread phenomenon in mammals. Since it involves competition, whereby one animal attempts to gain advantage over another, RT runs the risk of escalation to serious fighting. Competition is typically curtailed by some degree of cooperation and different signals help negotiate potential mishaps during RT. This review provides a framework for such signals, showing that they range along two dimensions: one from signals borrowed from other functional contexts to those that are unique to play, and the other from purely emotional expressions to highly cognitive (intentional) constructions. Some animal taxa have exaggerated the emotional and cognitive interplay aspects of play signals, yielding admixtures of communication that have led to complex forms of RT. This complexity has been further exaggerated in some lineages by the development of specific novel gestures that can be used to negotiate playful mood and entice reluctant partners. Play-derived gestu...
Do dogs respond to play signals given by humans
Animal Behaviour, 2001
Play signals are known to function in the solicitation and maintenance of intraspecific play, but their role in interspecific play is relatively unstudied. We carried out two studies to examine interspecific signalling when humans play with domestic dogs, Canis familiaris. In the first, we recorded dog-owner play sessions on video to identify actions used by 21 dog owners to initiate play with their dogs. Thirty-five actions were each used by three or more owners. These included postures, vocalizations and physical contact with the dog. The actions varied greatly in their apparent success at instigating play which was, surprisingly, unrelated to the frequency with which they were used. We then did an experiment to determine the effect of composites of commonly used signals upon the behaviour of 20 Labrador retrievers. The performance of both 'Bow' and 'Lunge' by a human altered the subsequent behaviour of the dogs. Both signals caused increases in play, and Lunge produced significant increases in play bout frequency and mean bout duration. The efficiency of both these postural signals was enhanced when they were accompanied by play vocalizations. Thus, specific actions used by humans do communicate a playful context to dogs and can be described as interspecific play signals.
Animal communication in linguistic & cognitive perspective
2022
Detailed comparative studies have revealed many surface similarities between linguistic communication and the communication of non-humans. How should we interpret these discoveries in linguistic and cognitive perspective? We review the literature with a specific focus on analogy (similar features and function but not shared ancestry) and homology (shared ancestry). We conclude that combinatorial features of animal communication are analogous but not homologous to natural language. Homologies are found instead in cognitive capacities of attention manipulation, which are enriched in humans, making possible many distinctive forms of communication, including language use. We hence present a new, graded taxonomy of means of attention manipulation, including a new class we call ‘Ladyginian’, which is related to but slightly broader than the more familiar class of ‘Gricean’ interaction. Only in the latter do actors have the goal to reveal specifically informative intentions. Great ape inte...
Cooperation and competition during dyadic play in domestic dogs, Canis familiaris
Animal Behavior , 2007
Social play involves a dynamic combination of competition and cooperation, yet few studies have systematically evaluated the cooperative side of play. We studied dyadic play in domestic dogs to investigate factors influencing variation in cooperative play strategies like self-handicapping and role reversal. Dyadic play bouts were videotaped and coded for asymmetric behaviours. We predicted that variation in play style would reflect salient aspects of the canine social system, including dominance relationships and age and size differences, but not sex differences. Our results refute the 50:50 rule proposed by some researchers, which asserts that participants must equalize their behaviour to maintain a playful atmosphere. We observed divergence from 50:50 symmetry to varying degrees across dyads. This variability was especially linked to dominance and age advantages, such that higher-ranking and/or older dogs generally showed higher proportions of attacks and pursuits and lower proportions of self-handicapping than their disadvantaged play partners. These results contradict the notion that more advantaged individuals consistently relinquish their advantage to facilitate play. Role reversals did occur, but certain social conventions apparently dictated which behaviours could be used during role reversals. For example, role reversals occurred during chases and tackles, but never during mounts, muzzle bites or muzzle licks, suggesting that these latter behaviours may be invariant indicators of formal dominance during play in domestic dogs. Play signalling was linked to self-handicapping behaviour but not to attack/pursuit behaviour, indicating that perhaps self-handicapping and play signalling work together to communicate playful intent and reinforce existing roles.
