New Study Shows Dogs Have Deeper Understanding Of Human Body Language

Cool news this week: Dogs get us.

They get our body language, at least.

And that's beyond the obvious lifting of the leash, which we've known for decades -- though a classic example of pets responding to our physical cues.

According to a study published Wednesday in PloS ONE journal, dogs generally spring for big portions of food — believe it or not, unless a human handles the smaller portion with interest.

One hundred forty-nine dogs and their owners were involved in the experiment, which allowed each dog to choose between a plate with one tasty morsel and a plate with six tasty morsels of food.

Even a dog on a diet wouldn't think twice, right?

As we'd imagine, those who weren't distracted by humans chose six pieces 73 percent of the time.

But when a human being approached and exhibited some type of favoritism — staring at one choice, holding the choice by its mouth, and sometimes also looking at and talking to the dog: “Oh wow, this is good, this is so good!” — dogs began to think outside the box.

Then the smaller portion tended to win, especially when the single piece was held up to the human's mouth.

Does humans handling dictate what dogs eat? (Someone whose dog eats backyard rodents may disagree.) Or is the human's “mm, this is clearly the better choice” body language more loud and clear to the canine kind than we think?

That kind of body language — that kind of thinking about choices — seems completely human, doesn't it? That's why this study surprised me. A leash, I get. The dog knows what's about to happen. But what is the human trying to say with the food behavior? Does the dog think the human somehow knows that food selection is tastier?

Then I try to imagine such behavior in a dog's world, but can't. My childhood dogs would never have tried to alter my dining decision-making. (If yours have, though, I'd love to hear that story.)

More surprising: When it comes to reading human body language about preferable food, dogs even catch on more quickly than chimpanzees, young children and wolves, earlier studies have found.

And they don't just learn over time spent with humans. Even nine-week-old puppies still living with their littermates outperform chimpanzees and wolves in similar tasks.

Rather than all that, researchers believe it's all evolutionary — either dogs were domesticated because they seemed to understand social cues, or those dogs that demonstrated the ability to understand social cues were domesticated. Which one of those solutions is still undetermined.

But feel free to test the food-handling cue with your dog while they figure it out. I'll bet the ultimate result will surprise you.

As for cats, well, mine checked out of the experiment treatless — which says I-don't-know-what about them.