Reddy et al.

Human–Animal Interactions (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.0001

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Do children help dogs spontaneously?

Rachna B. Reddy1,2,3, Margaret Echelbarger4,5, Natalie Toomajian4, Taeah Hammond4 and Henry M. Wellman4

Abstract
Two capacities considered foundational in human cooperation are prosocial motivation and goal-reading abilities that enable
helping. Children exhibit both proclivities by age 2 in interactions with other humans, but interactions with nonhuman species
on whom we have been interdependent for millennia are unstudied. We tested the hypothesis that children’s goal-reading and
prosocial propensities extend to other animals. We predicted children would help pet dogs access objects that dogs attempted
to reach but could not reach themselves. We studied 97 children between 2 and 3 years of age living in a small mid-western US
city, 44 of whom had dogs as household pets. In a quasi-naturalistic setting, we introduced children to 1 of 3 friendly pet dogs who
remained within a small, porous enclosure while a treat or toy was placed outside it. Dogs reacted naturally, either showing interest
in accessing the item (e.g., pawing, begging) or ignoring it. Measures of dog and child behavior during sessions were coded
blindly with high reliability. Children provided dogs with out-of-reach items twice as often when dogs showed interest rather than
ignored items, indicating sensitivity to the dog’s goals. Additionally, children were more generally likely to provide dogs with items
if children lived with pet dogs, if dogs were more lively and engaged rather than subdued and if the item was a treat rather than
a toy. These findings lend support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing proclivities for goal-reading and prosociality
extend beyond humans to other animals.
Keywords: instrumental helping, human-animal interaction, cognitive development, prosociality

Introduction others’ mental states, including knowledge, emotions, beliefs,

For millennia, humans have formed interdependent caregiving
relationships with domesticated animals (Clutton-Brock, 1981;
Zeuner, 1963). These relationships are often essential for survival,
but we understand little about how human capabilities for interspecies
care evolved. Such caregiving is peculiar within the animal
kingdom. Although between-species interactions and dependence
are everyday experiences in the lives of many animals—impala
respond to the predator alarm calls of baboons (Kitchen et al., 2010),
songbirds share information about food locations across species
lines (Farine et al., 2015), and grouper fish recruit eels as partners
in coordinated hunting (Bshary et al., 2006)—humans are the only
animals currently known to habitually care for and raise individuals of
other species on a large scale. How did animal care practices arise
in so many different cultures and locations and with so many different
nonhuman animal species? One hypothesis is that as a species we
are highly capable and motivated to behave in helpful and caregiving
ways towards other species because the psychological foundations
that enable human-to-human cooperation to extend to other animals.
Two key psychological capacities that facilitate cooperation and
helping in human-to-human contexts are: (1) the ability to infer
desires and goals of others or Theory-of-Mind (Wellman, 1992)
and (2) a motivation to behave prosocially towards others, and
especially to help them to reach their own or joint goals (Warneken
and Tomasello, 2006; 2007; Warneken 2015). Helping is an action
that necessitates both goal-reading and prosocial motivation.
Previous studies on both humans and nonhuman animals indicate
that both cognitive capacities and prosocial motivations to help have
deep evolutionary and developmental roots. First, instrumental
helping is demonstrated in experimental contexts by our closest living
relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, towards their conspecifics as
well as their human caretakers (Melis et al., 2011; Nolte and Call,
2021; Warneken and Tomasello 2006; Yamamoto et al., 2012).
Second, children’s helpful behavior towards other humans, both
adults and other children, is early developing—occurring by 2 years
of age and in many cultures (Aime et al., 2017; Hepach et al., 2017a;
2017b; 2012). Because helping is so early developing and culturally
widespread in humans, it has been considered a foundational part
of our species’ evolved cooperative psychology (Warneken, 2015).
Indirect evidence from past research also suggests that children
may be capable and motivated to help nonhuman animals as well

