Questão 24871

(UEFS 2013 - Meio do ano)

Dogged determination

Sometimes scientists seem to be telling us what we already know. Thus a recent study at Britain’s University of Portsmouth determined that if you told a dog not to take a piece of meat, then turned out the light 5 so he thought you couldn’t see him, he’d likely steal the food anyway.(I once lost half a Thanksgiving turkey like that, but it was no experiment.) What the rigorous testing done with scores of dogs of different breeds at Portsmouth has proved scientifically is that our canine 10 friends really do pay attention to what they’re doing — a level of cognition that puts them in a category of intelligence that can begin to be compared with primates. “Dogs show some specialized skills in how they read human communications, says Juliane Kaminski, one of 15 the authors of the Portsmouth study. “This seems to be a direct result of selection pressures during domestication.”  To put it unscientifically, they’ve been man’s best friend so long, it’s in their blood. Kaminski says she doesn’t know of any similar studies done on 20 felines. But, then, we already know cats don’t really give a damn what humans think.

DICKEY, Christopher. Dogged determination. In “Big Think: Around the world in six ideas.” Newsweek, Feb. 25, 2013. p. 9.

The word “Thus” (l. 2) expresses