The Emotional Intelligence of Labradors: Understanding Their Empathy & Connection

Are Labradors capable of empathy?

Yes! Empathy between humans is frequently nuanced and sophisticated, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact it can be really quite simple, and there’s plenty of evidence that it exists in dogs.

You don’t have to look far to find Labrador parents who feel like their dog can read their emotions or intuit how they’re feeling. Moments of empathy from our dogs are everywhere in stories and anecdotes. They haven’t escaped the notice of scientists and animal behavior researchers either.

And, curious folk as they are, there have been lots of attempts by those researchers to measure the exact extent of canine empathy. It’s still a relatively new field of study, so most of the results still need to be clarified or corroborated by further research. But nonetheless, here are are some interesting headlines.

Did you know?

• Dogs can distinguish between our laughter and our tears. When they hear us crying, they themselves become distressed.
• Dogs show physical signs of stress, such as increased heart rate, when their owner is subjected to a stressful experience, suggesting they look to us for cues about how to respond to a situation, and unconsciously mirror our own emotions.
• When dogs are faced with a familiar person who appears ‘trapped’ in a room, and they’re shown how to open the door, they will release the person, even if there’s no reward. This hints at the prosociality element of empathy – being motivated to act for the benefit of others, for its own sake.
• Of course it could simply be that gaining access to the familiar person is rewarding enough. BUT, a later study has indicated they will even release a stranger. However it does depend on their individual confidence, and they’re more likely to help a stranger if their owner is also present. Perhaps they need us for moral support just as much as we need them!

Are dogs as empathetic as humans?

In a word, no. It’s hard to make meaningful comparisons between dogs’ minds and our own, but their emotional development is roughly equivalent to that of a 24 – 30 month old toddler. They have all the basic emotions, including happiness and sorrow, love and fear, anger and disgust. But they haven’t developed more complex feelings like embarrassment, shame, remorse, or contempt.

That’s right – the wide-eyed, bashful look they give you when you catch them doing something they shouldn’t isn’t really embarrassment. It’s actually an appeasement behavior, because they’ve learned from experience that you may be angry now.

We interpret it as embarrassment because we’re projecting our own experience of human emotion and body language onto them.

Since dogs don’t feel those more complex emotions, they can’t recognize them in us or empathize with them either. But they may still pick up on the more simple emotions that tend to accompany them, and react appropriately to those.

For example if we feel guilt or remorse, we’re likely to also be sad, and perhaps cry. Labradors can recognize the sadness, but not the underlying regret. We’d love to see more research in future shedding light on how our dogs’ experience empathy, and what they make of our own emotional behaviour. It’s sure to come in time!

Where does Labs’ empathy come from?

This question, at least, is straightforward enough to answer. Labs’ capacity for empathy evolved as a product of their unique relationship with humans.

Like all dogs, Labradors owe their history to the influence of people. But more than most dogs, that history isn’t just a story about dogs becoming increasingly domesticated and dependent on us. The Labrador Retriever breed has its roots in 18th century Newfoundland, where English settlers and the dogs they brought from home weathered incredibly inhospitable conditions in order to exploit the fish stocks in the north Atlantic Ocean.

In this tough environment, humans were as nearly as reliant on the swimming and retrieving abilities of their dogs, as their dogs were on them for food and shelter.

It’s that remarkably co-dependent start which ultimately shaped the Labrador Retriever breed as we know it today. From the dogs they arrived with, the fishermen prized the most hardworking, co-operative, and people-oriented dogs for breeding. They valued the dogs they could depend on, and they worked and lived in tight partnership with them, day in and day out.

These dogs became known as St Johns Water Dogs, and a small number found their way to Britain in the ownership of wealthy aristocrats, who saw the potential for such intelligent and co-operative dogs to become superlative gundogs. They weren’t wrong, and the Labrador Retriever breed was founded.

So, a natural instinct to be interested in humans, and to understand us has been hardwired into Labradors from the very start. And it’s only been strengthened with time.

Your connection with your Labrador

Hopefully, like the people we hear from though our social media channels, you have a devoted relationship with your Lab and understand each other well.

The elements of that emotional connection that we’ve explored in this article are only part of a bigger picture. Your bond is special, and completely unique, so savor it!