Correspondence: 1Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; 2Department of Human Evolutionary Biology,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; 3Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; 4Department of Psychology,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; 5College of Business, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Corresponding author: Rachna B. Reddy rachna.reddy@duke.edu
Submitted: 23 October 2022. Accepted: 24 October 2022. Published: 16 January 2023.
© The Authors 2023. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution
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Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00012
as humans. First, children appear primed to attribute their minds
to the world around them. For example pre-school-aged children
readily anthropomorphize (Lane et al., 2010) and infants ascribe
intentionality to moving shapes on a screen (Gergely and Csibra,
2003; Hamlin, 2013). Additionally, some evidence suggests that
prosocial motivations towards other animals are heightened in
children compared to adults. In a recent questionnaire study, for
example children compared to adults prioritized the lives of dogs
more equally to the lives of humans (Wilks et al., 2021). Given
these propensities, it seems possible that young children would
(1) attribute goals and (2) be motivated to help another nonhuman
animal in a real-life interaction.
In this study, we tested the hypothesis that humans’ early developing
propensities for helping other humans extend to nonhuman animals.
Specifically, we predicted that in a quasi-naturalistic encounter
with friendly pet dogs, 2- to 3-year-old children would help dogs
to access desired out-of-reach items. We predicted that children
would demonstrate goal-reading capabilities as well as prosocial
motivations in this encounter, indicated by providing out-of-reach
objects to dogs when dogs attempted to access objects rather than
ignore them. We expected that children’s prior exposure to dogs
as social partners would enhance their proclivities for helping.
Therefore we predicted children with compared to children without
pet dogs at home would help dogs access objects more often.
We chose to work with dogs as an initial study species for this
inter-species helping investigation for two main reasons. First,
dogs have a unique coevolutionary history with humans as they
are by far the earliest known domesticated species (appearing
genetically distinct from wolves as early as 23,000 years ago;
Nagasawa et al., 2015; Perri et al., 2021). Second, dogs have
evolved to read human social cues (Hare and Tomasello, 1999)
and naturally seek out human help when they encounter problems:
Dogs’ help-seeking behaviors such as reaching and ‘begging’ for
items they cannot access (Marshall-Pescini et al., 2017) resemble
the actions of human experimenters in a classic experimental
helping paradigm (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006).
Methods
All research presented here was approved by the Institutional
Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee
at the University of Michigan. All children participated with the
consent of their parents and their own verbal assent. The three
dog ‘experimenters’ participated with the consent of their owners
and their own eagerness to return to the study room.
PARTICIPANTS
We recruited 97 children of 1.7 to 3.1-year-old (51 female, 46
male; age range: 20–47 months) to participate in three iterations
of our study at a university child laboratory, 44 of whom had pet
dogs at home and 53 who did not. We chose this sample size to
Figure 1. Dog ‘experimenters’ Fiona (left), Henry (center) and Seymour (right).
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reveal comparable effects if children helped dogs at similar levels
to their helping other humans. It was unclear what to expect with
children helping dogs, but research with children helping adults
in previous studies (Warneken and Tomasello 2006; 2007) has
consistently found significant helping with sample sizes ranging
from 24 to 36 children. We chose our age group after initially
piloting with 14-month-old to 3-year-old children (n = 35). Younger
children seemed overstimulated in the presence of the dog and
had difficulty attending to the situation as was necessary for the
study design used here. We also excluded children in our age
range who were indicated by their parents (in a recruitment phone
call) to be allergic to or highly fearful of dogs.
Children came from Ann Arbor, Michigan, US and surrounding
towns where most families were middle class. By parental report,
the majority of children (71%) identified as White, and 29% identified
as multiracial, Black or African-American, Latino or Asian. A total of
36% of these children had a parent occupied in caring for them
