What Hunting Dogs in Vanuatu and Mongolia Reveal About a Cognitive Blind Spot

Almost everything researchers thought they knew about how dogs think and communicate with humans was learned from a very specific kind of dog. A dog that lives indoors. A dog owned by someone with disposable income in a country with functional veterinary infrastructure. A dog, in other words, that most dogs in the world are nothing like.

Roughly 75 percent of the world’s approximately one billion dogs are not Western family pets. They roam, they scavenge, they work. They hunt pigs through dense jungle, flush game across steppe, guard homesteads at night. The field of dog cognition, like so much of psychology before it, has built its foundational claims on what researchers call WEIRD subjects: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. When you run almost all your experiments on one narrow slice of a species, you’re not studying the species. You’re studying a particular social arrangement.

A new study published in Scientific Reports¹ by a team led from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tried to do something about that. Lead author Juliane Bräuer and colleagues designed a cross-cultural test battery comprising six well-established behavioral experiments and a detailed questionnaire, then deployed it with 164 dog-owner pairs across five societies: rural Germany, the island of Efate in Vanuatu, the Khentii Province of eastern Mongolia, the Andasibe region of Madagascar, and Shipibo-Konibo communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Testing ran from October 2022 to September 2024.

Boy and his dog in Mongolia: The close relationship between dogs and humans, as seen in Western societies, exists in very different cultural contexts. Credit: Juliane Bräuer

To keep function comparable across sites, they focused on hunting dogs. Hunting is likely the oldest widespread form of dog-human cooperation, and a 2023 cross-cultural analysis of 124 societies found it to be the most common functional role for dogs globally. The six experiments probed a suite of social-cognitive capacities: whether dogs came when called; whether they followed a human pointing gesture to locate hidden food; whether they could communicate the location of food back to their owners; whether they avoided forbidden food when being watched; how they behaved when confronted with an unsolvable problem; and whether they used their owner’s emotional response to guide their approach to a novel, potentially frightening object.