ArticleScientific reports2020
Human proximity seeking in family pigs and dogs.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Companion pigs alternate orientation between humans and snout-inaccessible targets.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- An injectable oleogel-based bupivacaine formulation for prolonged non-opioid post-operative analgesia.Drug delivery and translational research · 2025Article
- Intradermally injected abobotulinumtoxinA administered preemptively before surgery alleviates post-surgical pain and normalizes behavior in a translational animal model.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Communication as a Tool for Exhibiting Prosocial Behavior in Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Out-of-reach rewards elicit human-oriented referential communicative behaviours in family dogs but not in family pigs.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Intraoperative abobotulinumtoxinA alleviates pain after surgery and improves general wellness in a translational animal model.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Family dogs (Canis familiaris) seek human contact from an early age, can discriminate and prefer their caregivers over other humans. To investigate if being kept as a family animal is sufficient to induce similar early human proximity-seeking in another domestic mammal, here we directly compared such behaviours in dogs and similarly raised domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus). We used a preference test to measure proximity-seeking behaviours of 4-month-old family pigs and dogs in the presence of their caregiver and either a stranger or a familiar object, in a novel environment. We found that both pigs and dogs preferred their caregivers over the familiar object but not over the stranger. However, when the caregiver and the stranger were present, only dogs showed an overall preference for human proximity, and pigs spent more time away from both humans. These results suggest that both dogs and pigs seek the proximity of their caregiver, but there is a difference in how each species generalizes their experience to other humans. Species-specific predispositions, including that dogs have a longer socialization period and that humans are more salient as a social stimulus for them, may be important for the early development of an overall preference for humans.
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Registered trials
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