at home full-time, and all spoke English as their only language or
fluently as one of their multiple languages.
Three dogs, Fiona, Henry and Seymour (Figure 1), participated as
‘experimenters’ in our study between 2015 and 2020. We initially
chose to work with Fiona, who belonged to a close friend of one
of the authors, because we observed Fiona to eagerly and gently
interact with young children (iteration 1). To expand beyond a single
dog, Henry, who belongs to one of the authors (who was never in
the room with him during testing), joined the study (iterations 1–2).
After Fiona moved away, we recruited Seymour, who belongs to
a friend of one of the authors, as an “experimenter” (iteration 3).
Fiona, Henry and Seymour spontaneously behaved differently in
similar situations because of differences in personality, baseline
activity and other factors. We did not attempt to control this
variability but used it to assess children’s dog-directed behaviors
in a generalizable way.
PROCEDURES
Children and their parents were taken to a testing room where one
of three small dogs, either Fiona, Henry, or Seymour, sat in an
enclosure created by a commercial baby-gate fence (Figures 1
and 2, Supplemental Video).
The enclosure had numerous holes and spaces to easily see the
dog and to allow small objects (i.e., edible dog treats or toys) to
be offered to the dog through the fence. We implemented this
enclosure set up as a safety measure. Although all three dogs had
no history of aggression and were gentle with children, the children
were quite young and we were concerned that they or their parents
might become startled or distressed if a dog initiated physical
contact with them such as excited licking. Importantly, our initial
IRB approval (iteration 1, n = 37 children) did not permit children
to pet dogs. We were able to obtain IRB permission for petting for
later participants (iterations 1 and 2, n = 60).
Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00013
We used treats and toys as out-of-reach objects because both
were of interest to dogs but might present different scenarios to
children (e.g., feed the dog vs. play with the dog). Using both
permitted us to distinguish whether children wanted to help the dog
across different contexts rather than solely feeding or playing with
the dog. There was also a ‘staging platform’ adjacent to the fence
where we placed out-of-reach objects (the white box-like item in
Figure 2). When children and parents entered the testing room,
we briefly introduced them to the dog together. Then, we asked
parents to sit in a chair in the back of the room and pretend to be
busy reading a magazine while we engaged their child in further
dog familiarization and then target out-of-reach object events.
Then the human experimenter again introduced the child to the
dog, sat on the floor and read a book about a dog named Spot
(‘kind of like Fiona/Henry/Seymour’) to the child in proximity to
the enclosure so that the child was comfortable in the testing
space and understood that they were permitted to interact with
the dog. Importantly, this book included no mention or depiction of
Spot’s goal-directed behavior. Based on our pilot testing, we had
concerns that children might think that they were not permitted to
interact with the dog in the testing room. During pilot sessions,
when we presented children with our task and later interviewed
them, several children verbally and emotionally expressed a
desire to feed the dog. For instance, one child screamed to a
‘busy’ parent, ‘She’s hungry! She’s hungry! That dog is hungry!’
but did not provide the dog with treats themselves. When asked
about their actions, children indicated that they thought they
were not allowed to feed the dog because she was ‘in a cage.’
Consequently, we took several measures to ensure children
understood that they were allowed to feed the dog but did not think
that the experimenter desired for them to do so. In iteration 1, prior
to receiving permission to allow petting and touching through the
enclosure fence, we gave children a dog treat to hold but did not
explicitly encourage or train them to feed the dog. In iterations 2
Figure 2. Child-dog interaction setup.
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and 3 we received IRB permission for petting through the fence
and permitted children to pet and feed the dog treats if they wished
to. In the latter iterations, we then used toys not treats in out-of-
reach object events rather than a combination of the two used in
the first iteration (see below).
After the children were familiarized with the dog in the manner
above, we initiated an out-of-reach ‘event,’ during which a treat or
toy was placed on the staging platform within reach of the child and
out-of-reach for the dog. Importantly, we did not want it to appear
as though the human experimenter had purposely placed the treat
