In canine behavior, it's pretty easy to see a dog's feeling of attraction manifest itself when he pulls on the leash to get to another dog, or when he chases a squirrel, or jumps up on a person he likes.

The flip side of attraction - which could be either magnetic repulsion or emotional resistance - isn't as clear cut, but can be seen vividly in the difference between the way a dog pulls toward an object of attraction along a straight line as opposed to taking a more circular approach. In my view, the curvature indicates that the dog's feeling of attraction has met some form of resistance, either internal or external. In fact if the resistance is strong enough, the dog won't dog even look at it or acknowledge the so-called object of attraction.

Biologists talk about approach and avoidance, which are behaviors. Attraction and resistance are emotional states. A dog can sometimes be seen approaching someone while having very strong feelings of resistance toward that person, i.e., approaching very slowly, with the head and tail hung low. A dog can also have a strong attraction for something and hold perfectly still, not approaching it at all (this is usually called stalking).

One of the rules I follow in training is that when using games like fetch or tug to elicit an obedience behavior, you should always quit before the dog starts to get tired or bored. This is very important because what starts out as a pleasurable learning experience can quickly become the opposite, which will result in slower response time, and may even devolve into a general lack of interest in listening or obeying at all.

How can you tell when the dog is starting to get tired or bored?

I recommend studying Turid Rugaas's "calming signals" - a dog's behavioral postures and micro-expressions - which I've discussed previously, and which Rugaas sees as being produced with the conscious intent to communicate to another dog or person.

Since dogs produce these behaviors when people and other dogs can't see them, I tend to think of them as "tells," the kind of postures and micro-expressions poker players read when in their oppononents when trying to determine whether they're bluffing. In my experience, canine tells can be successfully used to determine whether a dog is feeling more resistance than attraction in any given situation.

So one way to determine when a dog is getting tired or bored with a game goes back to the difference between a straight line and a curve. If Fido chases the ball ten times, and brings it directly back each time, in a straight line, it means he's still emotionally invested. If, on the eleventh throw, he begins to come back in a more curved fashion - no matter how subtle the difference - his interest has started to wane, his heart is no longer in the game, and it's time to take a break.

Of course, we could interpret this behavior in any number of ways. The dog is simply tired. The dog's sense of smell is starting to override his joy in playing, etc. But I think it's extremely helpful to be able to interpret canine behavior through the lens of attraction and resistance.

A new study, "Social eavesdropping in the domesticated dog," shows the importance of understanding canine behavior from the dog's rather than the human's point of view. In their abstract, the researchers strongly suggest that dogs have some very highly developed thought processes, putting them on a scale with chimps [1] in terms of their ability to determine whether others in their social group are of a generous or stingy nature.

The study was set up in a small room, with four humans and a number of dogs, tested one at time. In the video record, you can see one human sitting in a folding chair, holding the dog on a leash, facing two more people seated at the opposite end of the room, not far away, facing one another. They hold containers of food, sausages, etc., and occasionally have a nosh or two from their own containers.

After they nosh a bit, a fourth person enters, going back and forth, in the dog's line of sight, asking each in turn if she can have some food.

The person on the left always says no in a sharp, yet not very loud voice. And although the camera is set up so that we can't fully see the person on the right, she speaks in a friendlier tone, and gives the "beggar" a bit of food each time she asks. During this portion of the video, the dog seems mildly stressed (his mouth his open and he's panting). You can also see some stress-related micro-expressions whenever he's looking at or away from the stingy person. But tellingly, whenever he looks at the generous person, his eyes are always locked, laser-like, onto her.

After going through this procedure several times, the beggar disappears. Then the person holding the dog releases him, allowing him access to the food. In this case the dog went toward the "generous" person, ignoring the "stingy" one completely, which is what 2/3s of the dogs reportedly did.

Here's how the researchers interpret their results: "Eavesdropping on third-party interactions has been observed in a number of species and is considered an important source of information in decision-making processes ... We found that the dogs were capable of eavesdropping on human food-sharing interactions, and vocal communication was particularly important to convey the human's cooperative versus noncooperative intent."

There are two red flags here for me: "decision-making" and "intent."[2]

Do dogs make behavioral choices? Yes, all the time. But making a decision implies careful deliberation, weighing one's options, and choosing the "best" one based on some internal, linear thought process, which in this case would include categorization, logic, and mental time travel. Behavioral choices only require an emotional, not an intellectual process. As for understanding another being's intent, that falls directly under the aegis of theory of mind, an idea which has been discussed and debunked here quite thoroughly on numerous occasions.

I could be wrong, but I see this is an example of dognitive scientists not making enough of an effort to see things from the dog's point of view.

Granted, there's no way of knowing, empirically, what a dog is or isn't thinking, or exactly how their minds actually work. However the rules of science - Ockham's razor, Morgan's canon, and the rule against anthropomorphism - dictate that the simplest explanation, as long as it satisfactorily explains all aspects of a phenomenon, is probably the best. And everything in this study can be explained quite satisfactorily through the principles of attraction and resistance.