Hey Dog Lovers,
Ever wonder if your dog feels when they do something wrong? Or when they do what you ask of them.
Morality is a set of intentions, decisions and actions that can be seen as either proper or improper. Morals help cultivate and regulate social interactions, and they’re the beliefs that give us a sense of what’s right or wrong.
Dogs have a sense of rules and boundaries when it comes to interacting with one another, suggesting they can experience morality. They also seem to have a sense of knowing what’s right or wrong when it comes to social interactions. These observations suggest that dogs do operate with their own moral compass.
Decades of research suggest that beneath this apparently frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality. – In Dog’s Play, Researchers See Honesty & Deceit, Perhaps Something Like Morality
If dogs have a sense of morals it begs the questions; what other complex decisions and emotions are they experiencing? A few studies on dog emotions have found evidence of jealousy, empathy and the ability to recognize generosity.
Researchers are just beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding how cognitively complex our dogs are. But perhaps that emotional complexity, whether scientifically proven or not, explains why we bond so closely with our dogs.
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