or toy on the platform with the intention of giving it to or keeping it
away from the dog. Thus, we made the placing appear accidental
in the following ways: In iteration 1 (n = 37 children), we presented
four events to each child in the same order. In the first event, the
experimenter told the child, ‘I have to leave for one minute, but I’ll
be right back, OK?’ then left the area while surreptitiously letting a
single treat drop from her pocked onto the staging platform outside
of the dog’s enclosure, within reach of the child. To initiate her
departure in events 2–4, the experimenter used a remote to trigger
a ringing sound on her laptop computer, which was kept on a cart
at standing desk height at the back of the room. At the sound of
the buzz, she would exclaim, ‘Oh! I’ll be right back!’ surreptitiously
drop the treat or a toy on the platform, go to the computer, pretend
to be engaged and type, and allow the dog to naturally beg for
and attempt to access the out-of-reach food or toy for 30 seconds.
Begging/attempting behavior included the dog scratching at the
fence with her paws, making whining noises and/or looking at
the item and looking at the child while cocking her head from side
to side (see Supplemental Video). In events 1 and 4, the out-
of-reach item was a treat, in event 2 it was two treats contained
within a toy and in event 3 a toy alone (see Supplemental Video,
Supplemental Protocol). In this study iteration, both dogs Fiona
and Henry attempted to access the object in every test event
(n = 145 events, 37 children).
Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00014
After testing 37 children with the above method, we wanted to
document child behavior in ‘control’ events where dogs would
naturally ignore out-of-reach items compared to test events where
the dogs attempted to access items as they had during iteration
1. We achieved this natural distinction by rubbing a rubber dog-
bone-shaped toy with a dog treat or food in a manner that left
no residue detectable to children but retained a strong smell that
was attractive to dogs. Instead of creating four out-of-reach object
events for each child as we had in iteration 1, we created two
events, one where a scented bone was placed out of the dog’s
reach and one where an unscented bone was. We counterbalanced
the order of these ‘control’ and ‘test’ events between participants.
Because Fiona moved from the area, Henry remained our only dog
participant for iteration 2 (n = 37 child participants). Unexpectedly,
particularly during events with the unscented toy, Henry not only
ignored the out-of-reach item but became relatively disengaged,
appearing uninterested in the child. In total, there were 70 events
in which Henry attempted to access the out-of-reach toy but in
only 37% of these, he was energetic and engaged (see coding
details in ‘Analyses’ below). There were 77 events in which Henry
ignored the out-of-reach toy and he was energetic and engaged in
8% of these events. This behavior was quite different from Fiona’s
behavior and Henry’s own behavior during iteration 1 in which both
dogs were engaged and attempted to access objects in 100% of
events.
Our concern that Henry’s level of disengagement, more so than his
actions towards the out-of-reach item, might influence children’s
behavior, led us to work with a new dog, Seymour, who was
consistently engaged. Trials with Seymour constituted iteration 3.
These concerns about dog engagement level also contributed to
our decision to aggregate data from out-of-reach events across all
study iterations in a single analysis that permitted us to address
dog engagement, among other potentially confounding factors
(see ‘Analysis’ below).
As in iteration 2, in iteration 3 (n = 23 child participants) we
presented each child with two out-of-reach toy target events, in
this case, one where Seymour showed interest in the object and
one where he mostly ignored it. Both objects were identical-looking
rubber dog bone toys, differing only in colour. The different colours
were intended to demonstrate to the child (not the dog, who, as
in iteration 2 was responding to scent) that they were different
items. Event order (dog showed interest vs. did not) and objects
(which was scented and other was not) were counterbalanced
between child participants. We also slightly altered the ‘accidental’
placing of objects that put them out-of-reach during these iteration
3 events. Instead of having an experimenter ‘accidentally’ drop an
object, we had her ‘accidentally’ kick the staging platform with the
target object on it away from the edge of the fence as she walked
to attend to the computer buzzer. This change provided a more
streamlined method and permitted us to achieve identical behavior
between several experimenters who administered the tasks.
We were forced to end data collection for iteration 3 with the onset
