Dr. Mary Bates' excellent summary of a recent study by Isabelle Laumer and her colleagues called "Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species" was all it took to motivate me to offer some pilot data my students and I have collected over the years on teasing by free-running dogs. Bates writes:
Like joking, ape teasing is intentional, provocative, persistent, and includes elements of surprise and play. Teasing requires sophisticated socio-cognitive abilities and may be a precursor to joking behavior in humans. The cognitive prerequisites for teasing may have evolved in a common ancestor of humans and apes.
Playful teasing behaviors in apes had some key features in common: They were provocative. Teasers led the interactions by directing hard-to-ignore behaviors at their targets. They were intentional. Teasers approached specific targets and persisted when they were ignored, by either repeating or increasing the intensity of the behavior or switching to a different behavior. They were playful, but not “play.” While teasing is a playful activity, it differs from play. Teasing was more one-sided than play, and apes rarely used play signals when teasing. They occurred in relaxed contexts. Teasing mainly occurred when apes were relaxed, suggesting that it may happen during moments of neutrality or boredom.
For decades, my students and I collected detailed data on different aspects of social play in dogs that most frequently occurs when they are relaxed. Here is a summary of some observations that center primarily on dogs approaching and rapidly withdrawing (A/W, which isn't a formal play signal), which involved a dog slowly decreasing the distance between themselves and another dog using a loose gamboling gait and then running away to most likely get them to chase them. Feinting right and going left (and vice versa) also was observed.
These observations show that animals other than great apes, in this case dogs, engage in playful teasing that shares the four key features displayed by apes, noted above. In their only mention of dogs, Laumer and her colleagues note, "In studies of social play, initiating play is usually positively correlated with receiving play (e.g. western lowland gorillas [51]; dogs [52–54]). This suggests that play is a highly reciprocal behaviour, whereas most teasing events in our sample were largely one-sided." They also write, "Given that in 74% of teasing events, the target showed neutral or negatively-valanced behaviour towards the teaser as a first response, playful teasing seems distinct from attempts to initiate play."
I don’t see why a target (a recipient of playful teasing ) showing "neutral or negatively-valanced behaviour towards the teaser as a first response" rules out that teasing isn't an attempt to initiate play. Using teasing to get an otherwise reluctant dog to play is a good strategy to stimulate play and it wouldn't be surprising to see that it's commonly used in many different species. The best estimate that I could come up with was that A/W resulted in play around 70% of the time. I hope others will follow up on Laumer and her colleagues’ study and our observations.
Bates quotes Erica Cartmill, senior author of the great ape study, as follows: “If you’re a social animal, understanding how others will respond to your behavior is an important skill...You have to monitor their behavior and know what your relationship is like in order to know how far to push.” I couldn't agree more. Cartmill also notes, "Playful teasing is a behavior we absolutely see in humans, but it is not because we are different, but because humans are fundamentally the same, in many ways, as other social animals.”
Dogs and other animals just want to have fun and science shows this is so. Using teasing to get an otherwise reluctant dog to play is a good strategy to use to increase the likelihood that fair play occurs and the golden rules of play and mutually agreed upon codes of conduct are followed.
Perhaps the most important thing to come out of Laumer and her colleagues’ research is that it would be wonderful to see more formalized studies of teasing in a wide array of animals, social and nonsocial, to get a better handle on the "taxonomy of teasing." It's unlikely that teasing only evolved in non-human primates, and I look forward to learning more about teasing in animals other than great apes and mammals.
References
When Dogs Play, They Follow the Golden Rules of Fairness; Dogs Just Wanna Have Fun: Birds, Fish, and Reptiles Too; The Power of Play: Dogs Just Want to Have Fun.
Biology of Fun, 25th Anniversary Special Issue. Current Biology. January 5, 2015.
Dogs Engage in Playful Teasing to Play Fair and Have Fun
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20.02.2024
Dr. Mary Bates' excellent summary of a recent study by Isabelle Laumer and her colleagues called "Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species" was all it took to motivate me to offer some pilot data my students and I have collected over the years on teasing by free-running dogs. Bates writes:
Like joking, ape teasing is intentional, provocative, persistent, and includes elements of surprise and play. Teasing requires sophisticated socio-cognitive abilities and may be a precursor to joking behavior in humans. The cognitive prerequisites for teasing may have evolved in a common ancestor of humans and apes.
Playful teasing behaviors in apes had some key features in common: They were provocative. Teasers led the interactions by directing hard-to-ignore behaviors at their targets. They were intentional. Teasers approached specific targets and persisted when they were ignored, by either repeating or increasing the intensity of the behavior or switching to a different behavior. They were playful, but not “play.” While teasing is a playful activity, it differs from play. Teasing was more one-sided than play, and apes rarely used play signals when teasing. They........
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