Animal Behaviour, 2006
Social cognition, in particular the derivation of social information from observation of interactions between members of a social group, has been widely investigated in primates, but it has received little attention in other social mammals, although it has been anecdotally reported in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris. We recorded the behaviour of dogs ('spectators') that had observed controlled interactions between a human and a dog (the 'demonstrator') competing for an object, and that were subsequently allowed to interact freely with both participants. When the competitions were playful, as indicated by signals performed by the human, the spectator was more likely to approach the winner first and/or more rapidly, suggesting that winners of games are perceived as desirable social partners. When the human did not perform play signals, changing the social context from play to contest over a resource, spectators were slower to approach either of the participants, suggesting that participants in contests were less desirable as social partners than participants in games. If the dog was prevented from seeing the game, it still reacted differently to the winner and the loser, but its behaviour was not the same as after games that it had seen. We conclude that spectator dogs gain information from the players' subsequent behaviour as well as from direct observation of the game.
Animal communication and human language: An overview
Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b7977qr Acknowledgements: I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This project was supported in part by a full doctoral scholarship of the government of Colombia (Colciencias) and by the Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores, in Bogotá, Colombia.
Evidence of heterospecific referential communication from domestic horses (Equus caballus) to humans
2016
Referential communication occurs when a sender elaborates its gestures to direct the attention of a recipient to its role in pursuit of the desired goal, e.g. by pointing or showing an object, thereby informing the recipient what it wants. If the gesture is successful, the sender and the recipient focus their attention simultaneously on a third entity, the target. Here we investigated the ability of domestic horses (Equus caballus) to communicate referentially with a human observer about the location of a desired target, a bucket of food out of reach. In order to test six operational criteria of referential communication, we manipulated the recipient’s (experimenter) attentional state in four experimental conditions: frontally oriented, backward oriented, walking away from the arena and frontally oriented with other helpers present in the arena. The rate of gaze alternation was higher in the frontally oriented condition than in all the others. The horses appeared to use both indicative (pointing) and non-indicative (nods and shakes) head gestures in the relevant test conditions. Horses also elaborated their communication by switching from a visual to a tactile signal and demonstrated perseverance in their communication. The results of the tests revealed that horses used referential gestures to manipulate the attention of a human recipient so to obtain an unreachable resource. These are the first such findings in an ungulate species.
International Journal of Zoology and Animal Biology, 2022
Horses have played an important role in human history and the techniques and strategies with which we interact with them is based on concepts of operant conditioning with emphasis on negative and positive reinforcement. The human-horse interactions in training are primarily based on the desires and goals of the human with the recognition that proper response to horse behaviors should be considered in order to effectively achieve the desired training goal and minimize stress. When considering the concepts of language and communication, horse owners need to consider the ethological communication strategies of horses and the role they play in traditional horse-human interactions. By including principles of interspecies communication, mutual development of language, and pro-social behaviors, it may be possible to involve horses in the decision-making processes in which they are so often involved.
Animal communication, animal minds, and animal language
BAThesis, University of Lund.(2002). The …, 2001
The communication systems of nonhuman animals are reviewed, together with a discussion of their relevance for the evolution of human language. The teaching of language to nonhumans, as well as signs of mind and consciousness outside our species, are considered as possible bridges between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. 14 Including even the calls of domestic hens (Wauters et al, 1999) 15 Call et al (1998) and Tomasello et al (1999) found intriguing but ambiguous results on whether chimps can use information from the gaze of others. Monkeys failed similar tests (Anderson et al, 1996). 16 These studies are of captive human-raised chimps, but Vea & Sabater-Pi (1998) found that wild bonobos also use gestures, and Jucquois (1991) claims that gestures are "un moyen de communication privilégié" (p 22) for wild chimps.