of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, we had collected data
from only 23 children, the majority of whom (75%) did not have
pet dogs at home. This imbalance, making it difficult to examine
the effects of prior dog exposure when examining findings from
iteration 3 alone, further contributed to our decision to aggregate
events across all iterations for our primary analysis (see ‘Analysis’
below).
ANALYSIS
Coding
For each out-of-reach object event across the three iterations of
our study, we coded aspects of child and dog behavior from video.
First, we coded whether the child gave the dog this out-of-reach
item. Children could ‘give’ by either providing the object to the dog
themselves or by asking their parent or the adult experimenter to
do so. Second, we coded whether the dog appeared interested in
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the out-of-reach item. We considered dogs to be interested in the
item if they attempted to reach this item themselves, scratching at
the fence or attempting to lick the item through the enclosure gaps.
Third, we coded whether the dog was engaged generally with the
child as indicated by the dog sitting or standing up rather than
lying down, wagging its tail, vocalizing, approaching and orienting
towards the child or touching them.
A coder blind to our hypotheses coded 20% of all events (66/338)
for the preceding behaviors. Inter-rater agreement for whether
or not the child gave the object to the dog was 94%, for whether
or not the dog was interested in the out-of-reach object was 93%,
and for whether or not the dog was highly engaged in interacting
with the child was 93%.
Model
To determine whether children were helping dogs we needed to
determine whether they discriminately gave the dog the out-
of-reach object more often when the dog showed interest in the
object (by attempting to reach it themselves) than when the dog
ignored the object. However, we also expected other factors to
increase children’s likelihood to give objects to dogs regardless
of the dog’s in-task begging behavior. These included: (1) the
child having a pet dog at home. Here, we expected children with
increased dog experience to have increased knowledge and
comfort about interacting with dogs and therefore take more
initiative in interacting with an unfamiliar dog in this study setup.
(2) The dog’s level of engagement when interacting with the child.
Here we thought children would feel more encouraged to interact
with dogs who themselves showed eagerness about interacting
with children. And (3) the object being food rather than a toy. This
expectation stemmed from how excited children appeared to be to
feed dogs during the first iteration of our study.
To examine the influence of these factors, we conducted a mixed-
effects logistic regression where the outcome variable was whether
the child gave the out-of-reach item to the dog (Y/N) on an event-
by-event basis (n = 338 events where children attended to the
dog’s behavior). We aggregated data for all events across all study
iterations. Doing so permitted us to examine key confounding
factors that we could not examine within each iteration alone (see
‘Procedures’). Our main effect predictor of interest was whether
the dog showed interest in the object (Y/N). To control for whether
the child had a dog at home (Y/N), whether the dog was highly
engaged with the child (Y/N), and whether the object was food
rather than a toy (Y/N), we included these variables as additional
main effects. Importantly, we also controlled for methodological
variation between iterations and our repeated measures design
by including study iteration and participant identity respectively as
random intercepts.
We conducted analyses in R using the package lme4 (Bates et al.,
2007). We provide the data that support this study, full procedural
protocols and annotated R Code used to conduct our analyses on
our OSF website page: https://osf.io/3svbt/
Results
Children (N = 97) gave dogs out-of-reach treats and toys in 50%
(118/236) of all events where dogs attempted to access these
items themselves. In contrast, children offered dogs objects that
dogs ignored only half as often, on only 26% (27/102) of occasions
(Figures 3 and 4). The mixed-effects logistic regression indicated
that children were 1.6 (SE = 0.6) times more likely to provide dogs
with out-of-reach objects in events where dogs actually showed
interest versus ignored those objects, when controlling for the
other factors (Table 1, Figure 4). As expected, having a dog at
home, the dog being highly engaged, and the out-of-reach object
being food rather than a toy also increased children’s likelihood of
giving dogs objects on an event-by-event basis (Table 1, Figure 4).
Having a dog at home, in particular, had a large positive effect
Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00015

