Fluff Therapy

What would your dog do to help if you were upset? Quite a bit, study finds

Dogs are thought to be very aware of people’s emotions, but if a pup’s owner was really upset, would it actually go out of its way to offer help and comfort?

Some not only will, a study found, they’ll overcome obstacles to do it. In a paper called Timmy’s in the well: Empathy and prosocial helping in dogs, published in the journal Learning & Behavior, researchers showed that dogs with strong bonds to their owners hurried to pushed through a door when they heard their person crying. The name of the paper is an homage to Lassie, the canine superhero of 1950s TV.

“We found dogs not only sense what their owners are feeling, if a dog knows a way to help them, they’ll go through barriers to provide to help them,” said lead author Emily Sanford, a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University who did the research as an undergraduate at Macalester College.