14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, it's not just humans that get jealous every once in a while. On the contrary, dogs too sometimes feel the wrath of the green-eyed monster, and they are anything but shy when it comes to acting on it.
Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers with the University of California, San Diego in the US detail that, in order to study jealousy in dogs, they carried out a series of experiments involving 36 pooches.
Long story short, they monitored these dogs in their own homes. The focus was on how the pooches responded to seeing their owners interacting with various toys or reading a book and ignoring them.
As detailed in the journal PLOS ONE, the toys that were used in these experiments were a stuffed and an animated dog, together with a jack-o-lantern pail. The book that owners were asked to read played tunes when opened.
Of the dogs that were monitored as part of this investigation, 78% attempted to get their owners to pay attention to them when seeing them play with the dog-like toys. 42% reacted in the same manner to the pail.
Some of the dogs were so upset that they tried to block their owners access to the toys (30%), and few of them went as far as to try to bite the stuffed or the animated toy (25%). Just 22% of the dogs showed signs of not liking the book.
Based on the outcome of these experiments, psychology professor Christine Harris and colleagues say that, since dogs can experience it too, jealousy might not be a social construct after all. It could be a basic emotion like fear and anger.
“Our study suggests not only that dogs do engage in what appear to be jealous behaviors but also that they were seeking to break up the connection between the owner and a seeming rival,” the psychology professor says.
Furthermore, “We can’t really speak to the dogs’ subjective experiences, of course, but it looks as though they were motivated to protect an important social relationship.”
It is now believed that humans, together with creatures such as dogs, come to experience jealousy because this emotion helps protect social bonds from potential intruders.