Figure 3. Proportion of events in which children (N = 97) gave a pet dog an out-of-reach object when the dog showed interest in the object by attempting to
access it themselves (n = 236) vs. ignored the item (n = 102).

Figure 4. Odds ratio plot showing results of a mixed-effects logistic regression where the outcome variable was whether a child gave a dog an out-of-reach
object in a given event. Fixed effect predictor estimates and their standard errors are shown. Iteration and participant ID were included as random intercepts
(N = 97 child participants, 338 events).

Table 1. Results of a mixed-effects logistic regression where the outcome variable was whether a child gave a dog an out-of-reach object in a given event. Fixed
effect predictor estimates, their standard errors, and p-values are shown. Study iteration and participant ID were included as random intercepts (N = 97 child
participants, 338 events).

Predictor Estimate Standard Error p-value

intercept −5.11 1.43

Dog shows interest in object 1.64 0.63 0.09

Child has dog at home 3.23 1.45 0.03

Dog is highly engaged in interaction 1.14 0.98 0.25

Object is food 1.48 0.65 0.02

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Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00016
on children’s likelihood of giving objects to dogs in a given event
(Table 1, Figure 4). Here, too, however, children with and without
their own dogs discriminately ‘helped’ dogs, giving dogs objects-
of-interest more often than ignored objects. Specifically, children
with dogs at home gave objects in 60% (67/111) of events where
dogs showed interest in the out-of-reach object compared to 40%
(16/40) of events where dogs ignored the object. Children without
dogs at home gave objects in 40% (51/125) of instances where
dogs were interested in the object compared to 18% (11/67) of
instances where dogs ignored the object.
Children showed discriminate ‘helping’ on an individual as well as
event-by-event basis. Here, 60 of the 97 children who participated
received at least 1 event where the dog attempted to access the out-
of-reach object and 1 event where the same dog ignored a similar
object. Individual children showed relatively high baseline levels of
giving objects to dogs with 52% of participants giving dogs objects-
of-interest and ignoring objects with equal frequencies. However,
for children who behaved differently based on these dog behavioral
situations, 37% gave dogs the object-of-interest more frequently
than the ignored object while only 11% of children did the opposite.
The main patterns regarding children’s sensitivity to dogs’ goals
also persisted in study iteration 2 alone—the only study iteration
where dogs showed both interest and disinterest in objects and
where no COVID-related study interruptions occurred. Specifically,
in iteration 2, children (n = 37) provided items in 43% (30/70) of
instances where the dog attempted to access the item and in 23%
(18/77) of instances where the dog ignored the item. However, the
dog was also more engaged generally during the former compared
to the latter event types.
Discussion
In our study, we observed 2- to 3-year-old children helping naturally-
behaving pet dogs acquire treats or toys that dogs struggled to reach
on their own. Specifically, children gave dogs these out-of-reach
objects significantly more often when dogs struggled to reach the
objects compared to when dogs naturally ignored objects placed
in the same out-of-reach location. This distinction indicates that
children’s actions stem, in large part, from a recognition of the dog’s
goals and desires. Other factors influenced but did not eliminate, this
discriminant helping behavior, including children’s baseline motivation
to interact with an unfamiliar, friendly dog or baseline hesitancy to
do so. For example having a pet dog at home greatly increased
children’s baseline giving behavior, potentially because children felt
more comfortable and motivated to interact with dogs. Still, children
who did and did not have dogs at home both gave objects only half
as often when dogs ignored versus attempted to reach objects.
Children’s baseline giving of objects also increased when a dog was
energetic and highly engaged when interacting with them; however,
children attempted to engage passive dogs as well. All children
were particularly motivated to give food to dogs. These findings lend
support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing helping
propensities extend to nonhuman animals as well as other humans.
An alternative explanation is that children provided items to
dogs because children perceived doing so as helping the human
experimenter. When human experimenters appeared to ‘accidentally’
drop treats and toys out of the dog’s reach, children may have
perceived the experimenter to be attempting, yet failing, to give
these items to the dog herself. However, the human experimenter
enacted this behavior on every single trial and children discriminately
provided out-of-reach items based on the dogs’ behavior.
Taken together, our findings support the hypothesis that children
deploy their goal-reading abilities and prosocial inclinations in the
service of helping dogs, as well as humans, early in life. From several
perspectives, children’s proclivities to attribute desires and goals to
pet dogs during real-life, in-person interactions are unsurprising. As
noted as part of the impetus for our study, children attribute goals
to animated shapes and anthropomorphize animal characters
(Gergely and Csibra, 2003; Hamlin, 2013). Additionally many
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nonhuman animals read and act upon the behavior of individuals
of other species in everyday life (Bshary et al., 2006; Farine et al.,
2015; Kitchen et al., 2010). Indeed, as noted in our introduction, in
Warneken and Tomasello’s (2006) initial instrumental helping study,
juvenile chimpanzees helped their human caretakers to access out-
of-reach objects that humans struggled to reach.
However, we observed that as early as 2 years of age, children
behave in ways showing they are not only (1) able to read the goal-
directed behavior of another animal but (2) can and (3) do employ
that knowledge to help an animal reach its own goal. In addition to
informing us about childhood helping, these early childhood behaviors
may have important evolutionary significance. Our findings add to
a wide body of literature emphasizing helpful, prosocial motivation
as a trait pivotal in human evolution (for review, see: Warneken,
2015). Early developing proclivities to help other species may, in
