Evaluating a Claim on Jealous Emotions Frequently, there are questions asked by dog-lovers, and owners, about their dog’s emotion and responses to certain things. Sue Manning took these questions into her own hands and wrote on two studies from Dr. Bonnie Beaver, and Christine Harris, on what they discovered when trying to figure out if dogs experience the same human emotion of jealousy (Manning, 2014). The two studies left the audience questionable but the professors were both after the answer to the same question, do dogs get jealous? As I mentioned before, Sue Manning took a closer look into these studies. She explained Harris` study pretty generally, stating how Harris worked with 36 dogs, videotaping owners ignoring their pets while petting and talking sweetly to stuffed, animated dogs (Manning, 2014). After reading this section of the article I noticed that Harris used a form of experimentation know as, naturalistic observation. She gathered data about behavior by simply watching and taking notes and not trying to change anything during the trials. She had to use this form of experimentation because of the number of dogs in her population. Most of my reflections were negative but some positive. My first negative response to this study is the lack background information she portrayed in her population. I feel as if, age or maturity level would be the first thing to effect the actions that the dog, or puppy, might have displayed. For if the dog was a puppy, or at a young age, they would have more energy and less control over there actions. Also, another concern, if she had done background information on the thirty six dogs, would they have been seeking attention all the time, no matter if there owners had stuffed animals or toy pails, or not. According to Manning (2014) Harris believes the dogs saw the stuffed animals as rivals. This could be true but little aggression was shown towards the actual stuffed animal, more attention was drawn to the actual owner in Harris` study. When shown the stuffed animal, thirty percent snapped at the fake dog, and only one percent did when the second trial was tried with a jack-o-lantern pail (Manning, 2014). How do we know this is a valid percentage? The dog could simply have had protective instincts for his or her owner, which most dogs, to my knowledge, do. The only thing that really stuck out to me from the experiment was Harris` different use of independent variables, or the stuffed animal and the pail. This really did make me question why they reacted so differently to the more lifelike variable. This was the only time I asked myself if the dogs did get jealous, I felt the rest of the information was not useful to the audience, because all of it needed more validity.
In conclusion, I believe that the claim is not completely reliable because of the reasons I stated above. When I first saw the title of the article by Manning I was quite excited because I actually felt as if it could be a very interesting study, and perhaps an actual thing, jealousy in dogs. But because of the lack of background information on her population, Manning did no convincing for me after I read through her article. Do dogs get jealous? The world may never know.