Dogs fail to reciprocate the receipt of food from a human in a food-giving task

Abstract

Domestic dogs have been shown to reciprocate help received from conspecifics in food-giving tasks. However, it is not yet known whether dogs also reciprocate help received from humans. Here, we investigated whether dogs reciprocate the receipt of food from humans. In an experience phase, subjects encountered a helpful human who provided them with food by activating a food dispenser, and an unhelpful human who did not provide them with food. Subjects later had the opportunity to return food to each human type, in a test phase, via the same mechanism. In addition, a free interaction session was conducted in which the subject was free to interact with its owner and with whichever human partner it had encountered on that day. Two studies were carried out, which differed in the complexity of the experience phase and the time lag between the experience phase and test phase. Subjects did not reciprocate the receipt of food in either study. Furthermore, no difference was observed in the duration subjects spent in proximity to, or the latency to approach, the two human partners. Although our results suggest that dogs do not reciprocate help received from humans, they also suggest that the dogs did not recognize the cooperative or uncooperative act of the humans during the experience phase. It is plausible that aspects of the experimental design hindered the emergence of any potential reciprocity. However, it is also possible that dogs are simply not prosocial towards humans in food-giving contexts.

Wolves and dogs fail to form reputations of humans after indirect and direct experience in a food-giving situation

“…Although our finding that neither dogs nor wolves formed reputations of humans after direct experience is somewhat surprising given there is some evidence that wolves [37] and dogs [15][16][17][18]37] can form direct reputations, other studies have found that they could not [19,20]. Additionally, Jim et al [39] could not demonstrate that Asian elephants could form reputations of humans after direct experience and Subiaul et al [8] found that chimpanzees only learnt to discriminate between two humans after at least 32 trials, and one chimpanzee failed to show a consistent preference for a familiar generous partner.…”

“…Moreover, two studies by Carballo et al [ 17 , 18 ] showed that dogs preferred to approach and gazed more at a generous human than a selfish one in a food-giving situation [ 17 ] and when confronted with an unsolvable task [ 18 ]. However, other studies have found that dogs could not form reputations of humans after direct experience–Piotti et al [ 19 ] could not demonstrate that dogs formed a reputation of an experimenter based on her skilfulness or the quality of the interaction and McGetrick et al [ 20 ] found that dogs did not prefer a helpful human, who provided them with food by activating a food dispenser, compared to an unhelpful human, who did not provide them with food, which suggests that they did not form reputations of the humans based on their cooperativeness.…”

Do pet dogs reciprocate the receipt of food from familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics?

“…This study was similar to experimental reciprocity studies carried out with dogs (Gfrerer & Taborsky, 2017, 2018McGetrick et al, 2021) and rats (Rutte & Taborsky, 2007, 2008. Initially, the dogs went through a training phase to learn how to use the apparatus and/or to become habituated to the test setup.…”

“…Apart from the fact that one study employed pet dogs whereas the others focused on military dogs, one potential reason for different outcomes between these studies could be the species of the partner. McGetrick et al (2021) used humans as partners, whereas Taborsky (2017, 2018) employed dogs. Dogs have been shown to treat humans and conspecifics differently in experimental prosociality studies.…”

“…For example, dogs provided food to familiar conspecifics but not to humans by pulling a tray resulting in delivery of food to a neighbouring enclosure (Quervel-Chaumette et al, 2015;Quervel-Chaumette et al, 2016). Thus, in the current study, our first aim was to determine whether pet dogs would reciprocate the receipt of food from other pet dogs using a similar setup to that of McGetrick et al (2021). However, given that familiarity has been shown to play a crucial role in governing pet dogs' decision to donate food to a conspecific, with dogs donating to familiar but not unfamiliar conspecifics (Dale et al, 2016;Quervel-Chaumette et al, 2015), our second aim was to investigate the effect of familiarity on reciprocity.…”