Your Dog Imitates Others

Studies that have been carried out have concluded that  dogs imitate people’s gestures and expressions,  even imitating their character. It is very common for people who own dogs or who live with them to say that dogs not only reproduce facial expressions, but also imitate the details of behavior.

Why does your dog imitate others?

It must be borne in mind that  adapting to the environment around them is very important for the survival of the animal and, as they depend on humans to cover their basic needs, both in terms of food, shelter and affection, they develop their skills with regard to socialization and imitation, in order to please their owners.

differences with people

If we think about it, there aren’t that many differences between  people  and animals. The imitation ability is similar. Science has managed to prove that dogs imitate and remember the gestures and actions of their owners and those around them. Among other advantages, with imitation, animals can perform their tasks in a simpler way. 

Tests

Many tests have already been done to demonstrate this capacity for imitation, moreover, that dogs have a specific type of long-term memory, and that, when they observe new actions, they can copy them. When it comes to familiar gestures and actions, which they habitually live with, dogs are able to repeat them up to ten minutes after they’ve seen them being performed for the last time.

Domestic dogs are more likely to reproduce human gestures and communications. They assimilate expressions and are able to reproduce them. This is derived from the continual attention they have on humans, and the influence they absorb from them. These animals have a great capacity for  learning.

This ability to encode, assimilate and remember a human action after a period of time, shorter or longer, means that  dogs have a mental representation of the human demonstration,  as well as a possibility to generate an emotional imitation process, which they are a consequence of the repetition of the gestures of humans and other dogs.

learning ability

Everything that has already been mentioned also influences those owners who choose a specific breed or animal that has a character similar to yours, and that is more dynamic, passive, calm, active, nervous, sleepy, sedentary, moderate or gluttonous, shy, daring or bold. While this choice is important, it is not the only cause.

Living with human social groups managed to increase the ability of dogs to learn from humans. Studies were done, in which dogs mimicked human actions with delays of half a minute to ten minutes, periods in which the researchers distracted the animals’ minds with other activities.

Tests and videos

In one of the tests, owners of 8 adult dogs were trained to repeat what their monitors and caregivers did. Before performing the imitation, they had to wait around a minute.

Actions were of all kinds, jumping, dancing, walking around a hoop, etc. The results of these tests were positive. Animals repeated both the actions that were known and familiar to them and those actions that were new to them. 

A well-known video, with a lot of demand on social media, is the video of two Siberian Huskys imitating a baby crawling in a hallway; the two dogs perfectly mimic the baby’s crawling down the aisle. The video gained such fame that it has millions of reproductions on social networks, and in addition, it was also broadcast on television.