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      Cats and dogs: Best friends or deadly enemies? What the owners of cats and dogs living in the same household think about their relationship with people and other pets

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          Abstract

          Although popular culture describes them as mortal enemies, more and more often, dogs and cats live under the same roof. Does this make them best friends? Can sharing the same social and physical environment make them similar? This study compares the approaches of dogs and cats living in the same household have towards humans and other pets as perceived by the owner. Questionnaires collected from 1270 people owning both dog(s) and cat(s) were analysed. Most dogs and cats living together are playful with familiar humans (76.2%) but dogs have a more sociable approach towards strangers and conspecifics than cats (P<0.001). Moreover, the percentage of dogs that have a playful relationship with the owner (84.0%) was higher than cats (49.2%; P<0.001). Dogs and cats living together eat in different places and show different mutual interactions: more dogs lick the cat (42.8%) and more cats ignore the dog (41.8%) than vice versa (P<0.001). However, most dogs and cats sleep at least occasionally (68.5%) and play together (62.4%; P<0.001). Although some body postures, such as the tail’s position, are interpreted differently by the two species, the greater proportions of dogs and cats show a relaxed response to several kinds of approaches of their roommate. Our questionnaire confirms the common beliefs about the sociability of the dog and the privacy of the cat, but this does not result in continuous internal struggles. Most cohabitations are peaceful. Moreover, it is true that they speak different languages, but they seem to understand each other well and interpret each other's approaches in the right way. Thus, aspiring owners should not blindly believe popular assumptions, but both knowledge and respect for species-specific pet behaviours are essential to establish a balance in the household.

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          Human-like social skills in dogs?

          Domestic dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior--even more so than our nearest primate relatives. For example, they use human social and communicative behavior (e.g. a pointing gesture) to find hidden food, and they know what the human can and cannot see in various situations. Recent comparisons between canid species suggest that these unusual social skills have a heritable component and initially evolved during domestication as a result of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression towards humans. Differences in chimpanzee and human temperament suggest that a similar process may have been an important catalyst leading to the evolution of unusual social skills in our own species. The study of convergent evolution provides an exciting opportunity to gain further insights into the evolutionary processes leading to human-like forms of cooperation and communication.
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            A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do.

            The present investigations were undertaken to compare interspecific communicative abilities of dogs and wolves, which were socialized to humans at comparable levels. The first study demonstrated that socialized wolves were able to locate the place of hidden food indicated by the touching and, to some extent, pointing cues provided by the familiar human experimenter, but their performance remained inferior to that of dogs. In the second study, we have found that, after undergoing training to solve a simple manipulation task, dogs that are faced with an insoluble version of the same problem look/gaze at the human, while socialized wolves do not. Based on these observations, we suggest that the key difference between dog and wolf behavior is the dogs' ability to look at the human's face. Since looking behavior has an important function in initializing and maintaining communicative interaction in human communication systems, we suppose that by positive feedback processes (both evolutionary and ontogenetically) the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has lead to complex forms of dog-human communication that cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialization.
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              What did domestication do to dogs? A new account of dogs' sensitivity to human actions.

              Over the last two decades increasing evidence for an acute sensitivity to human gestures and attentional states in domestic dogs has led to a burgeoning of research into the social cognition of this highly familiar yet previously under-studied animal. Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) have been shown to be more successful than their closest relative (and wild progenitor) the wolf, and than man's closest relative, the chimpanzee, on tests of sensitivity to human social cues, such as following points to a container holding hidden food. The "Domestication Hypothesis" asserts that during domestication dogs evolved an inherent sensitivity to human gestures that their non-domesticated counterparts do not share. According to this view, sensitivity to human cues is present in dogs at an early age and shows little evidence of acquisition during ontogeny. A closer look at the findings of research on canine domestication, socialization, and conditioning, brings the assumptions of this hypothesis into question. We propose the Two Stage Hypothesis, according to which the sensitivity of an individual animal to human actions depends on acceptance of humans as social companions, and conditioning to follow human limbs. This offers a more parsimonious explanation for the domestic dog's sensitivity to human gestures, without requiring the use of additional mechanisms. We outline how tests of this new hypothesis open directions for future study that offer promise of a deeper understanding of mankind's oldest companion.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Resources
                Role: ResourcesRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ResourcesRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                26 August 2020
                2020
                : 15
                : 8
                : e0237822
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Laboratorio di Etologia e Benessere Animale (LEBA), Dipartimento di Medicina Veterinaria, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Italy
                [2 ] Dipartimento di Scienze Veterinarie, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
                Faculty of Animal Sciences and Food Engineering, University of São Paulo, BRAZIL
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8500-7970
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2128-6952
                Article
                PONE-D-20-11233
                10.1371/journal.pone.0237822
                7449504
                32845923
                7864ec92-cfd0-4478-8ca2-ca26bf609496
                © 2020 Menchetti et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 21 April 2020
                : 3 August 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 5, Pages: 21
                Funding
                The authors received no specific funding for this work.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Mammals
                Cats
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Mammals
                Cats
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Mammals
                Dogs
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Mammals
                Dogs
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Pets and Companion Animals
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animals
                Pets and Companion Animals
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Animal Sociality
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Animal Sociality
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Animal Sociality
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Domestic Animals
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animals
                Domestic Animals
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Research Design
                Survey Research
                Questionnaires
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Psychology
                Psychological Attitudes
                Social Sciences
                Psychology
                Psychological Attitudes
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