A dog saved her owner – who hurt his leg at home in rural Washington state, fell and couldn’t get up for hours – by walking to a road, sitting in the middle of it until a local sheriff’s deputy stopped, and leading the officer to him, according to authorities.
Gita, 13, had sat down in the middle of a road when a Stevens county deputy first encountered her. The deputy tried to get the dog into his patrol cruiser so he could then look for her owner, but she wouldn’t get in.
Gita at that point took off up a lightly traveled, unmarked path nearby when the deputy tried to get her off the roadway and away from potentially being hit by a motorist, the sheriff’s office said. The deputy followed Gita, who eventually led him to a small summer cabin.
The deputy soon heard an elderly man’s voice call out for help while on the ground a short distance from the cabin, according to the sheriff’s office. The man had medical conditions that required certain medications that he had not been able to take after falling and hurting his leg several hours earlier.
Honestly, given a canine’s physical capabilities, I’m not sure that I could have done as well as she did in that situation.
And for a dog, what had to have gone into that…
Assess that her owner was in trouble.
Assess that another human could help. I’m not sure that that’s an obvious conclusion for a dog to come to from an evolutionary standpoint. My guess is that most cases, in a pack of wild dogs, for most problems short of being attacked by something, there’s not a whole lot that bringing another dog to help is going to do, if one gets hurt.
She had to plan out in advance a way to get a human to do what she needed them to do.
Assess that disrupting traffic would be a way to get attention. That is, she had to have a model of the mental state of other humans sufficient to predict how they’d act in a situation that I doubt that she’d seen before.
Evade capture when someone tried to capture her.
And keep them interested enough to follow her to the cabin.
Dogs seek humans for help when they cannot solve the problem themselves. It’s one of the behavioural adaptations that distinguish them from wolves.
I can’t find the video of it, but there’s an experiment where a chunk of meat has a long piece of rope tied to it and placed in the centre of a cage so that only the end of the rope is accessible. Both both domesticated wolves and dogs are smart enough to start pulling on the reachable end of rope to get the meat to the cage edge.
Same experiment is repeated but this time the rope is nailed to the floor so that pulling on it will not work as last time. A wolf will eventually give up trying and ignore the cage. A dog will try every way it can think of and then seek out a human for help when all the attempts fail.
The behaviour of the dog in this article is more common than you think. What is impressive is that the human didn’t get in the way and actually figured it out.
If my dog has poop stuck to his butt he comes over and whimpers at me for help. My cat smears it all over my floor.
Some animals can figure it. At the nursery I used to work at, the new nursery cat decided to take a nap in a customer’s truck, and woke up in the nearby town (still several miles away).
She started to walk back, got part of the way, realized she didn’t know the rest of the way, and waited at an intersection. Then, when a local family stopped to put up some signs for a town festival, she accosted them and wouldn’t let them leave until they took her with them.
They recognized her and brought her back to the nursery.