Dogs can count how many treats you're giving them, according to research

Dogs can understand quantities, meaning they know you're giving them an extra treat or not, according to research.

In 2019, experts at Emory University found that our pet pooches have a basic understanding of numbers through scanning the brains of 11 dog breeds in an fMRI where they looked at different numbers of dots flashing on a screen.

(The dogs weren't given any advanced training before this study).

From this analysis, it was clear that the dogs’ parietotemporal cortex responded to differences in the number of dots - but how do we know it was specifically the number of dots the dogs were responding to?

We know the dogs weren't reacting to the size of the dots because the researchers held the total area of the dots constant.

iStockphoto by Getty Images

So the dog's response to the number of dots means they have an idea of what is more and less - so if you thought you could get away with giving your dog fewer treats... you thought wrong.

The ability to process basic numbers like this takes place in a distinct part of dogs' brains which is similar to the number-responsive neural regions in humans.

"Our work not only shows that dogs use a similar part of their brain to process numbers of objects as humans do — it shows that they don’t need to be trained to do it,” said Gregory Berns, Emory professor of psychology and senior author of the study.

While Lauren Aulet, a PhD candidate and first author in the study noted how these results provide "some of the strongest evidence yet that numerosity is a shared neural mechanism" that goes as far back as 80 million years of evolution.

Elsewhere, Chernobyl dogs are evolving – and even have unique genetics.

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