Ever feel like your dog was jealous when you played with another pooch? It might not have been your imagination, according to a new study.
The object of jealousy: a stuffed dog that barked and wagged its tail. Researchers compared how dogs reacted to their owners petting the faux canine with how they reacted to them showering love on a jack-o-lantern pail and reading a noise-making pop-up book aloud.
Dr. Christine Harris, an emotion researcher at UC San Diego, got the idea for the study after playing with her parents' three border collies.
"As I was petting the dogs, what happened is that one dog would push the other dogs head from out underneath my hand so that both hands were on him, and it wasn't just one dog who did this," she told NBC News. "They were not content to be sharing attention and resources. There was something about this exclusivity that made me think I was seeing a basic jealous behavior."
Harris adapted a study originally meant for six-month-old babies. When it was over, 72 percent of the dogs expressed jealous behavior (snapping at the object or pushing or touching the owner) when the fake canine was involved. Only 42 percent did the same with the pail and 22 percent with the book. One in four dogs actually showed aggressive behavior toward the fake dog, compared to only one dog out of the 36 in the study who snapped at the pail.
