Jealousy in Dogs
This study tested whether dogs displayed jealous behaviors when their human companions attended to three different objects, including a stuffed dog. The dogs did display more aggression towards the stuffed dog than towards other objects, and more actively tried to divert their human’s attention to themselves. This suggests that dogs experience jealousy, and that previous assumptions about the origin and nature of human jealousy may be inaccurate.
[Abstract excerpted from original source.]
“It is commonly assumed that jealousy is unique to humans, partially because of the complex cognitions often involved in this emotion. However, from a functional perspective, one might expect that an emotion that evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers might exist in other social species, particularly one as cognitively sophisticated as the dog. The current experiment adapted a paradigm from human infant studies to examine jealousy in domestic dogs. We found that dogs exhibited significantly more jealous behaviors (e.g., snapping, getting between the owner and object, pushing/touching the object/owner) when their owners displayed affectionate behaviors towards what appeared to be another dog as compared to nonsocial objects. These results lend support to the hypothesis that jealousy has some “primordial” form that exists in human infants and in at least one other social species besides humans.”