Your Pet Dog May Get Jealous By Imagining You With Another Pet

Jealousy is one of the challenges of owning multiple dogs. Any failure to balance the attention given to each one and your household's little social dynamic paves a way for lots of rivalry.

However, one common misconception is that this jealousy can be easily managed by never showing yourself interacting too much with one party while the other is in the room. The logic, as it goes, is that a dog's mind is supposedly more in response to what it senses rather than what it 'thinks.'

A new research from the University of Auckland highly suggests that dogs can actually imagine situations that foster feelings of jealousy even when they can't exactly see who (or what) is taking their owners attention from them.

This has a lot of interesting implications regarding the way dogs behave, as well as provide more detail on their similarities to humans.

Picturing a Dog's Imagination

What goes on in a dog's mind is still very much unknown. Researchers are still trying to determine whether they really can picture something on their mind, or if something else is going on that just makes them appear that they do.

Still, the Auckland study proved one thing: Dogs can at least 'sense' if there is something else getting their owner to pay less attention to them. Pair that up with their good, old-fashioned canine instinct and they will very likely figure it out.

The researchers confirmed this by essentially having eighteen dog owners pretend to interact with a fake dog while their real dogs watched. The interaction was partly obscured, however, meaning the dogs would have at least had to sense or picture what was going on in order to exhibit signs of jealousy.

The findings have really helped paint a more sophisticated picture of a dog's mind outside of being purely reactive or associative.

What it means for your dog's behavior

For those who really love their canine besties, this should make them more aware of how their other activities could affect their bond with their dog even if the animals can't always see what keeps their owners away for certain periods of time.

For example, if you are having meetings that have left you coming home late often, then it is possible your dog would still experience feelings of jealousy and neglect without knowing what a meeting is.

Likewise, if there is another animal in the house, they can still assume that you may be spending more time with them even if they don't see you two together. (Hence, teaching them to get along is key to reducing instances of jealousy).

To summarize, dog owners should never underestimate their pets capacity to have something on their mind. They have been one of mankind's most intelligent companions for thousands of years.

They can perceive emotion, sense threats to their loved ones and show affection even if it is not known how exactly that is experienced in their heads. Is it really difficult to imagine them being jealous of things they can't see?