Dogs are fascinating animals in terms of their intelligence and their ability to learn just about any command they are taught. Sit down, give me your paw, bring me the shoe… But the truth is that they have another quality that was not recognized so much, at least until now: creativity.
We are not talking about creativity to paint pictures or compose songs, but to surprise your reference humans with innovative movements. This was corroborated by the study “The Creative Canine”, developed by the trainer Elaina Franklin in collaboration with the psychologist Lauren Highfill. The most curious? Her finding was based on the training of dolphins.
Elaina Franklin worked as a dolphin trainer and observed that these mammals responded with novel movements when their trainers gave them the command “create”. Fascinated by this behavior, she decided to see if dogs could do the same, practicing successfully on her own pet.
It was then that, in association with the psychologist Lauren Highfill, they formed a group on the social network for Facebook for five trainers to share their progress with their respective dogs, in order to collect them for the pertinent study. In their research, they took into account three parameters to measure the performance of the dogs: repetition, energy and novelty of their behaviors.
His curious finding is that dogs can indeed be taught to be creative. Giving them the command “create”, the animals performed some novel movement with the aim of obtaining a reward, be it a trinket or their favorite toy. The creation criteria required the dog to perform a behavior that it had not performed previously in the session, so the only wrong response was when they did something repeatedly.
The five participating dogs developed many non-repetitive movements during the trials, reinforcing the hypothesis that they are creative if they are allowed to innovate in terms of their decisions. In addition, the study showed that dogs have the ability to remember what behaviors they had already performed so as not to repeat them, as occurs with dolphins. With all this, the idea that dogs have fluidity of behavior and the ability to execute unique and varied ideas is reinforced.
However, it was also proven that dogs have a preference for performing low-energy exercises when they are given freedom to create. With the exception of one of the study participants, a border collie, who did favor more energetic movements.
The authors of the study emphasize that this finding is especially interesting to reinforce the training of service dogs, such as guide or therapy dogs. In addition, they point out that dogs tend to lose motivation when they are stuck on the same task. Therefore, dogs trained to be creative develop more novel approaches to solving tasks. Likewise, encouraging the dog’s creativity prevents boredom and reduces stress, which results in a reduction in bad behaviors.