part, underlie the cultural development of practices that led to the
domestication of countless species across the planet, from dogs to
cows, pigs, horses, goats, sheep, alpacas, llamas, donkeys, yaks,
rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks, geese and elephants (Clutton-
Brock, 1981; Zeuner, 1963). For example if dog domestication
occurred via prosocial wolves visiting human garbage sites (Hare,
2017) humans’ helpful proclivities might have spurred direct feeding
and eventually joint hunting with these dog ancestors.
Our findings also have intriguing, practical implications. Working dogs
perform many roles in the lives of humans. These roles include rescuing
people from avalanches, finding landmines, providing independence
to those with disabilities and providing emotional comfort (Burrows
2008). Understanding how children think about the minds of dogs may
inform how children interact with working dogs in beneficial ways.
One strength of our exploratory study is that our ‘test’ setting
was intentionally quasi-naturalistic rather than experimentally
constrained. Our lack of constraints permitted us to describe a
wide range of dog and child behavior and compare how the two
co-varied. If young child helping occurred only in tightly controlled
experimental settings, it would be less interesting and important
than it is; by parental reports and in observational studies, young
children help other humans often at home, at parks and grocery
stores. Helping other humans is both early developing and wide-
spread across variable situations. Our findings, because of their
quasi-naturalistic character, suggest that children’s helping of dogs
is also likely to be robustly widespread. Indeed, children might help
familiar dogs (e.g., their own pets) who are not enclosed in a baby
gate at even higher levels than we observed.
At the same time, our quasi-experimental design is not without
limitations. Potentially, aggregating data across three study iterations
with even moderately different procedures, target objects and dog
temperaments could and probably do introduce unknown confounding
factors. As noted, however, we attempted to control for these limitations
by measuring key potential confounds (e.g., dog child engagement)
and entering them into our analyses. Our primary results emerge
after the potentially confounding factors are statistically controlled.
At the same time, experimental control of confounding factors that
we measured, but did not control for, would more closely parallel
the experimental findings demonstrating human-to-human helping
which inspired our investigation (Warneken and Tomasello, 2006).
Additionally, our child (and dog) participants represent a convenience
sample. Studying patterns of behavior in children and dogs in
other cultural contexts, particularly in non-WEIRD, that is western,
educated, industrialized, rich and democratic populations (Henrich
et al., 2010), will be essential to understanding the evolutionary and
developmental roots of helpful proclivities.
Future research will also be necessary to examine additional
psychological components of inter-specific instrumental helping,
including the emotions that underlie children’s motivation to help dogs,
how these motivations as well as cognitive attributions are shaped by
culture, and how all of the preceding processes change throughout
development. For example perhaps children’s motivations to help
dogs wane as they grow older, except in cultural contexts where
showing such helpful behavior towards dogs improves reputation
Reddy et al. Human–Animal Interactions (2023) https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.00017
(Hepach et al., 2023). Regardless, our findings indicate that young
children can and do help dogs spontaneously. They contribute to
burgeoning research on the childhood development of helping and
on the early development of human-animal interaction.
Acknowledgements
R.B.R. was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship Grant (DGE-1256260) and a Rackham Graduate
School Predoctoral Fellowship. The Infant Cognition Lab was supported
by a Collegiate Professorship from the University of Michigan and a
National Institutes of Health grant to Henry Wellman (HD022149).
For research assistance and management, we thank Sara Conwisar,
Makenzie Flynn, Marysa Gatica, Riley Gideon, Samantha Ladd, Janelis
Lopez, Cassie Neely, Hope Peskin-Shepherd, Liza Rosenfeld, Bailey
Russell, Alexis Smith and Lauren Yousif. We are exceptionally grateful
to Abagail Breidenstein, Margaret Echelbarger and Rebecca Baskin
for allowing their dogs Fiona, Henry and Seymour to work as ‘actors.’
We thank the Language and Cognition Lab Group at the University of
Michigan for thoughtful feedback and critique as we developed this
study. Last, we thank Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, John Mitani, Aaron Sandel,
Gabrielle Bunnell and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on
this manuscript at various stages.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
All authors contributed to the development of the study and writing
of this manuscript, initially conceived and drafted by R.R., H.W.,
and M.E. Data were collected by R.R., N.T., and T.H.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The authors confirm that the research meets any required ethical
guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements of the
study country. All research presented here was approved by the
Institutional Review Board and Institutional Animal Care and Use
Committee at the University of Michigan. All children participated
with the consent of their parents and their own verbal assent. The
three dog ‘experimenters’ participated with the consent of their
owners and their own eagerness to return to the study room.
AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION
All authors contributed to the development of the study and writing
of this manuscript, initially conceived and drafted by R.R., H.W.,
and M.E. Data were collected by R.R., N.T., and T.H.
FUNDING STATEMENT
Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University
of Michigan, National Science Foundation (US), (Grant/Award
Number: ‘DGE-1256260’) National Institutes of Health, (Grant/
Award Number: ‘HD022149’).
OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT
The data that support this study, our experimental protocols and
the R Code used to complete our analysis are available online on
the Open Science Framework website: https://osf.io/3svbt/
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