A Dog's Life

International researchers exploring how dogs think and react in the world are making some surprising discoveries in A DOG'S LIFE. Previous observations led experts to believe that dogs and wolves are organized into packs with a social hierarchy and a dominant "alpha male." More recent findings question this supposition and the widespread training advice that the belief has spawned. The experiments show that dogs are equipped through thousands of years of breeding to figure out human-dog social interaction riddles but less to understand riddles posed by the physical world, like walking around the correct side of a tree when attached to a human by leash. Dogs are good at imitating humans but not good at finding things in a maze, demonstrating how different dogs are from rats and pigeons. Some researchers also believe that, surprisingly, most dogs would rather hang out with their humans than with other dogs.