CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Rescue behavior is considered a type of pro-social response, defined as a voluntaryaction directed to benefit another individual who is in a stressful or dangerous situation.In two experiments, we investigated whether dogs would rescue their owners when theperson was trapped inside a wooden box and emitted clear signs of stress. Theperformance of these dogs was compared against that of a control group in which theowners remained calm while trapped. In addition, in order to assess if trainingmodulated this behavior, we tested a group of dogs from the military trained in searchand rescue tasks (Experiment 1). Results showed that dogs opened the box morefrequently when the owner pretended to be stressed than when calm. Trainingshortened latencies to open the door but not the frequency of the behavior. InExperiment 2, we investigated if emotional contagion could be a possible mechanismunderlying dogs´ rescue responses by measuring dogs´ behavior, heart rate, andsaliva cortisol level in the stressed and calm conditions, and also controlled forobedience by having the calm owners call their pets while trapped. We replicated thefindings of Experiment 1 as more dogs opened the door in the stressed ownercondition than in the calm condition. In addition, we observed an increase in heart rateacross trials in the stressed condition and a decrease across trials in the calmcondition, but no differences in cortisol levels or stress-related behaviors between conditions. In brief, we found evidence that approximately half of the dogs withoutprevious training showed spontaneous rescue behaviors directed to their owners.Neither was this behavior motivated by obedience nor by the motivation to re-establishsocial contact with the owner. We conclude that emotional contagion is a plausiblemechanism underlying dogs´ rescue behavior in the present protocol.