Done deal-cohabiting dominant and subordinate dogs differently rely on familiar demonstrators in a detour task.

Background: Companion dogs live in a mixed-species environment, where they can successfully learn from both humans and dogs. Breed type, the demonstrator's behavior, and in multi-dog households, the dogs' hierarchy are known influencing factors of the efficiency of dogs' social learning. In previous studies, always an unfamiliar dog or experimenter was the demonstrator of the given task. Now we tested social learning in a setting more relevant to the everyday life of dogs, where the demonstrator was either the owner or a cohabiting dog. We used the validated dog-rank assessment questionnaire (DRA-Q) and the well-established detour paradigm. We hypothesized that beyond the previously found associations between social learning and rank, we would find stronger differences between high- and low-ranking cohabiting dogs due to the subjects' everyday experience and different relationships with the demonstrators.

Results: We found that dominant dogs learn more effectively from the owner than from their subordinate dog companion. Subordinate dogs increased their success rate only when their dominant counterpart demonstrated the task, but did not improve when the owner was the demonstrator. Dogs with higher agonistic rank could improve their detour speed more often than the lower-ranked individuals in the Owner demonstration group, but we found no effect of the subranks in the Dog demonstration group.

Conclusions: These results warrant the intricate effect of within-group hierarchy of dogs even in non-competitive contexts. The strong difference between the subordinate and dominant dogs' learning performance in the Owner-demonstration group aligns with the "owner as the main resource for dogs" hypothesis.