Dogs have a sense of fairness

[draggar]

Chalk another one up for our canine companions:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,463467,00.html

Dogs do have a sense of fairness. If two dogs are doing the same tricks but one is always rewarded and the other is not then the one that is not getting rewarded stops tricks.

Interesting.

[One-Fang]

I think I have to agree with Clive.

We have known for eons that if you reward a dog, it repeats the trick. If you ignore a dog's behaviour, it does not repeat that behaviour. That is the basis of all dog training. Every halfway decent book out will tell you if you don't want your dog doing something, ignore that behaviour and reward it when it does what you do want.

So I'm not really surprised a dog not getting a reward for a trick stops doing it. What I would like to know is - how soon? After one iteration of seeing its partner get rewarded? Two? Twenty? Were the non-rewarded dogs told "Good dog" when they did the trick right? Or were all dogs completely ignored except for the provision of the food?

So much more to answer here before saying "dogs have a sense of fairness".