In a heart-wrenching video, a dog desperately attempts to revive its lifeless friend, who was tragically struck by a passing car.
The devastating footage captures the canine’s futile efforts as it paws at the motionless body of its companion, which lies at the roadside, while traffic rushes past, oblivious to the sorrowful scene unfolding.
Despite its relentless attempts, there is nothing the dog can do for its friend, whose life has already slipped away, leaving the surviving pup in a state of profound grief.
The video, seemingly recorded by a truck driver who may or may not have been involved in the accident, portrays the surviving dog as it mournfully tugs at its friend’s lifeless shoulder. The small, black mongrel, lacking a collar, lets out mournful barks, as if lamenting the cruel hand of fate that has befallen its companion.
This poignant moment challenges the notion that dogs are loyal only to those who provide them with sustenance. It adds to the vast collection of anecdotal evidence that suggests dogs possess a depth of emotion and connection that goes beyond mere tricks and treats.
The fate of this particular dog, who stood faithfully by its departed friend, remains unknown. The video serves as a poignant reminder of the profound bonds that can exist between these remarkable creatures, demonstrating that their capacity for love and companionship transcends the boundaries of human understanding.
In the comments section of the video, a viewer shared their own experience of how their pet dog responded when they pretended to be unresponsive. It’s a testament to the empathy and concern that dogs often display towards their human companions, further underscoring the deep emotional connections they can form.
Dogs actually do respond better when their owners use cute ‘baby talk’, study finds
Dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans, especially women, use to talk to babies, according to a new study.
The research, published recently in the journal Communications Biology, found “exciting similarities” between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.
Humans tend to speak with a specific speech style characterised by exaggerated prosody, or patterns of stress and intonation in a language, when communicating with individuals having limited language competence.
Such speech has previously been found to be very important for the healthy cognitive, social and language development of children, who are also tuned to such a high-pitched voice.
But researchers, including those from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, hoped to assess whether dog brains are also sensitive to this way of communication.
In the study, conscious family dogs were made to listen to dog, infant and adult-directed speech recorded from 12 women and men in real-life interactions.
As the dogs listened, their brain activities were measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
The study found the sound-processing regions of the dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed than adult-directed speech.
This marked the first neurological evidence that dog brains are tuned to speech directed specifically at them.
“Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues,” explained Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study.
Scientists also found dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women, and was affected by voice pitch and its variation.
These findings suggest the way we speak to dogs matters, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the higher-pitched voice tone typical to the female voice.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” said Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.
“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Dr Gabor said.
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