Do Dogs Recognize Their Mothers?

1 Do Dogs Recognize Their Mothers?

The reality is not so simple! Professor Peter Hepper of the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland conducted such an experiment.

The dogs participating in the experiment included Labradors, Golden Retrievers, and German Shepherds, with the puppies aged 4 to 6 weeks.

To determine whether the puppies could recognize their mothers, the staff placed each puppy’s mother and another mother dog of the same age and breed in two separate small rooms.

They recorded which room the puppy would go to first and how long it lingered at each room’s door. The result: 84% of the puppies recognized their mother and chose to linger at her door.

The second experiment was more challenging for the puppies. The staff placed the test puppy among another litter of puppies of the same age and breed on one side, and its own siblings on the other. The result: 67% of the puppies clearly preferred to stay with their siblings.

Professor Hepper said this is an olfactory behavior not yet decoded by humans. To prove the correctness of the above experiments, Professor Peter Hepper once conducted the following test:

He placed a towel in the mother dog’s den. Two days later, he used this towel and towels from other dogs’ dens to test the puppies.

To see whether the puppies could distinguish their mother’s scent, 82% of the puppies chose the towel from their mother’s den in this test.

Can a Mother Recognize Her Own Puppies?

Professor Hepper thought of this too. After much effort, he found a group of dogs about 2 years old that had been separated from their mothers at around 8 weeks and had not seen them since, until this test. He repeated the earlier series of experiments, except this time the subjects were the mothers, to see whether they could distinguish their own offspring.

As you might expect, 78% of the mothers spent more time sniffing the towel with their offspring’s scent. This experiment shows that mother dogs can distinguish their own puppies.

Can Adult Dogs Recognize Their Mothers?

To make the results more precise, Professor Hepper specifically selected a group of mother dogs of the same breed and age as the subjects’ mothers. The results were nearly identical: 76% of the adult dogs preferred the towel with their mother’s scent. The premise of this test was even stricter: these adult dogs had not seen their mothers since they were separated at 8 weeks.

Clearly, Professor Hepper’s experiments have changed our view of dogs. Some might say, ‘If they know it’s their mother, why are those sons still willing to mate with her?’

Do not analyze dogs using human logic. Humans know that incest is immoral, but dogs have no sense of morality.