New dog, old tricks? Stray dogs can understand human cues. Pet dogs are highly receptive to commands from their owners. But is this due to their training or do dogs have an innate ability to understand human signals? A new study finds that 80% of untrained stray dogs successfully followed pointing directions from people to a specific location. The results suggest that dogs can understand and respond to complex gestures without any training, meaning that dogs may have an innate connection to human behaviors. Source 8x.
According to other research, developed by the Arizona Center for Canine Cognition and published in the journal Current Biology in 2021, these animals understand human facial expressions and know how to interpret our demands from puppies.