No Matter Where In The World, Dogs And Their Owners Share A Similar Bond

Study: From the Amazon to Rural Germany, Dogs and Their Owners Act More Alike Than Anyone Expected

Dogs might sleep outside in rural Madagascar, chase wild pigs through dense jungle in Vanuatu, or snooze on a German hunter’s couch. Yet a sweeping new international study found that across vastly different cultures, the behaviors and attitudes between dogs and their owners show remarkable consistency, a result that surprised even the researchers.

Scientists tested hunting dogs and their owners in five countries: Germany, Vanuatu, Mongolia, Madagascar, and Peru. Despite enormous differences in how these communities live, what they believe, and how they treat their dogs, the pairs showed consistent patterns across nearly every measure the team tracked.

For decades, nearly everything scientists thought they knew about dogs came from studying them in Western countries, places researchers label with the acronym “WEIRD,” standing for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. About 75% of the world’s dogs are not kept the way Western pets are. This study, published in Scientific Reports, set out to ask whether the famous dog-human bond is truly universal, or largely a product of Western culture.

Scientists Put Dog Bonds to the Cross-Cultural Test

At least 30 dog-owner pairs were tested at each location: rural Germany, the island of Efate in Vanuatu, the Khentii Province of eastern Mongolia, the Andasibe region of eastern Madagascar, and Shipibo-Konibo villages in Amazonian Peru. Testing took place between October 2022 and September 2024. All dogs were used for hunting, though most also served as guard dogs.

Each pair went through six behavioral tests: an obedience test; a test of whether dogs could follow a human pointing gesture to find hidden food; a test of whether dogs could lead their owner to hidden food; a test of whether dogs avoided forbidden food when being watched; an unsolvable-problem task; and a test of whether dogs looked to their owner when confronted with a scary, unfamiliar object. Owners also completed a detailed questionnaire about their feelings toward their dogs. The researchers had predicted substantial cultural differences. They were largely wrong.

What Held Constant Across Five Countries

Across all five countries, owners overwhelmingly said they enjoyed having their dog around and felt their life was better for it. More than 90% in every country said they could rely on their dog and believed their dog would try to protect them, with no significant variation across locations.

In the behavioral tests, dogs in all five countries showed a consistent tendency to orient toward nearby humans across multiple scenarios. When following a pointing gesture to find hidden food, performance did not differ significantly across countries. When faced with an impossible task, dogs often turned to look at a nearby human, a behavior researchers believe may reflect an attempt to signal for help, though its exact meaning is still debated. One other finding stood out: dogs whose owners reported closer relationships were more likely to approach a frightening object alongside their owner. Bond strength did not predict performance on any other task.

Where Culture Did Leave a Mark

German dogs came faster than dogs in Madagascar and Vanuatu when called, and were more persistent when trying to open the sealed container. The researchers link this to Germany’s culture of formal obedience training for hunting dogs, which must pass an official exam, though they offer this as an interpretation rather than a conclusion. German dogs also tended to look at their owner rather than an unfamiliar researcher during the unsolvable problem test, while dogs in Madagascar and Vanuatu were more likely to look at the stranger.

In Vanuatu, owners outperformed those in other countries at reading their dog’s signals to locate hidden food. Researchers link this to the demands of hunting wild pigs through dense forest, where owners must read subtle cues from their dogs to find prey they cannot see. Peru stood out differently: owners there rated their relationship with their dogs lower than owners in all other countries. Researchers suggest this may relate to the fact that Peru was the only non-German location where hunters sometimes went out without their dogs. That remains an interpretation, not a directly tested finding.

A Bond Tens of Thousands of Years in the Making

Domestication itself is the researchers’ most likely explanation for these cross-cultural similarities. Dogs have lived alongside humans for tens of thousands of years, and the paper suggests that the cooperation hunting requires, including attentiveness, communication, and trust, may have shaped a psychological bond deep enough to persist across wildly different cultures today.

Like any study, this one has limits, most notably that all the dogs were hunters, and the tests were designed within Western research traditions, which may not capture everything dogs elsewhere are capable of.

Across five countries on four continents, spanning rainforest hunters and trained German gun dogs, the relationship between people and their dogs held to a surprisingly consistent shape. Whatever else separates these cultures, the bond they share with dogs does not appear to be one of them.

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