News From The University Of The Blatantly Obvious

Last month we learned from university researchers that dogs have personalities.

Dr Sam Gosling, of the University of Texas, rates the dogs on four key traits with positive and negative extremes. He adds that his work suggests pets should be matched with owners who have similar personalities.

I’ll have to write this down…

The work was presented at a major science conference in Washington DC.
“We used approaches used to assess human personality and applied them to dogs,” said Dr Gosling.
“You do find personality differences between breeds. Indeed, many have been bred on that basis. But you also find enormous [personality] differences within the breeds themselves.”

Now we learn that animals like to play and have a sense of humour.

Studies by various groups suggest monkeys, dogs and even rats love a good laugh. People, meanwhile, have been laughing since before they could talk.
“Indeed, neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the brain, and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in other animals eons before we humans came along with our ‘ha-ha-has’ and verbal repartee,” says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University.

In otherwords, formal research dollars and intellectual resources are being devoted to experiments that reproduce observations that can be obtained by raising a litter of puppies or owning two cats.