Attachment is a very important concept for animals that live in closed groups since group activities depend on the actual relationships among the members. Some forms of social learning or cooperation take place only if there is a close relationship between two animals.

Psychologists have found that there is a special bond between the mother and her infant, and not only the quality of this relationship varies from one individual mother to the next but later children's performance in the school, for example cooperative willingness etc, seems to depend on the quality of this relationship.

The most striking feature of the social life of dogs is that they seem to prefer joining human groups. The dog-human relationship has a long evolutionary history and this could be based both on dogs’ evolutionary heritage, being the descendants of wolves, and on changes which took place during their adaptation to living with humans. However, the notion that the dog is just a tamed version of the wolf and the affiliative behaviour of dogs towards human is simply the manifestation of a wolf-like behaviour in an interspecific context is not really supported by current knowledge. Recent evidence suggests that domestication led to significant changes in the social-affiliative behaviour system of dogs and these changes served as the basis of the evolutionary development of dog-human relationship.

In order to test dog-human attachment we have utilized the experimental developed by Mary Ainsworth (Strange Situation Test, 1969) for studying behavioural criteria of human infant-parent bond. This experimental approach offers direct comparisons between the behavioural manifestation of attachment behaviour in dogs and human children. We have found that dogs (both puppies and adult ones) displayed a specific reaction towards their owners, but not towards a stranger, by looking for them in their absence and making rapid and enduring contact upon their return. They also preferred to play with the owner, and decreased play activity in the absence of the owner.

Follow-up work provided evidence that this pattern of attachment is stable over at least one year and is independent of the peculiarities of the testing location. An important further analogy to the human case has been revealed by observing the emergence of attachment behaviour in shelter dogs. These observations suggest that dogs that have been deprived of human contact (adult shelter dogs) are able and motivated to initiate a new relationship rapidly after a short duration of social contact with humans.

More recent results show, that in contrast to 4-month-old dog pups, grey wolf cubs of the same age did not fulfil the criteria for attachment to human. Despite being hand-raised and socialized to an extreme level (in contact with their owners 20-24h per day for the first 3-4 months of their life), these hand-reared grey wolf pups did not seem to discriminate between their caregiver and a stranger greeting them when left alone in an unfamiliar enclosure. It seems that unlike dogs, the human caregiver does not act as a ‘secure base’ for wolves in stressful situations. These observed differences between wolves and dogs show that the emergence of ‘infant-like’ attachment in dogs is not (only) due to social experience during early exposure to humans.

Attachment has also another interesting effect: The attached individuals seem to develop some kind of dependence toward the attachment figure. This means that in a problem situation their first strategy is to seek the help of the attachment figure before attending the problem itself. This finding is often interpreted (in popular literature) as the 'pet dogs' being 'stupid' but this is not true! In contrast, it means that dogs living in close relationship with their owner prefer to wait for the other to do the job for them, and only if this 'strategy' fails are they willing to solve the problem themselves. In other words dogs are very flexible in using social strategies.

In sum our findings on the attachment behaviour point to a characteristic selective responsiveness to the human caregiver (owner) in dogs, and this supports the view that attachment is a functionally distinct component of the social behaviour of the dog showing striking functional behavioural similarities to that of described in human infants.

 

Further reading

Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 1997. Dog-human relationship affects problem solving behavior in the dog. Anthrozoös, 10: 214-224. (pdf)

Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V. 1998. Attachment behaviour in dogs: a new application of Ainsworth's (1969) Strange Situation Test. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112: 219-229. (pdf)

Gácsi, M., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Dóka, A., Csányi, V. 2001. Attachment behaviour of adult dogs (Canis familiaris) living at rescue centres: Forming new bonds. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115: 423-431. (pdf)

Naderi, Sz., Miklósi, Á., Dóka, A., Csányi, V. 2002. Does dog-human attachment affect their inter-specific cooperation? Acta Biologica Hungarica, 53: 537-550.

Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Virányi, Zs., Kubinyi, E., Csányi, V. 2005. Attachment to humans: a comparative study on hand-reared wolves and differently socialized dog puppies. Animal Behaviour, 70: 1367-1375. (pdf)

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