Dogs Are Born To Understand Us

Scientists have found that an unspoken bond of understanding exists between a dog and its owner and is unlike anything else in the natural world.
A study by Duke University in North Carolina proved that dogs are genuinely in tune with human emotions, feelings, and movements in a way no other species can mirror and they have have this ability at birth.

The researchers studied the difference in behaviour between wolf pups and dog puppies. 44 dogs and 37 wolves were used, with none of the animals older than 18 weeks of age.
The wolf pups in the study were from the Wildlife Science Centre in Minnesota and were hand-raised by keepers, who fed the wolves by hand and spent 24 hours a day with them. The dogs were left in their litter with their siblings and mother and had minimal contact with people prior to the study beginning.

All the animals underwent the same tests to determine how they responded to human clues and behaviour.
In the experiments, researchers hid a treat in one of two bowls and gave the participating puppy a clue to help them find the food. The gesture varied by trial, including a pointed finger, a glance in the direction of the food, or putting a small wooden block next to the correct bowl – a practice which was foreign to all of the animals.
The results revealed the dog puppies understood where to go with ease and were twice as likely to get it right as wolf puppies of the same age who had spent far more time around people.
17 of the 31 dogs consistently went to the right bowl, whereas none of the wolves performed better than random chance. Most of the dogs were able to pick up and follow clues from a person, whereas human tips were completely foreign to all the wolves.

The finding backs up a recent study from the University of Arizona, which studied 375 eight-week-old puppies, and concluded they are able to communicate with people from birth and need no training or practice to understand what their owner is saying.

Exactly how humans and dogs came to live in domestic harmony remains unknown, but the most popular hypothesis is that ancient hunter-gatherers encountered wolves in the wild and allowed some of the wolves to eat the leftovers of their kills.
But as only the most docile of the predators were tolerated so near, only human-friendly wolves got food and reproduced. Eventually, a lineage of wolves emerged which were solidly tuned into human behaviour and the two species slowly became closer, eventually hunting and working in tandem and living together.